The movement’s ostensible ambition was no less than to rebuild the Tower of Babel, restoring harmony to the world.

political economy as the prospect of human betterment,

Smith was without illusion in acknowledging that what drove men and women to better their condition was the ambition to acquire status in the eyes of others.

Corruption was but the other face of betterment.

Rousseau explicitly identified modern civilization with corruption.

different things, and from this distinction arose ostentatious display, deceitful cunning, and all the vices that follow in their wake’.

‘to be and to appear became two totally

And in accepting the institution of property, men and women agreed to inequality, to society organized hierarchically and divisively.

What humans did have, and animals did not, was free will, and hence the crucial quality of ‘perfectibility’, the capacity to change, to improve—or to corrupt—their original condition.