Better late for book club than never. Rousseau's work is truly ambitious. However, all that came to my mind was Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate. Among other topics, it disputes the fallacy of the noble savage. Rousseau描绘了一幅在没有社会的自我意识和自我比较的环境中成长的原始人类的画面。他鼓励人们独立于既定的文学或社会礼仪去思考和解决问题。仅仅由个人需求驱动,并且思考那个人可能是谁,这是一项有价值的练习。我喜欢卢梭试图将我们从社会继承的东西(与他人竞争并超越他人的需求)与我们的本性(在我看来有点过于伊甸园式和乐观)区分开来的方式。
Book V, on the other hand, was a textbook course in misogyny. It really brought down some of what he had built up to that point. The fact that he dropped this and the social contract in the same year and both got banned, I think, is more indicative of the achievement of this work than the shortcomings we're only able to perceive because of the (r)evolution this helped bring. It shows that his ideas were so revolutionary that they couldn't be ignored, even if some of them were controversial.