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PARTISAN REVIEW
"seem bought by the loss of character. At the same pace that man–
kind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or
to his own infamy."
As
for Rousseau, the use of even a finger's-worth of historical
imagination should suggest that the notion of "a state of nature"
which modern literary people so enjoy attacking, w.as a political meta–
phor employed in a pre-revolutionary situation, and not, therefore,
to be understood outside its context. Rousseau explicitly declared that
he did not suppose the "state of nature" to have existed in historical
time; it was, he said, "a pure idea of reason" reached by abstraction
from the observable state of society.
As
G. D. H. Cole remarks, "in
political matters at any rate, the 'state of nature' is for [Rousseau
J
only a term of controversy . . . he means by 'nature' not the original
state of a thing, nor even its reduction to the simplest terms; he is
passing over to the conception of 'nature' as identical with the full
development of [human] capacity...." There are, to be sure, ele–
ments in Rousseau's thought which one may well find distasteful, but
these are not the elements commonly referred to when he is used in
literary talk ,.as a straw man to be beaten with the cudgels of "or–
thodoxy."
What then is the significance of the turn to Original Sin among
so many intellectuals? Surely not to inform us, at this late moment,
that man is capable of evil. Or is it, .as Cleanth Brooks writes, to
suggest that man is a "limited" creature, limited in possibilities and
capacities, and hence unable to achieve his salvation through social
means? Yes, to be sure; but the problem of history is to determine,
by action, how far those limits may go. Conservative critics like to
say that "man's fallen nature" makes unrealistic the liberal-radical
vision of the good society-apparently, when Eve bit the apple she
predetermined, with one fatal crunch, that her progeny could work
its way up to capitalism, and not a step further. But the liberal-radical
vision of the good society does not depend upon a belief in the "un–
qualified goodness of man"; nor does it locate salvation in society:
anyone in need of being saved had better engage in a private scrutiny.
The liberal-radical claim is merely that the development of technology
has now made possible-possible, not inevitable-a solution of those
material problems that have burdened mankind for centuries. These
