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No Hope For Rousseau In Tomorrowland: Limits Of Civil Religion In E.L. Doctorow’S The Book Of Daniel: A Novel (1971), Gabrielle R. Johnson
No Hope For Rousseau In Tomorrowland: Limits Of Civil Religion In E.L. Doctorow’S The Book Of Daniel: A Novel (1971), Gabrielle R. Johnson
Undergraduate Honors Theses
Current scholarly work on E.L. Doctorow’s (1931-2015) novel The Book of Daniel: A Novel (1971) often ignores the narrator Daniel Isaacson’s implicit critique of Rousseau’s civil religion. This paper will show the importance of civil religion within the novel despite its being overlooked by most scholars. In The Book of Daniel, Daniel frequently examines instances of American civil religion and even goes as far as to describe it as inevitable and intrusive on freedom. Daniel implies throughout the novel that the American government models their civil religion on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s (1712-1778) conception as described in his treatise The Social …