Rousseau and Radicalization

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Rousseau and Radicalization
https://doi.org/10.3735/9781961844636.book-part-018

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Abstract

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) was one of the most innovative thinkers of the Enlightenment. He broke with most other philosophes—political thinkers of the period—by insisting that passion and emotion had more influence over the formation of human societies than did rational thinking. His political works, especially Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1750) and The Social Contract (1762), developed a theory of the origins of human society that stood in opposition to those of his contemporaries. He insisted that emotion, rather than rational thinking, governed human society in the state of nature.

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