Thanks for the tip.

Perhaps the two most common reactions of my students when they read the Confessions.

In his "Histoire" Thiers quotes Chaumette as saying in a speech, "Rousseau était peuple aussi, et il disait: Quand le peuple n'aura plus rien à manger, il mangera le riche."

No one has ever been able to identify a source in Rousseau for this.

I am sure that he did not say it.

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Might be able to find some useful notes if you visited Middlemarch.

Do you mean a few years or a few decades?

In Book 1, he refers to "des femmes au comptoir" whom he thinks will make fun of him. He says that his fear of this began when he was an apprentice but continues up to the time he is writing.

I would agree that he implies that, when he was thirty, he thought it might reveal his status as a servant if he went to a bakery rather than a patisserie. Both here and in Book One he makes it clear that he was ALWAYS afraid to go into a patisserie for fear of being laughed at by a shop-girl.

The passage shows both fear of detection if he sends another servant for the bread and concern for status if he goes himself. He also is reluctant to go into a patissier if anyone else is there.

Nice shout-out to Beacon Press. I do think that you should not restrict yourself to pointing out the need to consider "permissible hierarch." What about "just hierarchy," conditions in which equality might well be unjust?

He is a very adventurous musician with many fabulous recordings.

"Over the hill" is a synonym for seasoned or mature.

Just two more days in London. Have seen two plays (Oedipus and Juno and the Paycock), several exhibitions, had meals or coffee with numerous friends. A good distraction from the recent election.

I agree (with my experience of political theory in political science). It may not be what they were thinking about when they entered graduate school, and they might or might not be bitter about that.

As usual, a very helpful presentation. In the very first class I taught as a teaching assistant (1974) there was a student who agreed with Russell in arguing that nuclear weapons should be used preemptively to establish a world government in order to save us from nuclear annihilation.

In fact, this remark is reasonably well known even here. I prefer your version.

A part of me wants this to be the description of every event.

What an interesting and strange career. I remember him in an episode of "Columbo" decades ago.