The noble savage was raised to a more exalted level by Jean-Jacques Rousseau,19 another writer influenced by Montaigne – his annotated copy of the Essays survives. Unlike Diderot, Rousseau took primitive society to be something so perfect that it could not actually exist in any real part of the world, not even the Pacific. It functioned only as an ideal contrast to the mess that real societies had become. By definition, all existing civilisation was corrupt.
