Summary
Rousseau’s project in the Discourse on Inequality is
to describe all the sorts of inequality that exist among human beings
and to determine which sorts of inequality are “natural” and which
“unnatural” (and therefore preventable). Rousseau begins by discussing man
in his state of nature. For Rousseau, man in his state of nature is
essentially an animal like any other, driven by two key motivating principles:
pity and self-preservation. In the state of nature, which is more
a hypothetical idea than an actual historical epoch, man exists without
reason or the concept of good and evil, has few needs, and is essentially
happy. The only thing that separates him from the beasts is some
sense of unrealized perfectability.
This notion of perfectability is what allows human beings
to change with time, and according to Rousseau it becomes important the
moment an isolated human being is forced to adapt to his environment
and allows himself to be shaped by it. When natural disasters force
people to move from one place to another, make contact with other
people, and form small groups or elementary societies, new needs
are created, and men begin to move out of the state of nature toward
something very different. Rousseau writes that as individuals have
more contact with one another and small groupings begin to form,
the human mind develops language, which in turn contributes to the
development of reason. Life in the collective state also precipitates
the development of a new, negative motivating principle for human
actions. Rousseau calls this principle amour propre,
and it drives men to compare themselves to others. This drive toward
comparison to others is not rooted only in the desire to preserve
the self and pity others. Rather, comparison drives men to seek
domination over their fellow human beings as a way of augmenting
their own happiness.
Rousseau states that with the development of amour
propre and more complex human societies, private property
is invented, and the labor necessary for human survival is divided
among different individuals to provide for the whole. This division
of labor and the beginning of private property allow the property
owners and nonlaborers to dominate and exploit the poor. Rousseau
observes that this state of affairs is resented by the poor, who
will naturally seek war against the rich to end their unfair domination.
In Rousseau’s history, when the rich recognize this fact, they deceive
the poor into joining a political society that purports to grant
them the equality they seek. Instead of granting equality, however,
it sanctifies their oppression and makes an unnatural moral inequality
a permanent feature of civil society.
Rousseau’s argument in the Discourse is
that the only natural inequality among men is the inequality that
results from differences in physical strength, for this is the only
sort of inequality that exists in the state of nature. As Rousseau
explains, however, in modern societies the creation of laws and
property have corrupted natural men and created new forms of inequality
that are not in accordance with natural law. Rousseau calls these
unjustifiable, unacceptable forms of inequality moral inequality,
and he concludes by making clear that this sort of inequality must
be contested.
Analysis
Although Rousseau would later develop many of the Discourse main
points more expansively, it is significant as the first work to contain
all the central elements of his philosophy. In the moral and political
realm, the fundamental concept here is moral inequality, or unnatural
forms of inequality that are created by human beings. Rousseau is
clear that all such forms of inequality are morally wrong and as
such must be done away with. The means by which moral inequality
is to be banished is not a topic Rousseau broaches here, though
this is a question that was hotly debated during the French Revolution
and subsequent revolutions in the centuries since.
In the Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau
uses Hobbes’s concept of the state of nature but describes it in
a very different way. Whereas Hobbes described the state of nature
as a state of constant war populated by violent, self-interested
brutes, Rousseau holds that the state of nature is generally a peaceful,
happy place made up of free, independent men. To Rousseau, the sort
of war Hobbes describes is not reached until man leaves the
state of nature and enters civil society, when property and law
create a conflict between rich and poor. Aside from foreshadowing
the work of Marx and later theorists of class relations and societal
inequality, Rousseau’s conception of natural man is a key principle
in all his work: man is naturally good and is corrupted only by
his own delusions of perfectability and the harmful elements of
his capacity for reason. The means by which human beings are corrupted
and the circumstances under which man agrees to leave the state
of nature and enter human civil society are the focal points of
Rousseau’s masterpiece, The Social Contract.
