European thinkers developed thetheory of stages of human progress. The liberty and equality that the native americans enjoyed were ultimately signs of economic and cultural backwardness, something that's incompatible with advanced civilization. According to greber and wangro, what so does with his famous discourse on inequality is that he synthesizes the two opposing views into a masterful declaration of impotence. But according to jean jacques rousseau, his critique ends up serving as a justification for the status quo. Now this isn't true, as we'll see next time.
The European Enlightenment was heavily influenced by Native American critiques of European culture.
That European intellectuals reacted against this by developing the theory of “stages of human progress” where we went from from egalitarian hunter-gatherers to pastoralists to farmers to market civilization.
That Jean-Jacques Rousseau synthesized the Native American critique and the stages of progress theory into a seemingly egalitarian critique of European social hierarchies which resigns us to accept hierarchy as the price of civilization.
That this synthesis was the birth of the “intellectual left”.
That the concept of human equality has no meaning and should be discarded [these guys *really* needed to listen to this podcast before writing this…]
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