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deathcabforkatey 's review for:
A Discourse on Inequality
by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
I always feel weird giving star ratings to "hard" philosophy, but I think this was relatively solid and honestly has aged SO well relative to a lot of older philosophy. I appreciated the introduction fleshing out a lot of the background of Rousseau that was necessary to understand his viewpoint, and also found the biography of his life interesting. I was quite surprised to realize that his theorizing on the origin of mankind significantly pre-dates Darwin, and yet still somehow is ultimately much in line with natural selection. He is careful to always add in that "well it must have come from God" part, but he still maintains quite a bit of scientific conjecture. I enjoyed his discourse on the origins of inequality, and I think it's interesting to read knowing what would come in the future (e.g., Darwin, Marx). I never read this in undergrad, however I found that his last section is very readable. That said, like almost all older philosophy, it can be very dry and slow, reiterative, and unclear at times requiring multiple re-reads. I enjoyed it enough for myself, however unless you genuinely want to read philosophy, just don't.