No one as far as I know gave the peasants the chance to play aristocrat. Paradoxically it was this eighteenth-century attempt to live according to nature, to follow nature and to act naturally, that provided some of the most important philosophical justifications for the kind of complex and artificial systems that present nature enthusiasts most disdain. Although the physicists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are more famous for their discoveries concerning the nature of the physical world, it was the early economists who developed a deeper and more enduring understanding of the mechanisms of nature. The physicists developed a deterministic model of the world in which a few basic laws would govern the vast particulars of the universe. An opposing account pioneered by the physiocrats and developed by Adam Smith describes how order can arise from the bottom up rather than from the top down.
Macroscopic order arises from purely local as opposed to global factors.
Today this idea makes good physics as well as good biology. At the time it made a new economics and helped to justify both pluralism and democracy. I'm more interested in the metaphysics of this episode than its history. The point to emphasize here is that we are encouraged to learn from nature so that its harmony can become our own. To think that nature is moving by its own forces to produce our preferred states is to smuggle our ethical and religious concepts into our description of nature.