Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men

Rousseau's Second Discourse has a dedication, a preface, two parts, and a long set of notes. Following the rule of about fifteen thousand words of original per episode, it is told here in two episodes, breaking where Rousseau breaks between his two parts. The argument is condensed in Rousseau's own voice; the dedication is shortened, and the notes are mostly left out. The English is my own, made from the French.

To the Republic of Geneva

Magnificent, most honoured and sovereign lords: convinced that only a virtuous citizen may offer his country honours it can accept, I have worked for thirty years to deserve to offer you public homage.

If I had had to choose the place of my birth, I would have chosen a society of a size limited by the extent of human faculties — that is, by the possibility of being well governed; a state where, since all the individuals knew one another, neither the obscure manoeuvres of vice nor the modesty of virtue could escape the eyes and judgement of the public; where the sovereign and the people could have only one and the same interest. I would have wished to live and die free — that is, so subject to the laws that neither I nor anyone else could shake off their honourable yoke. I would have sought a country where the right of legislation was common to all citizens, but where the people, wisely, did not make new laws every day. In a word, I would have chosen the country that I find in you.

I cannot recall without the sweetest emotion the memory of the virtuous citizen to whom I owe my life, and who often spoke to me in my childhood of the respect due to you. I see him still, living by the work of his hands, and nourishing his soul with the most sublime truths. I see Tacitus, Plutarch and Grotius mingled before him with the tools of his trade. And I would not forget that precious half of the republic which makes the happiness of the other: amiable and virtuous women of Geneva, it will always be your lot to govern ours.

Preface

The most useful and least advanced of all human knowledge seems to me to be that of man; and I dare say that the inscription on the temple at Delphi alone contained a more important and more difficult precept than all the thick volumes of the moralists. Like the statue of Glaucus, which time, the sea and storms had so disfigured that it looked less like a god than like a wild beast, the human soul, altered in the midst of society by a thousand continually renewed causes, by the acquisition of a mass of knowledge and errors, by the changes that have taken place in the constitution of bodies, and by the continual shock of the passions, has, so to speak, changed its appearance so as to be almost unrecognisable.

What is more cruel still is that, since all the progress of the human species continually removes it from its primitive state, the more new knowledge we accumulate, the more we deprive ourselves of the means of acquiring the most important of all; so that, in a sense, it is by dint of studying man that we have made ourselves incapable of knowing him. It is no light undertaking to separate what is original from what is artificial in the present nature of man, and to know well a state which no longer exists, which perhaps never existed, which probably never will exist, and of which it is nevertheless necessary to have accurate notions in order to judge our present state properly.

Leaving aside all the scientific books, which teach us only to see men as they have made themselves, and meditating on the first and simplest operations of the human soul, I think I can perceive in it two principles prior to reason: one of which interests us keenly in our own well-being and preservation, and the other inspires in us a natural repugnance to seeing any sentient being, and principally our fellow men, perish or suffer. It is from the concurrence and combination of these two principles, without its being necessary to add that of sociability, that all the rules of natural right seem to me to flow. In this way, too, we put an end to the ancient disputes about the participation of animals in natural law: for if I am obliged to do no harm to my fellow man, it is less because he is a reasonable being than because he is a sentient being; and this quality, being common to animals and men, should at least give the animal the right not to be needlessly ill-treated by man.

The Question

What is the origin of inequality among men, and is it authorised by natural law? — Question proposed by the Academy of Dijon.

Exordium

It is of man that I have to speak; and the question I examine tells me that I am going to speak to men — for such questions are not proposed by those who are afraid of honouring the truth.

I conceive in the human species two kinds of inequality: one, which I call natural or physical, because it is established by nature, and consists in the difference of age, health, bodily strength, and the qualities of the mind or the soul; the other, which may be called moral or political inequality, because it depends on a kind of convention, and is established, or at least authorised, by the consent of men. This latter consists in the different privileges which some enjoy to the prejudice of others — such as being richer, more honoured, more powerful than they, or even making themselves obeyed by them.

The philosophers who have examined the foundations of society have all felt the necessity of going back to the state of nature, but none of them has reached it. Some have not hesitated to ascribe to man in that state the notion of the just and the unjust, without showing that he must have had it, or even that it was useful to him. Others have spoken of the natural right that everyone has to keep what belongs to him, without explaining what they meant by belonging. Others, giving the stronger authority over the weaker, at once brought in government. All of them, in short, speaking continually of need, avarice, oppression, desires and pride, have transferred to the state of nature ideas they had acquired in society: they spoke of savage man, and they described civil man.

Let us begin, then, by setting aside all the facts, for they do not affect the question. The researches that can be entered upon here must not be taken for historical truths, but only for hypothetical and conditional reasonings, better fitted to illuminate the nature of things than to show their true origin, like those which our physicists make every day concerning the formation of the world.

O man, from whatever country you come, whatever your opinions, listen: here is your history, as I have thought to read it, not in the books of your fellow men, who are liars, but in nature, which never lies.

First Part

Let me strip this being, so constituted, of all the supernatural gifts he may have received, and of all the artificial faculties he could only have acquired by long progress; let me consider him, in a word, as he must have come from the hands of nature. I see an animal less strong than some, less agile than others, but, taking him all round, the most advantageously organised of all. I see him satisfying his hunger under an oak, quenching his thirst at the first stream, finding his bed at the foot of the same tree that furnished his meal; and so his needs are satisfied.

Accustomed from infancy to the inclemency of the weather and the rigour of the seasons, inured to fatigue, and forced, naked and unarmed, to defend his life and his prey against other wild beasts, or to escape them by flight, men acquire a robust and almost unalterable constitution. Nature treats them precisely as the law of Sparta treated the children of citizens: she makes strong and robust those who are well constituted, and lets all the others perish. The savage's body is the only instrument he knows, and he employs it for various uses of which ours, for want of practice, are incapable; it is our industry that deprives us of the strength and agility that necessity obliges him to acquire. If he had had an axe, would his wrist break such strong branches? If he had had a ladder, would he climb trees so nimbly? Give civilised man time to gather all his machines about him, and no doubt he will easily overcome the savage man; but if you would see a still more unequal fight, set them face to face, naked and unarmed, and you will soon see the advantage of having all one's strength constantly at one's disposal, of being always ready for anything, and of carrying oneself, so to speak, always entire with oneself.

As for illnesses, the savage knows few: the excess of idleness in some, of labour in others, the ease of irritating and satisfying our appetites and our sensuality, the over-refined foods of the rich, the bad food of the poor, late nights, excesses of every kind, the immoderate transports of all the passions, the fatigues and exhaustion of the mind — these are the fatal proofs that most of our ills are our own work, and that we would have avoided almost all of them by preserving the simple, uniform and solitary way of life prescribed to us by nature. If she destined us to be healthy, I almost dare affirm that the state of reflection is a state contrary to nature, and that the man who meditates is a depraved animal.

So far I have considered only physical man. Let us now look at him from the metaphysical and moral side. I see in every animal only an ingenious machine, to which nature has given senses in order to wind itself up, and to guarantee itself, to a certain point, against everything that tends to destroy or derange it. I perceive precisely the same things in the human machine, with this difference: that nature alone does everything in the operations of the beast, whereas man contributes to his own as a free agent. The one chooses or rejects by instinct, the other by an act of freedom. So a pigeon would die of hunger beside a dish filled with the best meats, and a cat on heaps of fruit or grain, though either could very well nourish itself on the food it disdains, if it took it into its head to try. But even if the difficulties surrounding these questions left some room for dispute about this difference between man and animal, there is another very specific quality which distinguishes them, and about which there can be no dispute: the faculty of perfecting oneself — a faculty which, with the aid of circumstances, successively develops all the others, and resides among us in the species as well as in the individual. An animal is, at the end of a few months, what it will be all its life; and its species, at the end of a thousand years, what it was in the first of those thousand years. Why is man alone subject to becoming an imbecile? Is it not that he thus returns to his primitive state, and that, while the beast, which has acquired nothing and has nothing to lose, remains always with its instinct, man, losing again by old age or other accidents all that his perfectibility has made him acquire, thus falls lower than the beast itself? 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 it is this which, by force of time, draws him out of that original condition in which he would pass tranquil and innocent days; that it is this which, bringing to flower over the centuries his enlightenment and his errors, his vices and his virtues, makes him in the end the tyrant of himself and of nature.