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Rousseau was an influential 18th-century Swiss-French philosopher who developed a democratic theory of the social contract. Famous for imagining people in the state of nature as “noble savages” and criticizing the inequalities that arose within civilized society, Rousseau nevertheless argued that only non-white people could be noble savages. He justified this assumption by insisting that Europeans had superior metallurgy and agriculture, which Mills points out is historically inaccurate.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes in The Racial Contract
The The Racial Contract quotes below are all either spoken by Jean-Jacques Rousseau or refer to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 1, Part 2
Quotes
It would be a fundamental error, then—a point to which I will return—to see racism as anomalous, a mysterious deviation from European Enlightenment humanism. Rather, it needs to be realized that, in keeping with the Roman precedent, European humanism usually meant that only Europeans were human. European moral and political theory, like European thought in general, developed within the framework of the Racial Contract and, as a rule, took it for granted.
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes in The Racial Contract
The The Racial Contract quotes below are all either spoken by Jean-Jacques Rousseau or refer to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 1, Part 2
Quotes
It would be a fundamental error, then—a point to which I will return—to see racism as anomalous, a mysterious deviation from European Enlightenment humanism. Rather, it needs to be realized that, in keeping with the Roman precedent, European humanism usually meant that only Europeans were human. European moral and political theory, like European thought in general, developed within the framework of the Racial Contract and, as a rule, took it for granted.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
