 This metaphysical and physiological understanding of morality was central to Diderot’s politics as well, and with respect to theater it led him to theorize the mechanisms by which human performance and theatrical display both supported and corrupted the pursuit of virtue. Rousseau, with similar ethical orientations, condemned theater outright as a false and corrupting medium, arguing that natural religion and virtue could only be practiced in a natural, i.e., non-artificial or non-theatrical way. Diderot’s view was much more complicated. While he recognized the corrupting power of artistic representation to deceive, he also recognized its power to provoke and sustain natural experiences that promoted moral virtue. His impassioned speeches written for imagined Africans oppressed by European slavery, which he included in his contributions to Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes, illustrate well the fusion of theater and politics characteristic of Diderot. In these moments, Diderot used the full power of theatrical language and artificial representation to present an unequivocal statement about moral and political righteousness, one designed to move people to progressive and virtuous political action. Rousseau’s prize essay discourses produced in the 1750s were also influential upon Diderot in shaping his views, for like Rousseau Diderot developed an ideal of natural, egalitarian, communitarian virtue, which he found most fully developed in simple, rustic people who lived modestly and in close relation to their natural surroundings. Diderot also developed a countervailing conception of vice that was directly connected to wealth, especially wealth attached to elite privilege, and a morality that encouraged people to embrace basic organic foundations for life and to turn away from urban lives of selfishness and hedonism. The same morality infused his political economic writings as well, both in his celebration of the communitarian power of commerce to unite people into virtuous and prosperous polities, and in his critique of greed and commercial excess as a cause for social violence and political injustice.