You'll never learn so much in such a small book
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This book is a work of genius for the whole, exquisitely written it offers wisdom on most pages and nonsense on the others. It's been a very long time since I learnt such a large amount, the language has a poetic beauty to it and anybody interested in governance should read this. The thesis of the book is well known (as it indeed should be) but there are some startling facts about the author. Rousseau was serial child abandoner; he seems to have left five children in foundling hospitals and when attacked by his critic, a certain Voltaire, his defence was that the he would have been a poor father and his children would fair better in a foundling hospital. A slightly implausible fact given the high mortality rate at the founding hospital. Still, we judge him for his ideas, not his actions so this book receives a resounding five stars.
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socialist precurser
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this book is not, as other readers claim, endorsing dictatorship, but rather is criticising bad democracy. surprisingly persuasive and well written, as a blueprint to later socialist theories eg Marx, it is fascinating.
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A Warning From History
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This is an important book, perhaps one of the most influential ever written. Unfortunately its influence has been wholly pernicious in the extreme - the blueprint for totalitarian regimes the world over. Rousseau was a psychotic and self obsessed individual who elaborated a theory of human civilization at odds with the basic principles of common sense and reason. From the French Revolutionary terror to the Soviet Gulags - the hallmarks of Rousseau's absurd doctrines can be found. But a willfull disregard for reality seems to be the prerequisite for so called enlightened thinkers and those that provided the ideological bedrock for revolutionaries from the french revolution onwards. The most recent example of an attempt to throw off the 'shackles' of civilization occured in Cambodia - Pol Pot - a true disciple of Rousseau, nurtured in the intellectual salons of the Left Bank. Savage indeed, but noble? In the fevered dreams of Marxist intellectuals were the ovens and gulags first delineated - Rousseau was their precursor, an important document, handle with care.
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Rousseau, we love ya!
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It's coherent. It's valid. It's informed. One must make up one's own mind about the 'general will', however. Buy, read, then dismiss. Or buy, read, then love. If you can find it in your soul to love a piece of political theory, that is.
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