"It would have been better for the peace of France if this man had never existed", said Napoleon of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.Or here is what Voltaire wrote to Rousseau about "The Social Contract":
"I have received your new book against the human race, and thank you for it. Never was such a cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid. One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it. Nor can I embark in search of the savages of Canada, because the maladies to which I am condemned render a European surgeon necessary to me; because war is going on in those regions; and because the example of our actions has made the savages nearly as bad as ourselves."
A recent biography of Rousseau's life, by Leo Damrosch, apparently hits all bases. Damrosh himself summarizes it very nicely:
Rousseau was "...describing a state of nature that never existed, a political system that never could exist and an educational scheme that never should exist."
The first chapter can be read here. For a summary of the biography, please see Stacy Schiff's 'Jean-Jacques Rousseau' - an unruly mind in the NY Times.
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