The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

If nothing else, these preoccupations help to explain the continued relevance of an otherwise not particularly successful eighteenth-century Swiss musician named Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Those primarily concerned with the first question saw him as the first to ask it in a quintessentially modern way. Those mainly concerned with the second were able to represent him as the ultimate clueless villain, a simple-minded revolutionary who felt that the established order, being irrational, could simply be brushed aside. Many held Rousseau personally responsible for the guillotine. By contrast, few nowadays read the ‘traditionalists’ of the nineteenth century, but they’re actually important since it is they, not the Enlightenment philosophes, who are really responsible for modern social theory. It’s long been recognized that almost all the great issues of modern social science – tradition, solidarity, authority, status, alienation, the sacred – were first raised in the works of men like the theocratic Vicomte de Bonald, the monarchist Comte de Maistre, or the Whig politician and philosopher Edmund Burke as examples of the kind of stubborn social realities which they felt that Enlightenment thinkers, and Rousseau in particular, had refused to take seriously, with (they insisted) disastrous results.