This was why, three years before, on the other side of the English Channel, the statesman Edmund Burke had dubbed Rousseau “the insane Socrates” of the French Revolution. Even before the Reign of Terror, Burke saw in revolutionary France a tragic playing out of the Platonist temptation to perfect society through reason alone while ignoring human nature as Aristotle and the Enlightenment had defined it, in order to make us into something better.
