Talk:Anthropology of Unequal Society

--Poor Richard (talk) 01:52, 1 November 2012 (UTC) "Jean-Jacques Rousseau...argued that civilization, with its envy and self-consciousness, has made men bad. In his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality Among Men (1754), Rousseau maintained that man in a State of Nature had been a solitary, ape-like creature, who was not méchant (bad), as Hobbes had maintained, but (like some other animals) had an "innate repugnance to see others of his kind suffer" (and this natural sympathy constituted the Natural Man's one-and-only natural virtue).[22] It was Rousseau's fellow philosophe, Voltaire, objecting to Rousseau's egalitarianism, who charged him with primitivism and accused him of wanting to make people go back and walk on all fours.[23] Because Rousseau was the preferred philosopher of the radical Jacobins of the French Revolution, he, above all, became tarred with the accusation of promoting the notion of the "noble savage", especially during the polemics about Imperialism and scientific racism in the last half of the 19th century.[24] Yet the phrase "noble savage" does not occur in any of Rousseau's writings.[25] In fact, Rousseau arguably shared Hobbes' pessimistic view of humankind, except that as Rousseau saw it, Hobbes had made the error of assigning it to too early a stage in human evolution." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_savage#Erroneous_Identification_of_Rousseau_with_the_noble_savage

IMO Rousseau WAS enamored of the "noble savage" fantasy though he didn't use the phrase. However, this entire controversial and highly speculative side-track to his thought is irrelevant. What matters is the present social contract, not vague speculations about prehistory.

"For Rousseau the remedy was not in going back to the primitive but in reorganizing society on the basis of a properly drawn up social compact, so as to "draw from the very evil from which we suffer [i.e., civilization and progress] the remedy which shall cure it." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_savage#Erroneous_Identification_of_Rousseau_with_the_noble_savage

--Poor Richard (talk) 01:52, 1 November 2012 (UTC)