Natural man is born free but is everywhere in chains. 'Civilised man', unfortunately, 'is born and dies a slave. The infant is bound up in swaddling clothes, the corpse is nailed down in his coffin. All his life man is imprisoned by institutions.' Optimists will insist, as Helvétius did to Rousseau, that 'l'éducation peut tout.' Pessimists will reply, like de Maistre, that sheep are born carnivorous but everywhere eat grass. How do we know, if the men we see around us and we ourselves are slaves, that natural man is free? By introspection, says Rousseau - in tracing, through biography, the simplicity of the heart and its all but inevitable degradation by society. The biography may be theoretical, as in Émile and the discourse on inequality, or literary, as in the character of Saint-Preux, for instance, in La Nouvelle Héloise, or literal, as in the Confessions.

LRB 19 November 1981 | PDF Download