Melissa Lane on Rousseau on Modern Society

Philosophy Bites

Nigel Warburton

Education, Philosophy, Society & Culture

4.6 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 6 July 2008

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Modern society is for most people synonymous with progress. Not for the eighteenth century thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau believed that civilization corrupts us in certain ways. Melissa Lane explains Rousseau's views on progress in this episode of Philosophy Bites.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel War Burton.
0:07.0	Philosophy bites is available at www
0:09.6	philosophy bites.com.
0:11.2	Carl Marx saw the Industrial Revolution and its injustices as an inevitable
0:16.3	stage on the way to a communist utopia. But before Marx there had been another
0:21.3	searing critic of so-called progress.
0:24.0	Jean-Jacques Rousseau was an intellectual celebrity, a philosopher, novelist, musicologist, educationalist,
0:31.0	polemicist, and author of arguably history's most influential autobiography,
0:35.0	his confessions.
0:37.0	He was born in Geneva in 1712
0:40.0	and died in 1778.
0:42.0	The Industrial Revolution was still to come, but his Parisian friends, who
0:46.3	mostly became his ex-friends, were joyful participants in the advances in arts and science.
0:52.1	Russo, however, railed against so-called civilization.
0:56.0	He warned against the cities and their black vapors.
0:59.0	He eulogized nature.
1:01.2	Melissa Lane is a historian of ideas at Cambridge University.
1:05.0	Melissa Lane, welcome to Philosophy Bites.
1:07.0	Hi, and good to see you.
1:08.0	We're going to focus on Russo today and in particular his critique of civilization.
1:13.0	But before we get on to that, could you just say a bit about who Russo was?
1:17.0	Yeah, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a citizen of Geneva in Switzerland in the 18th century,
	...

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