Sublime

His aggressiveness had, after all, turned out to be not the hostility of the radical, idealistic reformer to property and power but something quite the opposite, an expression of his regard for power, an acknowledgment of the fact that he had on his side, in the person of that uneducated, practically illiterate demagogue from the Fulton Fish Market

John Barrow’s A New and Impartial History of England,

Belonging neither to the class which regarded the social revolution as an innovation to be resisted, nor to that which considered political equality the universal panacea for the evils of humanity, he resolved by personal observation of the results of democracy in the New World to ascertain its natural consequences, and to learn what the nations of

Many conservative thinkers see Rousseau as having gone full circle from a promising start to creating what we now think of as the political left.

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Along with his partner and co-author Chantal Mouffe, he provided one of the earliest foundations for what would become identity politics. In their 1985 work Hegemony and Socialist Strategy