This is episode 1 of the new HISTORY OF IDEAS series from Talking Politics. To hear the remaining 11 episodes, please subscribe to History of Ideas!
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality (also known as the Second Discourse) tells the story of all human history to answer one simple question: how did we end up in such an unequal world? David explores the steps Rousseau traces in the fall of humankind and asks whether this is a radical alternative to the vision offered by Hobbes or just a variant on it. Is Rousseau really such a nice philosopher?
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Going deeper…
Leo Damrosch,
Jean Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius (2005)David Edmonds and John Eidinow,
Rousseau’s Dog (2007)Pankaj Mishra, ‘How Rousseau predicted Trump’,
The New Yorker (2016)(Audio)
In Our Time, The Social Contract
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