Lewis wrote to Luis Munoz Marin, acknowledging that the book "runs the risk of offending Puerto Ricans who have dedicated their lives to eliminating poverty." But Lewis felt that much more needed to be done and that his work would serve as an antidote to a "
Rousseauan tendency" amongst anti-poverty authors to "play up the courage, dignity, and capacity for leadership of the very poor, without sufficient realization of the terribly destructive consequences of extreme poverty." Munoz Marin wrote Lewis that he would read the book with "interest and sympathy." A planned review by Munoz Marin of the book in Time never appeared.
For example the classical subject is characterised by the plenitude of, say,
Rousseauan natural rights, whereas the concept of human rights since World War II has been marred by the void of the Camps that is quintessentially registered by Liebeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin.
Joshua Cohen's book, Rousseau: a Free Community of Equals interprets
Rousseauan political thought with the tools of analytical philosophy.
We can best understand the modern university by seeing it as built on the synthesis of these two tendencies, Baconian and
Rousseauan. We now justify the hard sciences almost entirely in pragmatic and utilitarian terms, as the incubators of technology, not as observatories from which to behold and contemplate the music of the spheres.
This trope depends upon the conviction that, in an idealized
Rousseauan environment, people are able to shed the identities and prejudices foisted upon them by their respective civilizations and encounter one another through a glass no longer darkened by politics, religion, nationality, or race.
There are two competing narratives about modernity: the Lockean (liberty) narrative and the
Rousseauan (equality) narrative.
He argues against a simple complementarity between the sexes, whether in feminist or
Rousseauan form, in favor of a mutual transcendence of bodily difference through contested opinion.
(13) This attitude can be easily aligned with the
Rousseauan ideas of the era.
(43) I would not labor this obvious point if Breyer had not sounded a
Rousseauan note in the series of rhetorical questions by which he seeks to tie O'Connor's analysis to active liberty: "What are these arguments but an appeal to principles of solidarity, to principles of fraternity, to principles of active liberty?" (44) Solidarity and fraternity, yes, and these were ideals of Athenian society as of the French Revolution, but they are not, as he implies, democratic ideals.