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Talk:Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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This article is written in British English, which has its own spelling conventions (colour, travelled, centre, defence, artefact, analyse) and some terms that are used in it may be different or absent from other varieties of English. According to the relevant style guide, this should not be changed without broad consensus.

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Content worries

The content of this article sticks pretty close to http://www.lucidcafe.com/library/96jun/rousseau.html. Has proper permission been granted? matt 01:02 Feb 26, 2003 (UTC)

Rousseau the composer

Needs some mention of his work as a composer, but the article is so tightly written I'm not sure where to work it in without breaking it up. Le Devin du Village was wildly popular in France, and he was pretty well known for his music at the time. Antandrus 22:38, 16 Apr 2004 (UTC)

It would be also quite interesting who were his friends in Paris. --PhilipP 21:03, 26 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Like Denis Diderot, but I am not so much into Biography to fix this. --PhilipP 21:05, 26 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Antandrus, you're right: and in 1755-6, as a reaction to the immense (overwhelming) success due to his Discourses, he drew back from the mundane scene and for a while he chose to live off copying sheet music... he could'nt stand popularity. (and: he wrote some musical theory articles for the Enyclopédie, and a short Essay on the origin of languages with some Observations on Melody; and took part in the French-Italian opera controversy.)--zuben 21:32, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Anon edit

An anon recently made some changes to the bio, particularly altering the order of some items; I've brought this back into line with my timeline of Rousseau's life, which comes from the Everyman editions of his various works. Christopher Parham (talk) 17:42, 2005 July 26 (UTC)

Comment about Noble Savage

I have moved this criticism from the body of the article to the discussion page where it belonged instead of in a footnote (no. 17), where someone inserted it:

This comment is untrue. An idea of the "noble savage" --thought it may have differed from that of the British--certainly existed in the French colonial context. For more information about French racial thinking, see The Libertine Colony by Doris Garraway, There are No Slaves in France by Sue Peabody, The Avengers of the New World by Laurent Dubois, The French Atlantic Triangle by Christopher Miller. For information about the relationship between the French and English colonial contexts, see Sentimental Figures of Empire by Lynn Festa.

There is a misunderstanding here. The term "Noble Savage" is used now by scholars writing about French colonialism to refer to idealizing attitudes toward indigenous people. No one disputes that. However, the term "noble savage" was not used in French during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Although L'Escarbot did use the phrase: "The Savages are noble" as the heading of a chapter in his History of French Canada (c.1609), from where Dryden may have picked it up. The usual French term was and is: "le bon sauvage."

According to Ter Ellingson:

A few recent articles in French (e.g., Trudel 1996: 7ff.; Duvernay-Bolens 1998: 143) have abandoned the long-established bon sauvage in favor of a new expression, noble sauvage; and some German scholars use edle Wilde, “Noble Savage,” in place of gute Wilde, “good savage” (Bitterli 1976: 367 ff.; Sammer 1992: 932). Such cases seem obvious imitations of English usage, often arising in context of explicit references to English writers such as Berkhofer (1978 . . .) and Lovejoy and Boas . . .1935 ) in whose writings the “Noble Savage” plays a prominent role. Nor is it clear that the English-derived usage is moving toward a general acceptance in these languages, particularly in French; for many French languages continue to use bon sauvage (e.g.Todorov 1989; Doiron 1991; Guille-Escuret 1992), just as some (but perhaps fewer) German writers retain the term gute Wilde (e.g., Kohl 1981). Ellingson, The Myth of the Noble Savage (2001), p. 377

In the book by Doris Garraway, The Libertine Colony, the author explicitly states (in English) "I am going to use the term 'Noble Savage' to describe these settlers". She and the other writers cited above are using English, not French. See the wikipedia entry on Noble Savage.

In any case, no scholar of Rousseau argues that he used either the term or the concept. On the contrary. He did not idealize primitive peoples as his detractors have claimed. The discussion about racist attitudes toward colonial subjugated peoples belongs somewhere else.

Language and translation

Looking at all the discussions, it seems to me that there are and have been many, many misunderstandings because of the fact that most native English/American speakers have read Rousseau in English, and, moreover, that the basis for commentaries is formed by secondary sources. Seeing Damrosch, who indeed wrote a fine, but definitely not complete biography of Rousseau, ignores the hundreds of biographies written in French in the first place, and all the others written in dozens of other languages. Checking your facts is done by turning firstly to primary sources, not secondary ones, and written in the original language - many things are lost in translation, or just translated wrongly - and then the secondary ones. Checking facts when writing or commenting foreign personas is made easy by going to the Misplaced Pages-page in the relevant language.

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Copyright violation in "Stages of human development"?

An editor tried to add a source to one of the paragraphs in the Stages of human development section, which is for a Google Books listing of Western Thinker's in Political Science by Dr. Shrikant Yelegaonkar. The citation link they provided is in Indonesian and/or Taiwanese, so it's really unclear what's being shown, but if you look at it in English, you can see our article and the book share quite a bit of text, including the same section heading. I'm not sure if the book, which was published in 2015, copied from Misplaced Pages, or our article copied from the book. Please, if someone who has more knowledge on this topic can look into it, I'd appreciate it. tubedogg (talk) 02:50, 30 March 2018 (UTC)

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