Rousseau, Jean-Jacques; A Discourse on Inequality; Transl. Maurice Cranston; Penguin Classics, London, 1984
Born 1712, died 1778
This text is a discourse Rousseau wrote for a competition, the second time he had entered the Dijon competition. The 1st time he entered, he wrote a discourse about the effect of scientific advancements, and he won, creating quite a stir at the time. The question he was responding to was:
"What is the origin of the inequality among men, and is it authorized by natural law?"
In his dedication to his second discourse, Rousseau mentions wanting to live in "a commonwealth whose citizens, being long accustomed to a wise independence, were not only free but fit to be free."
"What is the origin of the inequality among men, and is it authorized by natural law?"
In his dedication to his second discourse, Rousseau mentions wanting to live in "a commonwealth whose citizens, being long accustomed to a wise independence, were not only free but fit to be free."
(pg 59)
He tells the citizenry of Geneva, his ideal[ized] state, to trust in their leaders (magistrates) and to place in them "that salutary confidence which reason owes to virtue." (pg 62)
I am having trouble getting into this book - and I'm just in his dedication/intro. It's partly his overwrought language and partly because I'm disenchanted with Rousseau the man. He seems like someone whose philosophy seems less a balanced exploration than a bitter and resentful reaction to being disappointed in what life handed him. This is probably somewhat unfair as he was reportedly shocked by the inequality he saw in France and the dissoluteness of the society. He was also poised to have fame and a financially secure position in Parisian society when he started publishing his discourses speaking out against "arts & science" and the advancements of society - and all this was rejected and his friends turned on him and ostracized him when he spoke against the status quo of the salon society. But I can't help dwelling on his actions against his 5 illegitimate children by his longterm mistress. He sent them off to an orphanage, telling a wealthy patroness when she asked if this was true:"Nature wishes us to have children because the earth produces enough to feed everybody; it is the style of life of the rich; it is your style of life which robs my children of bread."
No...it's Rousseau's decisions and actions which robbed his children.
He also reportedly went off to the woods for a week to ponder alone on inequality, before writing this discourse, (he waxes on about how he loves solitude and how man's natural condition was solitary) yet he wasn't really alone, he brought his mistress (same one) and 2 other women to take care of him while he pondered. Give me a break. This is the same man who in his intro writes nauseatingly "Could I forget that precious half of the commonwealth which assures the happiness of the other, and whose sweetness and prudence maintain its peace and good morals? Lovable and virtuous women of Geneva - the destiny of your sex will always be to govern ours. Happy are we so long as your chaste power, exerted solely within the marriage bond [of course ... and what a hypocrite], makes itself felt only for the glory of the state and the wellbeing of the public." He goes on and on and on in a similar saccharine vein - no wonder Wollstonecraft wasn't a fan.
All the typical female adjectives:
- gentle
- modest
- chaste
- simple
- sweet
- duty
- virtue
Later on he writes about the morality of love (pg 103) as "an artificial sentiment [..] cultivated by women [...] in order to establish their empire over men, and so make dominant the sex that ought to obey." So much for the 'precious half'.
This is tough going, though I think when he gets into his argument it will be a bit better.
On pg 89 he describes 'savage man', operating on instinct alone. Rousseau goes on to say that "Whatever our moralists say, human understanding owes much to the passions, which, by common consent, also owe much to it. It is by the activity of the passions that our reason improves itself; we seek to know only because we desire to enjoy; and it is impossible to conceive of a man who had neither desires nor fears giving himself the trouble of reasoning. The passions, in turn, owe their origin to our needs and their development to our knowledge. [...] The savage man['s] desires do not go beyond his physical needs.
Rousseau writes that the Roman jurists felt that natural law applied to man and animals, whereas the Moderns consider laws to apply to moral beings only, limiting natural law to "the one animal tht is endowed with reason, man" (pg 69). He goes on to state that "for it to be natural, it must be spoken directly by the voice of nature."
Rousseau will end up denying natural man's rationality.
He postulates
"2 principles antecedent to reason: the first gives us an ardent interest in our own wellbeing and our own preservation, the second inspires in us a natural aversion to seeing any other sentient being perish or suffer, especially if it is one of our own kind." (pg 70)
Sounds noble and compassionate but I have a big problem with this from the man who sent his children off to an orphanage. I find as I read all these male writers that I keep having to ignore my feelings of outrage as a woman and remember the times they lived in - but there were opposing, more enlightened viewpoints out there. You have De Las Casas and other priests in the 1500s realizing that what the Spaniards were doing in the Americas was wrong and when you get Mary Wollstonecraft realizing that the lot of women was wrong (and also being shocked by what happened to the revolution in France) and also realizing in the 1700s that if man kept cultivating the earth and reproducing and spreading out that eventually the earth would be overrun and used up, as opposed to Rousseau's anthropocentric view that
"Nature wishes us to have children because the earth produces enough to feed everybody". Similarly when you get people speaking about sentient beings and about people being horrified by the slaughter of hundreds of elephants in the years BCE, or being horrified by poor people brutalizing their animals then how can you get someone as intelligent and thoughtful as Descartes, thinking that animals didn't feel and were just machines?
These two natural principles, Rousseau writes are
"Nature wishes us to have children because the earth produces enough to feed everybody". Similarly when you get people speaking about sentient beings and about people being horrified by the slaughter of hundreds of elephants in the years BCE, or being horrified by poor people brutalizing their animals then how can you get someone as intelligent and thoughtful as Descartes, thinking that animals didn't feel and were just machines?
These two natural principles, Rousseau writes are
"rules that reason is afterwards forced to re-establish on other foundations, when as a result of successive developments, reason has succeeded in suffocating nature". (pg 70)
Regarding animals, Rousseau says
"animals, being devoid of intellect and free will, cannot recognize [natural] law, yet by reason of the fact they share [...] in our nature by virtue of the sensitivity with which they are endowed, it follows that animals ought to have a share in natural right, and that men are bound by a certain form of duty towards them." (pg 71).
Rousseau goes on to write that he is bound to treat other men well not because they are rational but because they are sentient.
"and a quality which is common to beast and man ought to give the former the right not to be uselessly ill-treated by the latter."
I find it very interesting that in the 1700s, pre-Origin of the Species, Rousseau begins by speaking of an evolutionary-type process, referring to starting in "the animal system what man must have been at the beginning in order to become in the end what he is." (pg 81) though apparently the idea of primitive man was around for awhile.
Writing about early "natural man", Rousseau contrasts a survival of the fittest system where only the strong survive, comparing it favourably with Sparta where [apparently] weak children were left out to die, as opposed to his society where "the state, by making children a burden to their fathers, kills them indiscriminately before they are born." (pg 82)
Well I guess he showed society by dumping his children back on society's hands. Take that society!!
[Note: Rousseau has his justification in his Reveries for why he sent his children to the Foundlings Home, for me it makes his actions even worse).
[Note: Rousseau has his justification in his Reveries for why he sent his children to the Foundlings Home, for me it makes his actions even worse).
He has an idealized view of "natural man", early man, the "noble savage" (though apparently Rousseau never used that term himself), as being healthy with no illnesses except old age (he also feels this way about animals), not realizing that if you live longer (something more difficult to achieve 'in the wild') then man and animals will have many more illnesses and infirmities - not to say that much of the illnesses we deal with today are not caused by civilization and "progress". Rousseau also idealizes life in the wild, stating that wild animals don't tend to attack natural men.
Rousseau speculates on whether man is different from animals not because he can reason but because he has free will (back to the Epicureans' swerve). He also adds in man's "faculty for self-improvement" (pg 88) as a point of difference.
"human understanding owes much to the passions which, by common consent, also owe much to it. It is by the activity of the passions that our reason improves itself; we seek to know only because we desire to enjoy" pg 89
Rousseau has nascent man starting to form groups and singing and dancing as they gathered under trees. He suggests that inequality started when someone danced better , or was more handsome. I think it would be more likely that someone was a better hunter or someone's mate was barren and people showed preferences or wanted what someone else had - someone built a better hut, had more skins to keep warm , was better at finding berries and which mushrooms weren't poisonous, others had tempers or were more aggressive, bigger, stronger. So many potential sources for inequalities to start. He states that savage man was peaceable , "restrained by natural pity" (pg 115) and quotes Locke "Where there is no property, there is no injury". Well...where there is food, territory and mating, there is the perception of property and the potential for conflict and injury - animal or man, civilized or natural.
Rousseau suggests that there is no true 'right of conquest' as any capitulations "have no basis but violence and are therefore ispo facto null and void" pg 123
He states that "freedom is the noblest of man's faculties" pg 127
It does make me want to read the Social Contract.
He writes about various types of government: monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. He makes a case for divine will being the ultimate authority and power-granting entity. As to who is appointed to power, "where wealth did not conquer, preference was accorded to merit" and/or to age "which gives experience in business and gravity in deliberations" pg 130
This somewhat ideal state soon deteriorates into factions, corruption, hereditary positions and privilege etc. aka Inequality.
Rousseau describes a[n inevitable] progression through stages where measures are taken to provide for the social good and these inevitably degenerate into inequality as society becomes divided into rich & poor or strong & weak. He mentions the "progress of inequality in these different revolutions" and despite the fact he was writing in the 18th century, this has borne true in subsequent revolutions, too numerous to enumerate (American, French, Russian, Communist China, South Africa etc).
"the vices which make social institutions necessary are the same vices which make the abuse of those institutions inevitable." pg 130
Rousseau describes the 4 differences that lead to inequality (pg 132):
'universal desire for reputation, honnours and promotion" turns all men into competitors and is "responsible for what is best and what is worst among men [...] for a multitude of bad things and a few very good things". The Penguin text we're reading has endnotes that include some marginalia written Voltaire (not a Rousseau fan) in his copy of the book. In this section he writes "Ape of Diogenes, how you condemn yourself."
Rousseau ends by writing about how natural man, or his nearest aproximation, savage man (such as a Carib native) would not be able to understand the things that civilized man values such as power, the esteem of others (whom they may not even esteem), the busyness doing non-essential things, the stress (Rousseau doesn't use this word but describes this). He characterizes civilized men as those "who know how to be happy and satisfied with themselves on the testimony of others rather than than on their own." pg 136 "The savage lives within himself; social man lives always outside himself."
In his notes, Rousseau goes further lamenting many of society's ills and and has a warning for people who think they can avoid these ills by retreating to nature, living more simply, avoiding these excesses and negative desires such as greed and renown, "renouncing [civilization]'s enlightenment in order to renounce its vices." pg 153, Note I.
He has some interesting points about progress which hold true today. He is also likely right (in my limited view of this) about the inevitable cycles societies will go through due to innate tendencies in man. I'm not sure that we know yet whether we can perfect this more, we're still working on it.
He states that "freedom is the noblest of man's faculties" pg 127
"The establishment of the body politic as a true contract between a people and the chiefs that people choose, a contract whereby both parties commit themselves to observe the laws which are stipulated in its articles and which form the bonds of their union." pg 128Earlier he had commented that "it would be difficult to prove the validity of any contract which bound only one of the parties, which gave everything to one and nothing to the other, and which could only be prejudicial to one contractant." pg 127
It does make me want to read the Social Contract.
He writes about various types of government: monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. He makes a case for divine will being the ultimate authority and power-granting entity. As to who is appointed to power, "where wealth did not conquer, preference was accorded to merit" and/or to age "which gives experience in business and gravity in deliberations" pg 130
This somewhat ideal state soon deteriorates into factions, corruption, hereditary positions and privilege etc. aka Inequality.
Rousseau describes a[n inevitable] progression through stages where measures are taken to provide for the social good and these inevitably degenerate into inequality as society becomes divided into rich & poor or strong & weak. He mentions the "progress of inequality in these different revolutions" and despite the fact he was writing in the 18th century, this has borne true in subsequent revolutions, too numerous to enumerate (American, French, Russian, Communist China, South Africa etc).
"the vices which make social institutions necessary are the same vices which make the abuse of those institutions inevitable." pg 130
Rousseau describes the 4 differences that lead to inequality (pg 132):
- wealth
- rank (or nobility)
- power
- personal merit
'universal desire for reputation, honnours and promotion" turns all men into competitors and is "responsible for what is best and what is worst among men [...] for a multitude of bad things and a few very good things". The Penguin text we're reading has endnotes that include some marginalia written Voltaire (not a Rousseau fan) in his copy of the book. In this section he writes "Ape of Diogenes, how you condemn yourself."
Rousseau ends by writing about how natural man, or his nearest aproximation, savage man (such as a Carib native) would not be able to understand the things that civilized man values such as power, the esteem of others (whom they may not even esteem), the busyness doing non-essential things, the stress (Rousseau doesn't use this word but describes this). He characterizes civilized men as those "who know how to be happy and satisfied with themselves on the testimony of others rather than than on their own." pg 136 "The savage lives within himself; social man lives always outside himself."
In his notes, Rousseau goes further lamenting many of society's ills and and has a warning for people who think they can avoid these ills by retreating to nature, living more simply, avoiding these excesses and negative desires such as greed and renown, "renouncing [civilization]'s enlightenment in order to renounce its vices." pg 153, Note I.
He has some interesting points about progress which hold true today. He is also likely right (in my limited view of this) about the inevitable cycles societies will go through due to innate tendencies in man. I'm not sure that we know yet whether we can perfect this more, we're still working on it.
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