Today we are only too aware of where this story ends. But it is important to realize that those who read him in the three decades before the French Revolution did not. They saw only a refreshing new political vision, a way to think about man’s progress apart from the materialistic values of commercial society—in short, a vision of humanity freed from the ever-expanding “getting and spending” that the neo-Aristotelians of the Enlightenment had seemed to forecast for Europe’s future.
