First Reddit post. I am going to reply to yours as it is the closest one to my thought, and also I have no idea how to post an original comment (just signed in). The main issue I have with this article is the easy and quick pop-freudian psycho-analysis. 'Rousseau was motivated by his need for a mother and then self-pity...' which as the article highlights that he could have had all the trappings of a philosophes' life is contradictory to the text itself. But the whole piece reads like an ahistorical ramblings of an undergrad...

You do make a point on Adam Smith, which follows partly from the author, I would like to point out that the penalties for trade without paying taxes (often far too high) and at the time greatly punishing the poor and hungry, his liberalisation of trade would have seemed necessary: ' at a time when the punishment for illegal livestock export was to have one's hand cut off and nailed up in the local marketplace, for a first offence, and the penalty for a second offence was death'.