Rousseau's effusions on the fundamental decency of human nature and the lost ages of liberty and equality were in no way responsible for the french revolution. But it could be argued that by bringing together the indigenous critique and the doctrine of progress originally developed to countereit, that he in fact, wrote the founding document of the left as an intellectual project.
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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