ABSTRACT
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was one of the first critics of the emerging modern state, with its dedication to an unlimited increase in economic prosperity and technological power over nature. The English liberal tradition celebrated property and liberty, commerce and representative government. But in Rousseau's view, Hobbes and Locke championed bourgeois subjects of a representative government, not autonomous citizens participating in formulating the rules by which they conducted their lives. Rousseau's sense of environmental responsibility pointed to appropriate technology. He was not hostile to all technical progress as such, but favored the kind of renewable, small-scale technologies that encourage natural productivity and reintegrate our activities with biospheric processes. Rousseau's participatory democratic model is meant to assure that citizens attain a relatively high degree of intimacy through face-to-face communication in public assemblies and other gatherings. The alleged democratic potential of telepolitics, and its presumed capacity to generate greater universal compassion, are worthy of careful, critical reflection.
