Quiz: A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality

10 questions drawn at random. Score 80% for a silver medal.

1. 1. On what does moral or political inequality depend, according to Rousseau?

   A kind of convention, established or authorised by consent The climate and soil of each country Differences of age, health and bodily strength The will of God revealed in Scripture
2. 2. To what does Rousseau compare the human soul as altered by society?

   A river silted up by floods until it has lost its course The statue of Glaucus, disfigured by time and the seas A ruined temple at Delphi A clock whose springs have rusted until it no longer keeps time
3. 3. Which body proposed the question that the Discourse answers?

   The Berlin Academy of Sciences The Académie française The Academy of Dijon The Small Council of Geneva
4. 4. How does Rousseau report Hobbes’s description of a bad man?

   As a wolf to other men As a slave of his passions As a fallen angel As a robust child
5. 5. According to Rousseau, what “first civilised men, and ruined humanity” in the philosophers’ view?

   Trade and navigation Fire and language Iron and corn Gold and silver
6. 6. To what does Rousseau compare even prudent men agreeing to sacrifice part of their freedom?

   A horse accepting the bridle A debtor pledging his house A wounded man having his arm cut off to save his body A sailor throwing cargo overboard in a storm
7. 7. What was the rich man’s “profoundest plan”?

   To make allies of his attackers through common laws and a supreme power To divide his lands among the poor in return for their labour and loyalty To invite a foreign prince to rule the community and guarantee his possessions To hire an army of the poor and use it to conquer and plunder his neighbours
8. 8. Which quality does Rousseau say distinguishes man from the brutes beyond any dispute?

   The faculty of self-improvement A natural sociability The power of speech The understanding
9. 9. Whom does Rousseau call “the real founder of civil society”?

   The first father who ruled his grown children The first chief chosen by an assembly of families to settle their quarrels The first man who enclosed a piece of ground and said “This is mine” The first conqueror who imposed his laws on a defeated and disarmed people
10. 10. What does Rousseau remember lying among his father’s tools?

    The Bible and Calvin’s Institutes The laws and edicts of the Republic The works of Tacitus, Plutarch and Grotius Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics