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,” and the temporal and spatial. Thereby, it cast alienated individuals at the center yet set them adrift, showed the finger to promises of progress, sieved the contradictions of imagined worlds, held up a mirror to the lies of nation, and looked into the eye of a living ghost, India’s Partition and its intimate violence. Now the auteur and the actor, new flâneurs both, could grimly move through
liberty, for example Mill, have escaped this charge (Thompson 1976: 136). Rousseau’s Wirkungsgeschichte has been less fortunate (Cobban 1968 for an overview). Louis Sebastien Mercier singled him out as one of the ‘first authors of the revolution’ (‘l’un des premiers auteurs de la revolution’) (Mercier 1791; see also Swenson 1999), and he has often been quoted, for example by Burke (1791) and Constant (1818), as a ‘Jacobin’, and as someone who ‘furnished deadly pretexts for more than one tyranny’ (Constant 1988: 317). That Robbespierre himself singled him out as the