Word: rousseau
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...notes, is not about to change his m.o. just because he's in a Montreal hospital bed. So he thunders on about the long-ago killing of "200 million" American natives by European armies--"The greatest holocaust in history happened right here"--and snipes that his businessman son (Stephane Rousseau) "is a puritanical capitalist, while I am a sensual socialist." If Fox News had a left-wing channel in Quebec, Remy would be its Sean Hannity...
...Guillame Rousseau, a French MIT student, disagreed...
Ever the great imagemaker, he cast himself to the French public as a symbol both of the virtuous frontier freedom romanticized by Rousseau and of the Enlightenment's reasoned wisdom championed by Voltaire. In a clever and deliberate manner, leavened by the wit and joie de vivre the French so adored, he portrayed the American cause, through his own personification of it, as that of the natural state fighting the corrupted one. He made a point of eschewing powdered wigs and formal dress, instead wearing a fur cap he had picked up years earlier on a trip to Canada...
Franklin could have begun with those about himself. America's original back-room operator was welcomed in France as a "noble savage," in sense and sensibility a joint production of Voltaire and Rousseau. The French embraced him as a frontier philosopher, which Franklin was not on either count. When consulted for information on farming, he confessed to thorough ignorance, having lived in cities all his life. His pages of political philosophy make for a skimpy offering. He was dismissive when his sister inquired after these: "I could as easily make a collection for you of all the past parings...
...intellectual history the false dichotomy of nature vs. nurture became. Whether human nature is born or made is an ancient conundrum discussed by Plato and Aristotle. Empiricist philosophers such as John Locke and David Hume argued that the human mind was formed by experience; nativists like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant held that there was such a thing as immutable human nature...