From everything I have read of Rousseau's biography, one has to come to the conclusion, based on the latest work on sociopathology, as summarized by Martha Stout in The Sociopath Next Door, that Rousseau was a sociopath. What other philosophy can a sociopath create other than one that is itself sociopathological? Is it any wonder, then, that the romantic leftism he spawned has always been sociopathological? -- i.e., the French Revolution, the various communist revolutions.
This is hardly an ad hominem attack. I am not saying that one cannot recover from even a sociopath legitimate ideas -- the Montessori method was inspired by Rousseau, after all, even if the disaster that is U.S. education was/is as well. But do we really want to base society, or a view of man, on that of a sociopath?
4 comments:
No, it's just psychiatry playing the checklist game.
She is Harvard. It says it all.
The book's a little more substantive than that. And she's an expert on sociopathology. And if you know the life of Rousseau, I think there's little doubt he really was a sociopath. And the countries that have adopted his overall world view have acted as sociopaths.
Expert in sociopathology!
Great! Rousseau and Charles Manson have a lot in common.
Diagnosing dead people, especially those who are from other centuries, is a hobby of some psychiatrist. Not people like David Healy, Peter Breggin, Bruce Levine, Joseph Glenmullen and all the ethics, of course.
Van Gogh has already been diagnosed all that is at DSM-4, can't hardly wait for the 5th version, that one that have been suggested by two great experts to be stopped and that DSM should end.
Egon Schiele, Kirchner and other artists too but Winston Churchill has also received his share as well as other politicians.
Rousseau suffered some paranoid episodes and it is not at the check-list of sociopaths.
Try:
"Jean Starobinski's essay "On Rousseau's Illness" in his Transparency and Obstruction."
and don't forget he suffered uremia.
Do you have any idea why the term sociopath and psychopath are in fashion?
Bipolarity?
Why 'neurosis! disappeared?
Why schizophrenia is being used to explain the society?
I believe you should make some researches because claiming that "undoubtedly Rousseau is sociopath" is an absurd.
The countries that have adopted "overall"...?
Why not blame Condorcet too? (wink)
One of the dangerous of the interdisciplinary approach is that it is difficult to one person have a deeply understanding about all disciplines what leads to phrases such as "Countries have acted like sociopaths."
Charles Manson is a psychopath, not a sociopath. There's a difference.
Rousseau acted like a sociopath. That doesn't mean he may not have had other things going on. I see less evidence for paranoia in Rousseau than a tendency to blame others for problems he created for himself. He treated everyone he knew with indifference -- and don't even get me started on his 5 children. Sociopaths also tend to live in a world of their own making, then get mad at everyone else for not living in it too.
Here's the thing: when you have any organization with teleology -- a goal or a purpose -- it does in fact end up having a "personality", though to be more accurately, it has the personality of those in charge, and the structures of such organizations do not attract the nicest of people when power and force are the central organizing features. In this sense, it does make sense to talk about a country being sociopathic. It makes no sense for an ateleological society, a spontaneous order, to be so diagnosed, but it does make sense for a society on which teleological, hierarchical network, organizational structure has been imposed. When a nation is an organization, it can behave in a sociopathological way; when it is but a set of spontaneous orders, it cannot. The same can be said of any purposeful organization.
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