Born in Geneva in 1712, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is a breath of fresh air to the utilitarian selfishness of Nietzscheianism and the grinding sameness of everyday life. In spite of a constant, withering criticism of the world in which he lived (which is still our world in more ways that matter than not) he nevertheless, at his core, possesses an optimistic vision of humanity that howls with a romanticism that is almost…foreign to these times. I quote Rousseau at length, there being no other way to quote him (thank you, 18th century French sentence structure):
“If we consider human society with a calm and disinterested eye, it seems to show us nothing but the violence of the powerful and the oppression of the weak; the mind is shocked by the cruelty of the one and equally grieved by the blindness of the other; and as nothing is less stable in human life than those exterior relations, which chance produces oftener than wisdom, and which are called weakness or power, poverty or riches, human establishments appear at first glance like so many castles built upon quicksand; it is only by taking a nearer survey of them, and by removing the dust and sand which surrounds and disguises its edifice, that we can perceive the unshakable basis upon which it [human society] stands and learn to respect its foundations.”
--On the Origin of Inequality
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