A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality

Contents

1. Dedication to the Republic of Geneva 27 min 12

   Rousseau dedicates his answer to the Dijon Academy’s question to the Republic of Geneva, the city of his birth. He describes the country he would have chosen: small, ancient, free, at peace, where all citizens legislate but only magistrates propose laws, and finds it realised in Geneva. He urges his fellow-citizens to unity and trust in their magistrates, honours his watchmaker father as typical of Geneva’s working people, praises the clergy and the city’s women as guardians of morals, and contrasts Genevan simplicity with foreign luxury. The idealised portrait doubled as a standard against which Geneva’s patrician government could be judged.

2. Preface 14 min 8

   The knowledge of man is the most useful and least advanced of sciences, because society has disfigured human nature like the sea-battered statue of Glaucus. To understand inequality we must distinguish what is original in man from what is artificial, and form true ideas of a state that perhaps never existed. The natural lawyers fail because they attribute to natural man a reasoning only society produces. Rousseau instead finds two principles prior to reason, self-preservation and pity, from which natural right can be derived without supposing sociability; they even give animals, as sentient beings, a claim not to be ill-treated.

3. On the Origin and Foundation of the Inequality of Mankind 7 min 6

   Rousseau distinguishes natural or physical inequality, in age, health, strength and mind, from moral or political inequality, which rests on convention and consists in privileges of wealth, honour and power. He refuses to ask whether the two are connected. His subject is the moment when right replaced violence. Earlier philosophers all went back to a state of nature but carried social ideas with them. Setting aside the facts of sacred history, he offers hypothetical reasoning about what humanity would have become if left to itself, addressed to the whole human race.

4. I The First Part 1 h 15 min 26

   Rousseau portrays natural man: a robust, solitary forager whose few physical wants are easily met, who fears little and suffers few diseases, most of which come with society. What distinguishes him from animals is free agency and, beyond dispute, perfectibility, the faculty of self-improvement that is the source of both progress and misery. A long digression shows how hard it is to explain the origin of language. Against Hobbes, natural man is not wicked: self-preservation is tempered by natural pity. Without lasting ties, property or mutual dependence, natural inequality has little effect, and no one can be enslaved.

5. II The Second Part 1 h 19 min 36

   Rousseau traces the road from the state of nature to civil society. After the famous opening on the first man who fenced land and said “This is mine”, he retells the stages: tools, huts and families, comparison and the wish for esteem, then metallurgy and agriculture, which bring the division of labour, property and dependence. A war of rich and poor follows, which the rich end by proposing a social compact that turns their usurpations into rights. Inequality then passes through three stages, rich and poor, powerful and weak, master and slave, until despotism makes all equal again because all are nothing.

6. Appendix 21 min 6

   Cole prints one of Rousseau’s long notes as an appendix. Against Maupertuis’s reckoning that life holds more pain than pleasure, Rousseau replies that the evils are of civilised man’s own making. Society sets each man’s interest against his neighbour’s; luxury, unhealthy trades, adulterated food, epidemics and taxes ruin the poor and depopulate the countryside. He ends by refusing the inference that societies should be abolished: men like himself must obey the laws while despising a constitution that needs rare virtues to work.