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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2009
Ever since the Enlightenment, most intellectuals on the liberal and radical end of the ideological spectrum have tended to stand for a morality and politics of authenticity, sincerity, and naturalness; while their conservative opponents defended the need for decorum, civility, and restraints. These differences were, of course, largely rooted in differing basic conceptions about the nature of the human animal. Traditionally, the conservatives had a pessimistic view of human nature and hence believed that it had to be curbed; they pitted their views against the progressive belief in the basic goodness of human-kind that emerged in the eighteenth century. When Rousseau proclaimed in Émile: ‘Coming from the hands of the author of all things, everything is good; in the hands of man, everything degenerates’, Bonald, the great critic of Enlightenment thought, answered: ‘We are bad by nature, good through society. The savage is not a man, he is not even a childish man, he is only a degenerate man’.
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