The Discourse on the Origins of Social Inequality
66: "it's really a kind of clever compromise between two or perhaps even three contradictory positions on the most urgent social and moral concerns of eighteenth-century Europe. It manages to incorporate elements of the indigenous critique, echoes of the Biblical narrative of the Fall, and something that looks a great deal like the evolutionary stages of material development that were just being propounded, around that time, by Turgot and Scottish Enlightenment thinkers" (i.e. Adam Smith)
68-9: Rousseau, in some ways, can be seen as an "arch-conservative" (he makes the point that "seeming progress only leads to moral decay") but he "was indeed a crucial figure in the formation of left wing thought [...] in folding together the indigenous critique and the doctrine of progress originally developed to counter it, Rousseau did in fact write the founding document of the left as an intellectual project"
67: "political radicals at the time of the American and French Revolutions embraced Rousseau's ideas"
"Rousseau sees progress as undermining an essentially benevolent human nature, while classic conservative thought tends to see it as having undermined traditional mores and forms of authority which had previously been able to contain the less benevolent aspects of human nature"
Kandiaronk (indigenous critic) points out that property is the root of the problem, but ultimately Rousseau "cannot really envisage society being based on anything else"