Political Philosophy: First Essay
Wylie Breckenridge
How did social inequalities originate according to Rousseau? Is he actually
advocating that man 'return to nature'?
Rousseau, like us, lived in a society with inequalities between its citizens. Some are
strong, some are not. Some are intelligent, some are not. Some are wealthy, some are
not. Some are powerful, some are not. Why? That is the question he addressed in his
Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men1. He thought of
these inequalities as falling into two categories. The first two, strength and intelligence,
are examples of what Rousseau called natural inequalities because, in his words, they
are "established by nature" (p. 16). The second two, wealth and power, are examples of
what he called moral inequality because they are "established, or at least authorized, by
the consent of men" (p. 16). Natural inequality, by its very definition, is established by
nature and so it is not to the point to ask for its origin or justification. Moral inequality,
however, is our own doing and so it is legitimate to ask for its origin and justification.
That is what Rousseau does in the Discourse.
In the end he sums up his approach by saying, "I have tried to set forth the origin and
progress of inequality… to the extent that these things can be deduced from the nature
of man by the light of reason alone…" (pp. 70-71). His method is to wind the clock
back to a time before social inequalities existed, and then reconstruct the development
of man using reason as his tool and nature as his guide. In this way, he hopes to find
when and why social inequalities began. He is critical of theories that attribute social
qualities to man even in his most natural state, the 'state of nature'. He says that they
"speak of savage man and they depict civilized man"2, meaning that what they call the
'state of nature' is already a civilized state. Rousseau goes back further. His 'state of
nature' is a condition in which man is in no way social, and it is there that he begins.
He claims that in this state, "inequality is practically non-existent" (p. 71). This is
certainly true of social inequality: for a man to be wealthy, there must be property; for a
man to be powerful, there must be laws. But property and law, as he goes on to show,
are advanced social concepts and so in the state of nature, before any form of society
had begun, they do not exist. But he thinks the same can be said of natural inequalities:
even though some may be stronger or more agile than others, they have no reason to use
this advantage against their fellow humans - there is plenty of food to go around and
there is no desire to take slaves. These natural inequalities, then, are practically (in the
literal sense) non-existent.
But, Rousseau claims, natural man has a quality that he calls "perfectibility" - a faculty
for developing our natural abilities. It is this, he believes, that is the ultimate source of
our social ills:
It would be sad for us to be forced to agree that this distinctive and almost
unlimited faculty is the source of all man's misfortunes; that this is what, by
1
"Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men" is reprinted in the course notes
and will be referred to throughout this essay as "the Discourse". All page references are to the
Discourse.
2
I think this comes from Rousseau's "The Social Contract".
-1-
dint of time, draws him out of that original condition in which he would
pass tranquil and innocent days; that this is what, through centuries of
giving rise to his enlightenment and his errors, his vices and his virtues,
eventually make him a tyrant over himself and nature. (p. 26)
It is this faculty, he suggests, that urges us to do things more easily and with more
speed. It is this faculty that urges us to want more than we need. It is this faculty that
eventually leads to inequality:
But as soon as one man needed the help of another, as soon as one man
realized that it was useful for a single individual to have provisions for two,
equality disappeared, property came into existence, labor became necessary.
Vast forests were transformed into smiling fields which had to be watered
by men's sweat, and in which slavery and misery were soon to germinate
and grow with the crops. (p. 51)
Rousseau marks the development of property as a crucial step in the path to inequality.
With any property at all comes the desire for more property, and with this comes the
desire to have others labour for us. He imagines a situation in which "the strongest did
the most work; the most adroit turned theirs to better advantage: the most ingenious
found ways to shorten their labor" (p. 53). This division of labour leads to a division of
humans into the wealthy and the poor: "… in laboring equally, the one earned a great
deal while the other barely had enough to live" (p. 53).
This inequality of wealth led to an unstable situation:
… the destruction of equality was followed by the most frightful disorder.
Thus the usurpations of the rich, the acts of brigandage by the poor, the
unbridled passions of all, stifling natural pity and the still weak voice of
justice, made men greedy, ambitious and wicked… Emerging society gave
way to the most horrible state of war. (p. 55)
It is at this point, Rousseau claims, that society was officially formed. It was the idea of
the rich, who feared losing their wealth and status in the existing volatile state. He
describes it as "the most thought-out project that ever entered the human mind. It was to
use in his favor the very strength of those who attacked him, to turn his adversaries into
his defenders…" (p. 56). The poor, the "crude, easily seduced men who also had too
many disputes to settle among themselves to be able to get along without arbiters" (p.
56), were easily coerced into joining an institution that was designed to do the exact
opposite of what it claimed: "to protect the weak from oppression, restrain the
ambitious, and assure everyone of possessing what belongs to him" (p. 56). This
account of the formation of society is considerably different to that of Hobbes, who
imagined men coming together by mutual consent to establish a way of life that was
genuinely better than the one they had. That it was formed by consent and led to a better
life was Hobbes's justification for society. Rousseau is claiming, instead, that society
was master-minded by the rich, that the poor had little choice but to agree to join it, that
it maintained and strengthened the inequality it was claimed to guard against and,
therefore, that it was unjustified.
-2-
To summarize, this is Rousseau's account of the origin of social inequality: It did not
exist in the state of nature, but was the inevitable product of man's faculty of
perfectibility. From the creation of property arose the wealthy class. From this came an
unstable state in which the wealthy risked losing what they had to the uprising of the
poor. The wealthy established 'society', purportedly to protect the poor but actually to
protect the wealthy, and this gave rise to the politically powerful.
It is very clear throughout the Discourse that Rousseau thought we were better off in the
state of nature than in society. He describes the former using words like 'freedom' and
'happiness', and the latter using words like 'misery' and 'torment'. At one stage he asks,
"if anyone has ever heard tell of a savage who was living in liberty ever dreaming of
complaining about his life and of killing himself", and by pleading, "let the judgment
therefore be made with less pride on which side the real misery lies" (p. 34). But he is
not advocating that we return to nature. He thinks, in fact, that we cannot, because along
the way to becoming social we changed in a way that rendered a return impossible. He
says that "savage man and civilized man differ so greatly in the depths of their hearts
and in their inclinations, that what constitutes the supreme happiness of the one would
reduce the other to despair" (p. 69). In the state of nature we had no passion like pride or
envy because they developed later, and thus in the state of nature we had none of the
problems they create. But now that we do have these passions they will continue to
plague us, even if we try to live as we once did. Rousseau claims that, despite this, there
is a sense in which we will return to the state of nature anyway. He develops his history
of inequality to its ridiculous conclusion - a state in which "subjects no longer have any
law other than the master's will, nor the master any rule other than his passions", so that
"the notions of good and the principles of justice again vanish" (p. 68). He thinks that in
this state we will again be governed only by the law of the strongest. He calls this "the
final stage of inequality", a time when "all private individuals become equals again,
because they are nothing" (p. 68).
It is difficult not to be moved by Rousseau's account of the human condition in society,
and this gives the Discourse immediate appeal. Moreover, he presents it as veridical,
saying to the reader "here is your history, as I have thought to read it, not in the books of
your fellowmen, who are liars, but in nature, who never lies. Everything that comes
from nature will be true; there will be nothing false except what I have unintentionally
added" (p. 18). Here, and elsewhere at the start of the Discourse, he advertises his
account as an objective one, concerned only with the truth. But when reading the
Discourse it is difficult not to feel that it is more of an attack on the social philosophies
of Hobbes and others, concerned more with finding ways to rebut their arguments than
with finding the truth. It is difficult to believe that his history of man, starting so long
ago and facing so many possible turns along the way, is anything more than one of
many such histories. Nevertheless, at the very least it shows that the theories of these
other philosophers have an opponent that is both plausible and attractive.
-3-