Barzun on Rousseau

By -
"His books on government, morals, education, and social life did give the course of ideas a wrench. To understand how, one must erase from the mind every remark or allusion one has come across about him and his thought. In academic writings as in journalism, his name and the adjective Rousseauian are used to characterize opinions he never held... For the record: Rousseau did not invent or idolize the noble savage, did not urge going 'back to nature,' did not say that since men are born free and are now in chains, we must break the chains." -- From Dawn to Decadence, p. 382

Comments

  1. Warren8:10 PM

    I think it became fashionable to make things up about what Rousseau wrote during and after the Royalist restoration in France. He certainly influenced some people who did bad things (e.g. the Jacobins), but that doesn't give you academic license to make stuff up about what he thought.

    Interestingly, on a similar note, I was reading a Dumas novel recently in which the main character essentially makes all the errors Barzun describes here in one paragraph. The understanding seemed to be cribbed right from Voltaire.

    I have no idea if this was Dumas' actual understanding of course.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more