Yet our discourse often radicalizes some portions of Rousseau's complex analysis and slights other parts. The Left preserves his love of justice at the expense of his love of greatness, whereas the Right does the opposite. The morality of compassion is adopted at the expense of his concern for wholeness and his critique of alienation, and his critique of conventional inequality is extended to deny the natural inequality he admitted. We are therefore compelled to ask what his judgment would be of our thought and language and whether he can help correct it, or whether his thought needs to be not only confronted but transcended in order to rethink our situation and to grasp alternatives to contemporary ways of thinking.