Discourse on the Origin of Inequality

Overview

In 1753 the Academy of Dijon asked what the origin of inequality among men was and whether it was authorised by natural law. Rousseau, who had won their prize four years earlier with an essay arguing that the arts and sciences had corrupted morals, answered at length and lost. The result is about ninety pages plus a set of long notes that are worth reading, addressed formally to the Republic of Geneva in a dedication that praises a city he had recently stopped living in.

The book is built in two halves with a preface. Part One asks what a human being is once you strip away everything society added. Part Two tells the story of how society added it. Rousseau is explicit that this is not history. He calls the state of nature a condition that perhaps never existed and that we need anyway, as a standard against which to measure what we have become. It is a thought experiment about origins, and he warns his reader not to take the chronology literally while writing it out step by step in vivid detail.

The prose is unlike anything else in eighteenth-century political theory. It accelerates, it accuses, it addresses you directly. Rousseau is arguing, but he is also mourning.

The argument

Part One. Take away tools, language, family, agriculture and fear of opinion, and what remains is an animal that is strong, healthy, slow to anger and almost entirely alone. Rousseau grants it two drives: self-preservation, which he calls amour de soi, and pity, an immediate aversion to seeing another creature suffer. He denies it reason in any developed sense, denies it language, and denies it sociability. Crucially, he grants it two things that will destroy it: free will and perfectibilité, the capacity to acquire new faculties indefinitely. Natural man is not good because he is virtuous. He is good because he has no occasion to be otherwise.

Inequality in this condition is trivial. One man is faster, another stronger, and since nobody depends on anybody, the difference buys nothing.

Part Two. A sequence of accidents starts the machine. Climate and scarcity push people together. Huts appear, then families, then leisure, then the habit of comparison. Around the first shared fires people begin to be seen, and wanting to be seen well is the birth of amour-propre, the vanity that measures itself against others. Songs, dances, the prettiest girl, the strongest boy: Rousseau places the fall of man at a village festival.

Then come the two decisive inventions, agriculture and metallurgy. Cultivating land requires claiming it, and claiming it makes labour into title. Division of labour makes each person dependent on others, and dependence makes it profitable to seem better than you are. Rousseau’s word for the resulting condition is not poverty but fers, irons. The strong take, the weak are taken from, and the state of war that Hobbes wrongly located in nature actually arrives here, generated by property.

The rich then make an offer. Let us institute laws and magistrates, so that the weak are protected from oppression and everyone’s holdings are secure. The poor accept, because they are threatened and because the terms sound universal. Rousseau calls this the most deliberate project ever to enter the human mind, and he means it as a charge. Law does not correct the inequality of property; it converts a fact into a right, and hands the beneficiaries the power to enforce it.

The last stage is despotism. Inequality increases until every intermediate rank is crushed, and there is one master and a population of slaves. At that point equality returns, because zero equals zero. Rousseau ends by distinguishing natural inequality, which is small and physical, from moral or political inequality, which is large, artificial and not authorised by natural law at all. That is his answer to Dijon.

How to read it

Read the preface and the dedication quickly, then Part One carefully, then Part Two twice. The notes at the end are not optional; note IX in particular contains some of his fiercest writing about wealth and health.

Watch for the two-step Rousseau uses throughout. He denies that his history is factual, then reasons from it as though it were. Decide for yourself whether this is a flaw or a method. He is trying to isolate a variable, the way a physicist imagines a frictionless plane.

Do not arrive with the phrase “noble savage”. Rousseau never uses it, and his natural man is not noble, not wise and not a model to return to. The essay says the road back is closed. It is a diagnosis, not a programme.

Read it against Hobbes and Locke, who are its targets. Hobbes put war in nature; Rousseau says Hobbes described a man who had already been to market. Locke made property natural; Rousseau makes it the founding trick. And read it before the Social Contract, which is his attempt to answer the question this book leaves open: given that we cannot go back, what would a legitimate society look like?

Questions it raises

• Can a thought experiment about a condition that never existed tell us anything true about human nature?
• Is amour-propre curable, or is any society of ranked beings bound to produce it?
• If property founded inequality, does Rousseau owe us an account of what should replace it?
• He grants natural man pity but not reason. Is pity enough to build a morality on?
• Does the pact between rich and poor describe a real event, a useful fiction, or a slander on all law?
• Rousseau says progress in the arts and sciences has cost us our freedom. On his own evidence, has it?