ABSTRACT
Payne Knight returns as notional source of parody in this renewed ‘Progress’, but again others – particularly Darwin – are not far below the surface. This time the critique focuses on pastoral nostalgia and naivety. Behind Payne Knight, Darwin, and other such writers, is the giant Rousseau, and here particularly Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality (1754), which held that ‘man is naturally good, and only by institutions is he made bad’. Rousseau’s campaign for savage simplicity and innocence drew a tart response from Voltaire which serves to paraphrase the anti-jacobins’s impatience:
I have received your new book against the human race, and thank you for it. Never was such cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid. One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it. 1
