Many have remarked that, to those on the receiving end, being told you are an inferior breed and that therefore anything you say can be ignored, and being told you are an innocent child of nature or the embodiment of ancient wisdom, and that therefore everything you say must be treated as ineffably profound are almost equally annoying. Both

Jesuits, then, clearly recognized and acknowledged an intrinsic relation between refusal of arbitrary power, open and inclusive political debate and a taste for reasoned argument.

Equality here is a direct extension of freedom; indeed, is its expression. It also has almost nothing in common with the more familiar (Eurasian) notion of ‘equality before the law’, which is ultimately equality before the sovereign – that is, once again, equality in common subjugation. Americans, by contrast, were equal insofar as they were

Some emphasized the virtues of freedom they found in Native American societies, including sexual freedom, but also freedom from the expectation of constant toil in pursuit of land and wealth.31 Others noted the ‘Indian’s’ reluctance ever to let anyone fall into a condition of poverty, hunger or destitution. It was not so much that they feared

It’s precisely this capacity to shift between scales that most obviously separates human social cognition from that of other primates.5 Apes may vie for affection or dominance, but any victory is temporary and open to being renegotiated. Nothing is imagined as eternal. Nothing is really imagined at all. Humans tend to live simultaneously with the

Civic festivals were moments when the imaginary structures to which people deferred in their daily lives, but which couldn’t normally be seen, temporarily took on tangible, material form.

that time there was as yet no ‘prehistory’.

The reason for the essay’s astonishing success, then, is that for all its sensationalist style, it’s really a kind of clever compromise between two or perhaps even three contradictory positions on the most urgent social and moral concerns of eighteenth-century Europe. It manages to incorporate elements of the indigenous critique, echoes of the

Such sinful conduct, they believed, was just the extension of a more general principle of freedom, rooted in natural dispositions, which they saw as inherently pernicious.