Rousseau is the most significant figure in the political Counter-Enlightenment. His moral and political philosophy was inspirational to Immanuel Kant, Johann Herder, Johann Fichte, and G. W. F. Hegel, and from them transmitted to the collectivist Right. It was perhaps more inspirational to the collectivist Left: Rousseau’s writings were the Bible of the Jacobin leaders of the French Revolution, absorbed by many of the hopeful Russian revolutionaries of the late nineteenth century, and influential upon the more agrarian socialists of the twentieth century in China and Cambodia.
