HKB
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Often appears with: tyranny and despotism · the nature and attributes of God · roman empire · barbarism vs civilization · arbitrary power
Usually: argument (1) · censure (1)
“Surely it is madness to make the fate of thousands depend on the caprice of a weak fellow creature, whose very station sinks him NECESSARILY below the meanest of his subjects!” Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman · insight
She rejects Rousseau’s celebration of “barbarism” and contrasts it with Roman and Spartan examples, then condemns kingship and uncontrolled power as inevitably corrupting and harmful to morality and social liberty.
Rousseau exerts himself to prove, that all WAS right originally: a crowd of authors that all IS now right: and I, that all WILL BE right. But, true to his first position, next to a state of nature, Rousseau celebrates barbarism, and, apostrophizing the shade of Fabricius, he forgets that, in conquering the world, the Romans never dreamed of establishing their own liberty on a firm basis, or of extending the reign of…