Rousseau is famous for inventing the 'noble savage' — a phrase he never actually wrote
Jean-Jacques Rousseau is widely credited with the romantic idea that humans in a pre-civilized state of nature were purer and happier than people corrupted by society. But the exact phrase 'noble savage' appears nowhere in his writing; it predates him, first used by the poet John Dryden in 1672, and Rousseau's actual argument about the state of nature was considerably more cautious than the myth that followed him.
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality — 1755
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