12 - Stalking Puer Robustus

Summary

This chapter explains the Thomas Hobbes's treatment of human power more generally. Human power in its most general sense is neither wholly natural nor wholly civil or conventional for Hobbes, representing, as it does, the central point of their convergence. In omitting Hobbes's almost (in the passage from De Cive) Jean-Jacques Rousseau signals his intention to provide a more adequate account of human robustness (and of human malice) than Hobbes was able to supply. In Emile, Rousseau attempts to show what education and habits in keeping with those received qualities might mean. Rousseau's approach to living nature takes its primary bearings from how things are on coming into being, as suggested by nature's Latin root. God or nature shows itself most clearly in works whose suitability has not yet been masked or otherwise deformed by (human) habit and experience.