Unfortunately, until then, Kant wrote, “human nature must suffer the cruelest hardships under the guise of external well-being.” No wonder Rousseau preferred man’s savage state, Kant observed, so long as this last stage to which the human race must climb is not attained.30 Over Kant’s reading of Rousseau flutters the flag of the United Nations, but also the first pages of Georg Friedrich Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and Auguste Comte’s Positive Philosophy, not to mention Marx’s Das Kapital. With the fusion of Kant and Rousseau, the European mind was on the brink of a new way of visualizing the
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