ABSTRACT
The reconciliation of liberty with equality which Rousseau placed on the agenda of modern politics seems also not to have survived the old ideological confrontation of Left and Right, which has been largely replaced by the politics of an unfocused centre a typically bourgeois resolution. Western societies have undoubtedly also grown much flatter and considerably more mobile economically than they were in the recent past, never mind in Rousseau's time. Rousseau's response to bourgeois individualism with a competing ethics of authenticity. Richard Rorty is interestingly Rousseauian in having recognized the same theoretical challenge for the West's educational institutions today as did Rousseau for modern educational institutions in his political/educational writing. The bourgeois family which Rousseau regarded as the solid building-block of an ordered society has lost its status as the model family and has been supplanted in many societies by a variety of competing models that are not even necessarily heterosexual.
