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A stroll in the garden of big ideas

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From: The Scotsman
Date: 20041109
Author:Duncan Macmillan

JEAN-JACQUES Rousseau is one of those writers who has passed so deeply into the fabric of our thought that we probably acknowledge him every day without realising it. He put the idea of the self at the centre of our understanding and he made the cultivation of sensibility an objective in education. He argued that if the ultimate authority is within ourselves, we can acknowledge no other master - and so produced one of the great rallying cries of the French Revolution and democracy itself: "Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains". The chains were not only the chains of archaic political ...

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