The Social Contract and the French Revolution

Rousseau and Burke both hate abstract thought for different reasons. Rousseau hates it because it brings us to like calamity, but Burke hates it because he thinks that people who do things in the name of principle or ideas are really idiots. I just want to emphasize reading these texts on their own terms and with a historical grain of salt. They're not Hobbesian rusellians anymore, are there? Think of them as machinic processes.