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.
