HENRY MAYHEW (1812-1887) AND

hyperuophy of state power, of bureaucratic and technocratic aganization;
the isolation and atomization of the person (and the concomitant growth of
the "masses"); the degradation of the symbolic dimasion of human
experience; the loss of cultures and languages; the quantitative and
qualitative shift in war - all in all. wbat Vico might have recognized as the
new barbarism. Is'
In establishing the "primitivp/ciMT paradigm, R m u "' compared primitive
and civilization cultures with these wads:
Savage man and civilized man Mix so much at th bottom of tkir bearts
and in their inclinations, that what umstitutes tfie suprem! happiness of the
one would reduce the other to despair. The first sighs fu nothing but repose
and Liberty; he desires only to live, and to be exempt fiom labour . . .
Civilized man_ on the other hand, is always in motion, perpenrally sweating
and toiling, and racking his brains to find occupations still m e labdous: he
continues a drudge to his last minute; nay, he courts death to be able to live,
a renounce life to acquire immatalj~."~
Befae Rousseau, Montaigne s a M westan civilization as well in his political
essay, "On Cannibals." He compared his own Renaissance civilization with the
aboriginal life of the Brazilian Tupinabama:
See Rousseau. 1%5[1755], 244.
Is9 Rausseau's "Ibc Essay oa the Origin of languages" talcen together with the Discourses on the
Origin of Incqurrlity (1755) and the Social Conrrucf (1762) provided a scathing indictment of
eighreenrh-century thought.