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“Rousseau founded the main political and cultural<\/a> movements of the modern<\/a> world. Many ‘isms’ of the right and the left<\/a> – Romanticism<\/a>, socialism<\/a>, authoritarianism, nationalism<\/a>, anarchism<\/a> – can be traced to Rousseau’s writings. Whether in his denunciation of moral<\/a> corruption<\/a>, his claim that the metropolis was a den of vice and that virtue resided in ordinary people<\/a> (whom the elites routinely conspired against and deceived), his praise of militant patriotism, his distrust of intellectual technocracy, his advocacy of a return to the collective, the ‘people’, or his concern for the ‘stranger’, Rousseau anticipated the modern underdog with his aggravated sense of victimhood<\/a> and demand for redemption. …<\/p>\n Rousseau was … the prototype of the man who feels himself, despite his obvious success, to be at the bottom of the social pyramid. … He was convinced, like many converts to ideological<\/a> causes and religious beliefs, that he was immune to corruption. A conviction of his incorruptibility was what gave his liberation<\/a> from social pieties a heroic aura … In the movement from victimhood to moral supremacy, Rousseau enacted … [what] has become commonplace in our time. …<\/p>\n Rousseau’s first great disciple, Robespierre, seems to have grasped, and embodied, better than anyone the incendiary appeal of victimhood in societies built around the pursuit of wealth and power<\/a>. …<\/p>\n The Jacobins and the German<\/a> Romantics may have been Rousseau’s most famous disciples, determined to create through retributive terror<\/a> or economic and cultural<\/a> nationalism the moral community neglected by Enlightment<\/a> philosophes<\/a>. …: Herder inaugurated the nativist quest – hectically pursued by almost every nation since – for whatever could be identified as embodying an authentic national spirit: literary forms, cuisine and architecture as much as language. … Fichte came to think that Germans were simply superior to everyone else … [and he] gave nationalism its characteristic secular feature: the transposition of religious into national loyalties. … K\u00f6rner, [then, called the wars against Napoleon] ‘a crusade … a holy war’. This [was the first] ‘holy war’ in post-Christian Europe. …”<\/p>\n aus: Pankaj Mishra: Age of Anger, a History of the Present. o.O.: Allen Lane (Penguin Random House) 2017, S. 110-113, 174, 175, 191, 193.<\/p>\n