An unbroken horse erects his mane, paws the ground and starts back impetuously at the sight of the bridle; while one which is properly trained suffers patiently even whip and spur: so savage man will not bend his neck to the yoke to which civilised man submits without a murmur, but prefers the most turbulent state of liberty to the most peaceful slavery.
Here Rousseau stresses a point in support of his theory that people entered into society in order to protect their property, not because the strong forced the weak. Freedom cannot be given away, it is not a possession like other possessions. Beings that are naturally free will refuse servitude even to the point of death. Rousseau contrasts this against modern man, who is so accustomed to servitude that he doesn't even know that he is not free.
There is, I feel, an age at which the individual man would wish to stop: you are about to inquire about the age at which you would have liked your whole species to stand still. Discontented with your present state, for reasons which threaten your unfortunate descendants with still greater discontent, you will perhaps wish it were in your power to go back; and this feeling should be a panegyric on your first ancestors, a criticism of your contemporaries, and a terror to the unfortunates who will come after you.
This quote describes the state of nature that Rousseau introduces in the first part. Here he stresses the contrast of this time to modern civilization, stresses the idyllic qualities of that state—not that it was totally peaceful, but that it was free, and therefore happy—and advances his view of the history of humankind as a progressive degradation and loss of freedom.
However, even if the difficulties attending all these questions should still leave room for difference in this respect between men and brutes, there is another very specific quality which distinguishes them, and which will admit of no dispute. This is the faculty of self-improvement, which, by the help of circumstances, gradually develops all the rest of our faculties, and is inherent in the species as in the individual: whereas a brute is, at the end of a few months, all he will ever be during his whole life, and his species, at the end of a thousand years, exactly what it was the first year of that thousand. [...]
It would be melancholy, were we forced to admit that this distinctive and almost unlimited faculty is the source of all human misfortunes; that it is this which, in time, draws man out of his original state, in which he would have spent his days insensibly in peace and innocence; that it is this faculty, which, successively producing in different ages his discoveries and his errors, his vices and his virtues, makes him at length a tyrant both over himself and over nature.
Rousseau stresses that what distinguishes human beings from animals is that humans possess the faculty of self-perfection. Human beings have an instinctive drive to perfect themselves, animals don't. Thus human beings change over time, while animals remain the same. This view clashes with the religious belief that man is born in sin and cannot be perfected, except by God; at the same time, it suggests that progress is, in fact, the cause of man's unhappiness, and that without self-perfection he would still live in a state of nature that, for all of its hardships, was nonetheless free and therefore happy. Rousseau regards all social progress skeptically, a view that flew sharply in the face of the 18th century Enlightenment in France.
That man in the state of nature is both strong and dependent involves two contrary suppositions. Man is weak when he is dependent, and is his own master before he comes to be strong. Hobbes did not reflect that the same cause, which prevents a savage from making use of his reason, as our jurists hold, prevents him also from abusing his faculties, as Hobbes himself allows: so that it may be justly said that savages are not bad merely because they do not know what it is to be good: for it is neither the development of the understanding nor the restraint of law that hinders them from doing ill; but the peacefulness of their passions, and their ignorance of vice: tanto plus in illis proficit vitiorum ignoratio, quam in his cognitio virtutis.
Rousseau argues against Hobbes's view that man is born naturally evil—that if his mother was too long in giving him his breast, he would beat her, that if he wanted someone else's possessions, he just took them without thinking about the consequences. Original man had no sense of virtue, Rousseau agrees, since that is a social construction. Because he was strong, he had no need of other people's possessions, he simply secured his own and left others be. This quote is often misread as suggesting that Rousseau believes that natural man is naturally virtuous.
Let any one inform us what produced the swarms of barbarians, who overran Europe, Asia and Africa for so many ages. Was their prodigious increase due to their industry and arts, to the wisdom of their laws, or to the excellence of their political system? Let the learned tell us why, instead of multiplying to such a degree, these fierce and brutal men, without sense or science, without education, without restraint, did not destroy each other hourly in quarrelling over the productions of their fields and woods. Let them tell us how these wretches could have the presumption to oppose such clever people as we were, so well trained in military discipline, and possessed of such excellent laws and institutions: and why, since society has been brought to perfection in northern countries, and so much pains taken to instruct their inhabitants in their social duties and in the art of living happily and peaceably together, we see them no longer produce such numberless hosts as they used once to send forth to be the plague and terror of other nations. I fear some one may at last answer me by saying, that all these fine things, arts, sciences and laws, were wisely invented by men, as a salutary plague, to prevent the too great multiplication of mankind, lest the world, which was given us for a habitation, should in time be too small for its inhabitants.
Rousseau closes by remembering the downfall of the Roman empire, overrun by barbarians. If Rome, with all of its cultural advancements, and all of its pleasures, was so great, how could it have been overrun so easily by simple societies like the "barbarian" ones? The answer is that perhaps the lifestyle of the barbarian, which is freer and more independent, and more scornful of window-dressing like philosophy and science, is perhaps the happier and more authentic one. Here, Rousseau's reader would have seen an unmistakable indictment of contemporary French society, and a critique of the Enlightenment, a philosophical and social movement that stressed education as a form of liberation. Our goal should not be to become more intelligent, Rousseau says, but to live more freely, more naturally, more authentically.
Mandeville well knew that, in spite of all their morality, men would have never been better than monsters, had not nature bestowed on them a sense of compassion, to aid their reason: but he did not see that from this quality alone flow all those social virtues, of which he denied man the possession. But what is generosity, clemency or humanity but compassion applied to the weak, to the guilty, or to mankind in general? Even benevolence and friendship are, if we judge rightly, only the effects of compassion, constantly set upon a particular object: for how is it different to wish that another person may not suffer pain and uneasiness and to wish him happy?
Rousseau stresses that all of man's virtues stem from the natural feeling of pity. In this way, Rousseau cuts against the Enlightenment idea that virtue is something that man gains in society, because he learns to be reasonable, and reason checks his impulses. In fact, man has a natural pull towards virtue, or at least towards pitying the suffering of others, that social institutions ultimately dull. Without this pull, there could be no society, since men would not want to give up the freedom of their independence.
The very study of the original man, of his real wants, and the fundamental principles of his duty, is besides the only proper method we can adopt to obviate all the difficulties which the origin of moral inequality presents, on the true foundations of the body politic, on the reciprocal rights of its members, and on many other similar topics equally important and obscure.
Here Rousseau describes his methodology for the Discourse on Inequality. His goal will be to describe man as he really is, or once was, in order to distinguish which aspects of his being have been drilled into him by society, and are therefore illegitimate. Rousseau locates these not in reason, but in two fundamental feelings, which he thinks underlie everything that man has been taught by society: the instinct for self-preservation, and the feeling of pity when he sees other people suffer.
With regard to paternal authority, from which some writers have derived absolute government and all society, it is enough, without going back to the contrary arguments of Locke and Sidney, to remark that nothing on earth can be further from the ferocious spirit of despotism than the mildness of that authority which looks more to the advantage of him who obeys than to that of him who commands; that, by the law of nature, the father is the child's master no longer than his help is necessary; that from that time they are both equal, the son being perfectly independent of the father, and owing him only respect and not obedience.
Rousseau rejects the idea that the father can be the basis for all authority. (A century and a half later, this will be a central view of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud's anthropological writings.) Instead, he believes that the father derives his authority from the tyrant. Since the earliest families had no real need of one another, since human beings were by nature independent, the very idea of fatherhood, as a kind of guidance and forced dependency, would have had to derive from government, instead of the other way around. Given Rousseau's mention of his own father in the dedication to the Discourse, it is not going too far to sense some of Rousseau's ambivalent feelings towards his own father here.
The different forms of government owe their origin to the differing degrees of inequality which existed between individuals at the time of their institution. If there happened to be any one man among them pre-eminent in power, virtue, riches or personal influence, he became sole magistrate, and the State assumed the form of monarchy. If several, nearly equal in point of eminence, stood above the rest, they were elected jointly, and formed an aristocracy. Again, among a people who had deviated less from a state of nature, and between whose fortune or talents there was less disproportion, the supreme administration was retained in common, and a democracy was formed.
Rousseau draws a direct connection between different kinds of inequality and different kinds of government. He implicitly rejects the idea that one form would have succeeded somewhere because it was more sensible than others, or because it was ordained by God. (In France, Louis XIV, who was king just before Rousseau was born, claimed to have been appointed by God.) Simply, societies where one person had much more than others became monarchies; those where a few had much more became aristocracies; and those where distribution was more or less equal became democracies. It follows that all forms of government are more or less illegitimate.
That men are actually wicked, a sad and continual experience of them proves beyond doubt: but, all the same, I think I have shown that man is naturally good. What then can have depraved him to such an extent, except the changes that have happened in his constitution, the advances he has made, and the knowledge he has acquired? We may admire human society as much as we please; it will be none the less true that it necessarily leads men to hate each other in proportion as their interests clash, and to do one another apparent services, while they are really doing every imaginable mischief.
Rousseau makes the case that man was more or less good in the state of nature. Why then is there so much evil in the world? Rousseau blames the process of civilization itself, which rather than educating people only corrupts them further. It gives them cause to do evil, and it rewards them for it. This passage, echoing as it did his provocative First Discourse, would make Rousseau's reputation in Europe until the present day. It resonated strongly with revolutionaries and reformers who believed that if the structure of society could be changed, then people's "natures" such as they were would change as well.
