The notion that men could renegotiate a social contract, rather than taking it as a given, required a certain confidence in human reason.
Such confidence could be weakened by uncertainties regarding both means and ends. Were men's desires selfish or beneficent? Addressing this question, many eighteenth-century thinkers replayed the Christian drama of the contest between vice and virtue.
The spokesmen of the French Enlightenment were more likely than their British counterparts to worry that the pursuit of selfinterest might lead men astray.Different trajectories of economic development had unfolded. In France, the King had greater power and fathers more authority. Both wage employment and commodity trade were less widespread than in Britain. Still, a new generation of Parisian intellectuals, including Montesquieu, Voltaire, Saint Lambert, and Diderot, relentlessly disputed the relationship between moral virtue, human nature, and economic progress. Most were hopeful that self-interest—especially sexual self-interest—would be naturally tempered by natural benevolence. They were more tolerant of feminine lust than their British counterparts, even if their sympathy for women stopped short of any systematic critique of male authority.