Leon Kass on the Wisdom of Rousseau

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 16 June 2025

⏱️ 77 minutes

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Summary

Does technology liberate us or enslave us? How do our social interactions affect our sense of self and our emotional health? Listen as author and master teacher Leon Kass and EconTalk's Russ Roberts do a close reading of a few paragraphs of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and explore some of the deepest aspects of our relationships with each other and with our technology.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:07.9	I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Sholem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
0:13.8	Go to EconTalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links and other information related to today's conversation.
0:21.2	You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006.
0:26.7	Our email address is mail at econTalk.org.
0:30.0	We'd love to hear from you.
0:36.6	Today is May 26, 2025, and my guest today is author and teacher and professor Leon Kass,
0:44.0	the dean of faculty here at Sholem College in Jerusalem.
0:47.0	This is Leon's second appearance on the program.
0:50.0	He was last here in March of 2021, talking about human flourishing, living well, and Aristotle.
0:56.4	Leon, welcome back to Econ Talk.
1:00.5	Thanks very much.
1:01.3	Nice to be back with you, Russ.
1:02.9	Our topic for today as a thinker,
1:04.7	I have never respected,
1:06.9	but I really never read either,
1:09.3	so that's kind of awkward.
1:17.2	And I realized with Leon's help that maybe I had judged Jean-Jacques Rousseau a little too quickly.
1:22.8	So what we're going to do today, Leon's going to give a brief summary of Rousseau's life and career,
1:27.8	and we're going to do a close reading of a few paragraphs from his discourse on the origins and foundations of inequality among men, which is also known as the second discourse.
1:34.0	We'll link to that work, to the text we'll be studying, you can follow along with us, or you can
1:38.0	just listen. We'll be reading out loud some of the passages that we'll be discussing.
	...

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