Rachel K. Carnell (ed.), Servanne Woodward (general ed.), Le Monde français du dix-huitième siècle / Eighteenth Century French World, vol. 9, no 1, 2024 (ISSN 2371-722X)
MFDS-ECFW publishes an issue directed by Rachel K. Carnell, Cleveland State University, that came initially from her roundtable at the 2023 ASECS: "Kandiaronk, le Baron de la Hontan, Indigenous Critique, and Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality".
Kandiaronk, le Baron de la Hontan, Huron Critique, and Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality
In The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow point out that eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophy was influenced by a Native American critique of European inequality. They situate Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 1754 Discourse on Inequality within the context of Louis-Armand, Baron de la Hontan’s 1703 Supplément Aux Voyages du Baron de Lahontan in which the voice of Adario, in dialogue with the author, may represent that of Kandiaronk, the Wendat philosopher-statesman so critical of European government and social conventions (Dawn, pp. 27-77).
Critics and reviewers have objected to various aspects of Graeber and Wengrow's wide ranging argument; however, there is clearly scope for rich scholarly engagement with their ideas, and therefore we are devoting a special issue of MFDS-ECFW to this topic.
