Rousseau Reading

Last week, in our discussion of Modernity, the word 'progress' was mentioned quite a bit. We talked about Modernity as an era of progress in that industrialization began to replace agriculture, and the future became an opportunity rather than a repitition of the past. We also discussed Modernity as a period when there was a strong inclination to compare the present to the past.
The idea of Modernity as a period of looking at the past with an inclination toward future progress was fresh in my mind as I read Rousseau, and these ideas were strongly embodied in his work as I read Part 1. Part 1 was simply the background for the main points of this book, which I am sure come later. Rousseau, as a product of his time, took ample effort to look way into the past at savage man in the state of nature in order to explain the way the present state of man came into existance. It was interesting to see the general theme that we discussed in class applied by a specific writer, who is one of the main voices of Modernity.