Notes

Critics have long considered much of Rousseau's work extremely controversial, if not decidedly revolutionary. Moreover, Rousseau's works have been subject to various and contradictory interpretations. In the years after Rousseau's death, he was seen as a champion of individualism by both counter-revolutionaries and radicals. Conversely, Hippolyte Taine wrote in his Ancien Régime that Rousseau's collectivism led inevitably to tyranny and despotism. In general, Rousseau's writings were widely read and critically acclaimed throughout Europe well into the nineteenth century, after which point interest waned until the early twentieth century. As the bicentenary of Rousseau's birth approached, English commentators began to reassess the import of the writer's life and ideology and critics focused on the contradictory nature of much of his thought. There have been periodic attempts, such as Ernst Cassirer's 1932 essay The Problem of Rousseau, to extract from the variety of his writings the fundamental unity of thought that Rousseau himself claimed existed. Rousseau continued (and continues) to be read as providing a foundation for a range of political ideologies, including modern democracy, socialist collectivism, totalitarianism, and individualist anarchy. In recent years, critical attention has shifted from a "paternity" approach—study of Rousseau's "formative influence" on modern society as the father of certain ideas, movements, and events—to attempts at lucid interpretation of the actual meaning of his thought, but he remains a complex or contradictory figure whose ideas and eloquence continue to resonate powerfully with those reading him from the economic and social vantage point of the late twentieth century.