Discourse on the Origins of Inequality Among Men Name: ______
By Jean Jacques Rousseau
I am going to speak about man, and I only speak to human beings who are not afraid of the truth.
I think that there are two kinds of inequality among human beings. One I can natural or physical inequality, because it depends on differences in age, health, bodily strength, and intelligence. The other I call moral or political inequality because it depends on the laws which human beings have agreed to. These laws allow some people to have more wealth and power than others.
Everyone knows what the source of natural inequality is. It is nature. Some people also ask whether political inequality isn’t based on natural inequality. Whether, in fact, those who have wealth and power aren’t better in strength, intelligence, and moral virtue than those who don’t have wealth and power. This is the sort of things that slaves say when they know their masters are listening. Free and reasonable people who are looking for the truth don’t talk this way.
What then are we looking for? We are looking for that moment in the history of man when the idea of right took place of strength and violence; when nature was subjected to law. We want to explain by what series of almost magical events the majority of the people who together are strong could be made to serve their rulers who are few and therefore weaker. We want to know why all human beings traded their real happiness for the imaginary security of living in political society.
The philosophers who have tried to answer this question have all felt the need of going back to the state of nature in which man lived before societies were formed. They do this to discover the distinction between law and nature. None of them has reached it. Some of them have assumed that man in the state of nature already had the ideas of just and unjust. These philosophers didn’t even bother to ask the question how human beings could have had political ideas before they were useful to them. Other philosophers have talked about the natural right everyone has to protect what belongs to him, his property. They haven’t explained what they mean by “belong” or “property” or how human beings thought about how much time was needed before the words “authority” and “govern” could have any meaning at all for human beings. Finally, all these philosophers speak about man in the state of nature in terms of the ideas of needs, greed, oppression, desire, and pride. These ideas can’t apply to man in the state of nature, because they require society to come into existence.
Man in the state of nature is a very difficult thing to imagine and think about. We must, therefore, begin by setting aside all attempts to do so, for it is not important for the question I am trying to answer to discover the exact truth about man in the state of nature. One must instead proceed the way physicists do when they make hypotheses about the origins of the world. They do not take these hypotheses to be the truth about the past, but use them because they are useful in thinking about the nature of things around us. In the same way, I am interested not in the past, but in the nature of man. I make guesses about the past only if they are useful in explaining the existence of political inequality today. Since I am speaking about man in general, I speak in words that any human being can understand.
I speak to the feelings inside you which have been corrupted by your education and habits, but which haven’t yet been destroyed. You and I, and all other human beings, are unhappy and dissatisfied with our lives. We sometimes think that there was a time in the past when people were happier. We all wish that man had not changed beyond that point. You will want to go backward in time. This desire to praise the past is really a criticism of the present. If you don’t give up this desire, it will also become a source of great unhappiness for your children and will make impossible a serious effort to end our own unhappiness.