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I hope that everybody followed new souls' advice and exercised your rights as a citizen of a free state yesterday. I hope all is well. I begin today with an apology for the particular edition that you're using for this section of the class. Rousseau's texts assigned in this course are not my preference, but it was the only edition I could find where the second discourse and the social contract are both in the same volume, in order to keep your costs down. However, a far superior edition is found in the Cambridge blue book series, edited and translated by Gravich. If anyone wants to do more advanced work in Rousseau, I recommend getting that edition for better translations and notes. For anyone interested, next year I will be offering an undergraduate seminar entirely devoted to Rousseau. He is one of the few political philosophers to whom one could devote an entire semester. So if any of you develop an interest in Rousseau next year, we'll explore his writings in more detail. With that being said, I want to talk today about the remarkable human being and writer Rousseau. It is common to see him as a critic of liberalism, specifically the kind of property-owning, rights-based society expressed by John Locke. However, to view Rousseau solely as a critic of Lockean liberalism would be unfair. Rousseau was a product of the ancien régime, the old regime in France. He was born in 1712, two years before the death of King Louis XIV, the symbol of absolutism. He died in 1778, a decade before the French Revolution. Rousseau lived in a time of transition, but what would come after was unclear. Rousseau was Swiss, not French. He signed many of his important works as a citizen of Geneva, his birthplace. He was the...