While Rousseau does not cite Lahontan or the Jesuit Relations directly, he was clearly familiar with them,49 as any intellectual of the time would have been, and his work is informed by the same critical questions: why are Europeans so competitive? Why do they not share food? Why do they submit themselves to other people’s orders? Rousseau’s long excursus on pitié – the natural sympathy that, he argues, savages have for one another and the quality that holds off the worst depredations of civilization in its second phase – only makes sense in light of the constant indigenous exclamations of
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