Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality among Men, often abbreviated to Discourse on Inequality, is a treatise on human nature in civil society, in which the author inquires about what divides people from people and how those inequalities originated in the first place. His work is divided into four sections, namely the Dedication, the Preface, then the First and Second Parts of “A Dissertation on the Origin and Foundation of the Inequality of Mankind.”
To begin with, Rousseau dedicates the work to his birthplace, Geneva. He praises the social system in Geneva as an ideal, near-perfect one. In his utopian and highly idealized vision of Geneva, he notes how the laws and institutions there are just and stable, how its inhabitants live in mutual harmony and continue with the community spirit, and how the State of Geneva maintains a friendly and peaceful relationship with its neighboring countries by neither threatening them nor being threatened by them. Rousseau's Utopian picture of 18th-century Geneva was far from an accurate one, and the state in his writing seems to be more of an ideal embodiment of the virtues he had always wished for, rather than an accurate picture of Geneva itself. Thus, the idealized Geneva turns to be a counter-discourse to the contemporary Paris, the city where Rousseau had spent quite a few years of his life and the city he would leave afterwards with dejection.
The Preface opens by assigning immense importance to the study of humanity as opposed to all other disciplines of knowledge. Rousseau says: “Of all human sciences the most useful and most imperfect appears to me to be that of mankind: and I will venture to say, the single inscription on the Temple of Delphi contained a precept more difficult and more important than is to be found in all the huge volumes that moralists have ever written. I consider the subject of the following discourse as one of the most interesting questions philosophy can propose.” Rousseau feels that to begin with, an in-depth study of mankind is necessary; otherwise, the study of inequality among mankind makes no sense. He thinks it is the high time to study mankind, because the ever-advancing scientific discoveries and technological inventions are gradually pushing humanity farther from its primitive state, which he terms the "state of nature."
According to Rousseau, there are two kinds of inequality among the human species. He calls the first one natural or physical inequality, “because it is established by nature, and consists in a difference of age, health, bodily strength, and the qualities of the mind or of the soul.” The other one, in which he is particularly interested, has been defined as moral or political inequality, “because it depends on a kind of convention, and is established, or at least authorized by the consent of men”. It is useless to look for the reasons of natural inequality, because the term is self-explanatory; hence, the author focuses on the second one. The precise theme of the essay, according to Rousseau, is to “mark, in the progress of things, the moment at which right took the place of violence and nature became subject to law, and to explain by what sequence of miracles the strong came to submit to serve the weak, and the people to purchase imaginary repose at the expense of real felicity”.
Subsequently, in the First Part, Rousseau begins his critical dissection of the ‘natural man’, because he thinks it is essential to “judge rightly of the natural state of man, to consider him from his origin, and to examine him, as it were, in the embryo of his species.” Rousseau is not trying to elaborate the procedure through which humanity attained its present condition in modern civil society from those primitive days of the ‘natural state of man’; he only admits that it has been a complex process. What interests Rousseau more is the self-love (Original French: amour propre) that mankind has developed over this course of evolution from a natural state to the civil society. Rousseau’s natural man has the animalistic instinct for self-preservation, which comes from his love of self (Original French: amour de soi-même). All his actions in the natural state are initiated and driven by this self-love, and it is for his own sake that he seeks to avoid conflicts with other humans or animals. Rousseau ‘sees’ him “satisfying his hunger at the first oak, and slaking his thirst at the first brook; finding his bed at the foot of the tree which afforded him a repast; and, with that, all his wants supplied”. This natural man of Rousseau is a savage, and he is distinguished from his peers by physical differences. According to Rousseau, “Nature in this case treats them exactly as Sparta treated the children of her citizens: those who come well formed into the world she renders strong and robust, and all the rest she destroys; differing in this respect from our modern communities, in which the State, by making children a burden to their parents, kills them indiscriminately before they are born.”
Nevertheless, what differentiates this natural man from the rest of the animal kingdom is his capacity for ‘perfectibility’ and his inborn sense of freedom. By perfectibility, Rousseau means how humans are capable of learning new things from observing others humans or nature itself. Freedom is interpreted as the capacity to transform or overcome natural instinct. Rousseau’s savage lacks the capacity of reason, which makes him significantly different from the savage imagined by Hobbes: while the uncivilized man described in Leviathan is in a constant state of fear and anxiety, Rousseau’s Natural Man cannot conceive of death or any other catastrophic end due to his lack of reasoning abilities.
The Second Part begins with a dramatic imagined scenario depicting the first ‘private property’ ever acquired. Rousseau describes the “first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.” And this private property is the cause of inequality among modern humans. Here, then, we have the answer to Rousseau's initial question. It is private property that is the origin of inequality. As long as people were satisfied with their rustic needs, they were happy and equal. As long as “they undertook only what a single person could accomplish, and confined themselves to such arts as did not require the joint labour of several hands, they lived free, healthy, honest and happy lives, so long as their nature allowed, and as they continued to enjoy the pleasures of mutual and independent intercourse.” On the other hand, “from the moment one man began to stand in need of the help of another; from the moment it appeared advantageous to any one man to have enough provisions for two, equality disappeared, property was introduced, work became indispensable, and vast forests became smiling fields, which man had to water with the sweat of his brow, and where slavery and misery were soon seen to germinate and grow up with the crops”.
Having thus included these observations, the treatise ends with Rousseau wondering what should be done next. He asks, “Must societies be totally abolished? Must meum and tuum be annihilated, and must we return again to the forests to live among bears?” He, nevertheless, leaves the questions largely unanswered to the pondering of his readers and of future generations.
