Jean-Jacques Roussseau tricentenary

With Rousseau there was this reference to the idea of an original 'noble savage,' around which a society with its compacts and compromises are built.  Morality was a natural, innately human condition as opposed to something formulated from within society, and that mankind's natural and moralistic aversion toward suffering becomes eroded as certain predicates compete with one another for domination within society. 

It's easy to see how someone as intellectually dishonest as Rand could have seen fit to cherry pick from Rousseau in asserting that the individual should 'exist for their own sake,' and that the 'pursuit of ones own rational self-interest' represents the highest moral purpose; which is a complete forgery from Rousseau to begin with.

Just as proponents of evolutionary science today wouldn't necessarily wish to see a society built upon the principles of natural selection, Rousseau conceptualized that within an ideal society, the notion of functioning within the parameters of 'the general will,' where this innate morality is codified into the service of the common good, was better than one where individual greed is allowed to predominate.  Problems arise when groups and individuals become estranged from the paramount of functioning to the good of all.  Confusion surfaces as destructive charlatans and hypocrites like Rand obscure what it actually means to function in this manner.  Foucault later called into question the notion that morality was inherent to human nature, certainly as expressed within the dispositif.

Of course, codification requires a bureaucracy and enforcement mechanisms, to the point where one eventually considers the need to once again rise up against the inexorable weight of bureaucratic oppression, which never ceases expanding upon itself, where yet another bureaucracy is required to guard against counter-revolution.