Rousseau on Poland Part 1: National Identity as Resistance
In 1770, a group of Polish noblemen asked a Swiss philosopher for help saving their country. That philosopher was Rousseau. The country was Poland. It was being squeezed by Russia, Prussia, and Austria on all sides. Two years later, in 1772, those three empires would carve Poland up between them in the First Partition. Rousseau’s text arrived too late to change anything. But what he wrote is still one of the most interesting political documents of the Enlightenment. Because his advice was not what you would expect.