Class warfare new and old
I have been posting excerpts from Paul Johnson's book Intellectuals . Here's another about Rousseau, the great icon of the French Revolution, the source of all our modern ills. See if it doesn't sound like certain occupiers and ne'er -do-wells (and their elected accomplices fomenting class warfare) you've heard about lately . [Rousseau's] writings also a bound with radical bitterness. ‘I hate the great, I hate their rank, their harshness, their prejudices, their pettiness, all their vice.’ He wrote to one grand lady: ‘It is the wealthy class, your class, that steals from mine the bread of my children,’* and he admitted to a certain resentment against the rich and successful, as if their wealth and happiness had been gained at my expense’. The rich were ‘hungry wolves who, once having tasted human flesh, refuse any other nourishment.’ His many powerful aphorisms, which make his books so sharply attractive especially to the young, are radical in tone. ‘...