Rousseau himself was aware of the paradoxical impression his thought made, and discusses the issue in his Letter to d’Alembert on the Theatre and other places. Yet, alongside the portrait of Rousseau the republican revolutionary, there are others who have claimed to find in his writings a political teaching of anti-modern reactionary conservatism, replete with hostility to commerce and industrial development, the condemnation of large nation-states, and an opposition to the spread of scientific knowledge generally. He was accused early on of inspiring some of the most extreme aspects of the French Revolution and was held up as an authority by Robespierre. Indeed, Rousseau has been claimed as the inaugurator of socialism and nationalism on the one hand, and romanticism and existentialism on the other. The reader who approaches Rousseau for the first time encounters an author apparently fond of great paradoxes, offering what often seem incompatible principles-praising, for instance, Sparta and austere political virtue in one work, and extolling the goodness of the solitary individual and the private enjoyment of the sentiment of existence in another. Few political philosophers have provoked such varying interpretations as Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778).
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