“Down with Élites!” (HOW ROUSSEAU PREDICTED TRUMP: The
Enlightenment philosopher’s attack on cosmopolitan élites now seems prophetic) by Pankaj Mishra (New Yorker magazine piece)
Mishra notes:
“Exhorting the
pursuit of luxury together with the freedom of speech, Voltaire and the others
had articulated and embodied a mode of life in which individual freedom was
achieved through increased wealth and intellectual sophistication. Against this
moral and intellectual revolution, which came after centuries of submission
before throne and altar, Rousseau launched a counterrevolution. The word
“finance,” he said, is “a slave’s word,” and the secret workings of financial
systems are a “means of making pilferers and traitors, and of putting freedom
and the public good upon the auction block.”.…
Rousseau did share
a crucial assumption with his adversaries: that the age of clerical tyranny and
divinely sanctioned monarchy was being replaced by an era of escalating
egalitarianism. But he warned that the bourgeois values of wealth, vanity, and
ostentation would impede rather than advance the growth of equality, morality,
dignity, freedom, and compassion. He believed that a society based on envy and
the power of money, though it might promise progress, would actually impose
psychologically debilitating change on its citizens.”