By good chance, one of the most famous British intellectuals, David Hume, was not only living in Paris at the time, but was also sympathetic to Rousseau's cause. A few years earlier, at the request of a Parisian literary lady, Hume had written out of the blue to Rousseau, offering him refuge on British soil. That offer was now at last taken up and, in January 1766, the two men travelled together from Paris to London.
They made a very odd couple. The French philosopher (or rather, Swiss - he was born in Geneva) was a small, gesticulating man with animated features and a bizarre taste in clothes: wearing what he called an Armenian caftan, he sought (like Lawrence of Arabia in the Beyond the Fringe sketch) to pass unnoticed in the street. Hume was a large, portly figure with an amiable but bovine face and a strangely vacant stare. He dressed conventionally; indeed, convention was something in which he - unlike Rousseau - rather strongly believed.
The intellectual differences went deeper than that. Rousseau idealised natural innocence and saw the socialisation of mankind as a process of corruption. Modern man was an alienated being, and radical changes were needed to remedy that. For Hume, the civilising process in human history involved a complex web of interactions, through which moral behaviour was learned and refined, and political institutions were settled and gradually improved.
