Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius
Leo Damrosch,
Washington Post,
Dec 28, 2005
"It is manifestly against the Law of Nature... that a handful of men wallow in luxury, while the famished multitudes lack the necessities of life." If you are not familiar with Rousseau, this review of Michael Dirda's biography is a gentle introduction, one that I would encourage. Rousseau is important to me. He writes, "Nothing is more depressing than the general fate of men. And yet they feel in themselves a consuming desire to become happy, and it makes them feel at every moment that they were born to be happy. So why are they not?" This strikes a chord with me - Rousseau talks about the imprisonment society imposes on people - "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." And in the last section of Connective Knowledge, I was thinking of Rousseau when I wrote, "Freedom begins with living free, in sharing freely, in celebrating each other, and in letting others, too, to live free. Freedom begins when we understand of our own biases and our own prejudices; by embracing autonomy and diversity, interaction and openness, we break through the darkness, into the light."
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