/lit/ - Literature

Rousseau wasn't the Newton of social sciences, Newton is the Rousseau of natural sciences.

"Don't show your student how a telescope works; make him invent the telescope when he needs one. Also, don't send him to this place called college, he will not come more educated out.

He ran away from home as a bitter, rebellious teen and got away with it. Oh, what kind of idiot wouldn't come up with this? Fucking genius... sob, no one will ever be this based again

> knocks at your door

tl;dr What’s the connection between Rousseau and the left (especially Marx)? Is there even one?

It always come down to “well Rousseau thought man was corrupted and enslaved by society and was le inherently good just just Leftist’s think”. But this makes zero sense when you move beyond broad generalizations and start considering actual details.

Rousseau, like Hobbes, viewed man in his natural state as being atomistic, and having virtue in his solitude. Marx seems to implicitly repudiate this claim in Theses on Feuerbach, when he asserts:

>Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence. But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual.

>In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.

Rousseau’s view of man’s journey toward civilization (i.e., he was born free but was tricked into serfdom) also doesn’t square with historical materialism at all. I may be wrong, but I’m not sure Marx left behind any writing suggesting he’d even thought about Rousseau. I guess you could say Rousseau’s view on private property is related to Marx or other Enlightenment-era socialists like the Diggers, but this is sort of a trite and tangential observation that neglects the actual substance of these people’s thoughts.

Either way, it doesn’t seem like there’s a strong case that there’s a “Rousseauean tradition” or something on the left, unless you’re just talking about other French guys like de Sade or Foucault who are in dialog with it (in that case maybe?). So I’m wondering, is there an actual case for this? It seems to be taught to undergrads a lot, so I’m assuming somebody like Will Durant must have made this connection a long time ago and people just continue to uncritically repeat it.

OP here. Posted wrong pic

The agricultural revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.