Rousseau as Red Tory

All should read Jacob Levy’s Cato piece on Red Toryism. For obvious reasons, I really liked this part:

The claim that commercial modernity necessarily represents a time of mutual alienation, dissolution of traditional communal bonds, decline of virtue, and perpetually increasing wealth for the wealthy and poverty for the poor — that claim found one of its most profound and influential formulations in Rousseau’s work. In short, Rousseau has as good a claim to be the founder of Red Toryism and conservatism as anything else — and much better a claim than to being any kind of founder of liberalism.

Link.