Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Michael S. Roth, who is the president of Wesleyan, teaches the course “The Modern and the Post-Modern.”  Roth says that while Rousseau claimed that the state protected inequality and uses the poor to protect the status of the rich, Alexis Tocqueville saw something else in America.  Tocqueville agreed with the problem of inequality but the state should be a vehicle to provide and protect the equality of persons.  Roth says about Rousseau that his legacy is long.  “He institutes a mode of thinking, that challenges his contemporary society, by saying that the dynamics that we see in what looks like progress, are really corruption…. we see greater inequality protected by the state, that vanity and hypocrisy keep us from knowing what human beings are really like.”