Summary
Given the state of nature described in Part One, Rousseau now turns his attention to how it was possible for society to come about. At first, man had everything he needed, and thought only of his own preservation. In order to preserve himself, to compete with animals for food, he had to develop his body. Gradually, men learned to overcome their environment, too, by fishing and hunting. Soon they learned to make fire. His natural precautions taught him to compare things and to designate them as being large or small, fast or slow. This capacity to learn gave man further control over nature. He learned to trap animals, and fight other predators.
By coming into contact with other human beings, he gradually saw that they behaved much as he did. Their common interest brought human beings into moments of free association where they worked together, with no lasting obligations. Each person was acting in their own self-interest, either using their strength or intelligence. Gradually, men learned mutual commitment—if they were hunting a deer together, each person knew that they had to do their particular task.
This sort of association only required a very simple language. Soon men began to make tools, and with them came the first fights, which were quickly resolved by the strongest. Common habitation brought about the family, which in turn created conjugal love and paternal love. This created the first differences in gender—women watched the hut, men went out to hunt. This made women weaker. This arrangement also created the first leisure time, which created the first unhappiness for human beings, since they were no longer able to immediately satisfy their desires.
Then men came together into large bands, and eventually nations, united by common customs and features. This creates the first opportunity for socializing, the first opportunity for love, and with it, the first jealousies. Gradually, bonds are tightened, song and dance emerge. Everyone looked at others, and felt himself looked at, and public esteem was born. This was the first source of inequality, and the first vice. As soon as human beings began to value one another, the first struggles over that value arose, and the first crime. Rousseau argues that most of the "primitive" tribes with which civilized nations have had contact are, currently, at this stage.
With society came the birth of morality—laws common to all individuals. And with them came punishment, as a deterrent. Rousseau believes that this state was probably the most comfortable for man, since he had the advantages that came with communal living, while still having the relative freedom of self-reliance. For a time, relative equality existed. But the moment that a human being realized that it was better to have supplies for two than supplies for one, or that his work was easier when he had others assist him with it, inequality was born.
Then came the discovery of iron, and the cultivation of wheat. Rousseau argues that these more or less began to form society as we know it, leading to the first division of labor. Some men smelted the iron and forged it; others grew food. More people worked, so fewer were available to gather food, but all needed to eat. The cultivation of land led to the first property, since it is the institution of labor, of tilling soil, that makes man feel that he has a right to the wheat that grows from it.
Here, the strongest did the most work, while the most intelligent found ways to work less. The farmer needs iron, and the blacksmith needs wheat, and while they exchange their goods, the farmer works substantially more than the blacksmith.
At this point, the human race as we know it begins. Not only are there inequalities of wealth and power, inequalities of luck, but also inequalities of esteem, and so men were forced to either affect appearances, to seem better than they were, or to acquire esteem some other way. It is at this point that the first cleft between appearance and being opened. By virtue of his new needs, man is subjugated to the esteem and the practical abilities of his fellow people. As a master, he needs workers; as a slave, he needs masters to protect him.
Wealth initially consisted of land and livestock. When the land was covered, and inheritances grew, soon people could only acquire at the expense of someone else. It is at this point that the state of war of all against all described by Hobbes in fact broke out.
Now, in order to preserve their own property, and to bring humanity back from the brink of ruin, the law was invented. Now, the wealthy could use the strength of those who were attacking them to defend them. The wealthy claimed that the purpose of the law is to save the weak from oppression and to restrain the ambitious, when in fact it is to protect their own possessions. The poor, tired of the mutual fighting, let themselves be taken in. This development gave rise to societies, that once again began to war amongst each, other just as individuals had.
Rousseau distinguishes this theory of the origin of the law from two other prevalent theories: the conquest of the rich, and the uniting of the poor to mutually protect themselves. In the first case, conquest is so openly based on the use of force that it could not possibly be the basis for the law, which is based on a mutually recognized right. In the second case, the poor had nothing to gain by inventing the concept of law, since they had no property to protect.
The first forms of government did not have a constant or regular form. The first governments only dealt with crises as they came up, since they had no guiding philosophy. One generation just added its customs to those of the generation before, instead of organizing the whole set of rules into a coherent system. Laws were easy to break and punishments were easy to avoid.
Rousseau considers the authority of the father as the basis for legal authority. Rousseau argues that the despotism that characterized early government could not have been more different than the tenderness of paternal love. Parents look out for their children; kings look out for themselves. By the same token, a father can’t demand the love of his children, while this is exactly what kings do to their subjects.
It is more likely, Rousseau concludes, that things are the other way around: paternal authority derives from the law. The perverted form of modern fatherhood, where fathers dangle the promise of an inheritance to make their children follow their orders, is patterned after the way rulers behave.
Rousseau also rejects the notion that men might have voluntarily given their freedom to a tyrant. It is not possible to give away one’s freedom, Rousseau says, because it is a natural possession, the only possession that actual matters, unlike property. To give away one’s liberty would be to give away one’s very existence. He concludes that tyranny gradually grew out of the law, instead of the law defending tyranny.
The genius of a society of laws, Rousseau argues, is that those enforcing the law, the magistrates, had the greatest interest in doing so effectively, because if they failed, they would lose the power that came with their position. The laws supposedly express the general will of the people, and the government is established as an authority that holds everybody to the law, which Rousseau compares to a contract. Just as contracts would be worthless if there weren’t a law to enforce make sure both parties held up their end of it, without a government to make sure people followed the law, the law would be worthless. That, according to Rousseau, is the origin of all government.
All magistrates were initially elected based on wealth, general wisdom, or age. This gave rise to plotting and squabbling, and the first civil wars. Leaders became accustomed to power, and passed it onto their children, while the people became accustomed to the peace that came with servitude. Thus, the history of inequality begins with the establishment of the law, continues with the creation of government, and is finished when the first governments lost their legitimacy and became arbitrary.
Laws, Rousseau argues, have no civilizing effect. If laws could legitimately change people, they would be completely unnecessary. Instead, they just restrain them. People only submit to them willingly because they seek, in some measure, to command themselves. True happiness would consist in neither submitting nor commanding.
Rousseau divides inequality into four categories: wealth, nobility, power, and personal merit. Ultimately, he concludes that all of these are traced back to wealth, since it purchases the other three. Generally, the wealthier a society is, the more corrupt it is, and the more inequality exists in it. Thus the general desire for wealth creates chaos and, even in the most stable societies, creates divisions between people, and returns us to a degraded parody of the state of nature: all human beings are once again equal, because all are nothing. The constant struggle for prestige gradually brings about psychological changes in human beings, because if they truly wanted to be free, such a society could not exist.
The end result is that man in the state of nature and man as he exists today have only the most tenuous relationship to one another. What would make the one happy makes the other miserable, and vice versa. Inequality, in turn, corrodes values, because deep down we know that the society to which we belong is not truly legitimate. Thus we can be honorable without being truly virtuous, we can be masters of philosophy without being truly wise, and while we have many different pleasures on offer, none of them truly bring us happiness. Therefore, inequality is not sanctioned by nature, but is in fact a perversion of it.
Analysis
The crucial parts of Rousseau’s Discourse can be easy to overlook, because Rousseau claims, on the one hand, to be unfolding a commonly acknowledged narrative about the history of humanity, while, on the other hand, claiming that the order of events and the development of human institutions can be figured out rationally. To the modern reader, it can be difficult to tell exactly what Rousseau’s contribution is, and why it was so important to his time.
As a bit of context, we might reflect that Rousseau wrote this essay for an essay contest—though, because it grew quite long, he didn’t finish it in time, and it was published as a standalone pamphlet. The winner was an abbé, a priest in the church, who gave what most people in Rousseau’s time would have regarded as the obvious answer to the question: people are unequal because God made them that way, and wants them to stay that way.
Rousseau, by contrast, offers a very distinct picture of human development, one that moves by chance occurrences and violent upheavals. Earthquakes and storms force human beings together and separate them. These cataclysms create leaps forward in human development.
Nonetheless, now that we have read the two parts, it’s important to take note of the religious flavor of Rousseau’s analysis of human life. The literary theorist Erich Auerbach said of Rousseau that the philosopher was “constitutionally Christian”—that, while Rousseau could not intellectually accept the existence of God, many of the emotional appeals of Christianity resonated with him. The first part of Rousseau’s Discourse has the unmistakable flavor of a lost paradise. Human history only truly starts when we are expelled from this Eden. It is the history of corruption, resulting in the world of today, one that is unnatural and wrong.
It is a common misperception that Rousseau wants to return to this state of nature—in fact, as the philosopher Ernst Cassirer argues, the “paradise” that Rousseau envisions at the end of this history is the ideal society described in The Social Contract. This three-part, quasi-Christian historiography of an ideal past, a fall, and a redemption on earth would be hugely influential for the German philosopher G.W.F Hegel, and for Karl Marx.
Like Karl Marx, Rousseau also places significant store by the division of labor, and the result that this has on human social development. Society, and the differentiation of roles within it, is created by dividing complex tasks into individual roles that people perform. This places human beings in a position where they can no longer survive independently, but rely on one another for subsistence. The history of property, then, emerges from labor, in that as one labors, one feels that one has a right to the products of one’s own labor, rather than property being a natural, God-given right. The division of labor, in its turn, produces class differences, and these produce conflict. Society is created to address these conflicts to keep people from envying one another’s property and fighting over it.
What follows is the development of laws and systems of government, the general overview of which Rousseau borrows from Aristotle (democracy, monarchy, despotism). But, having read Part One, it follows that no system of government is truly legitimate, because each is only based on and compounds the inequality created by nature. Rousseau's argument would have a major impact on the social upheavals of the 18th and 19th century. For the major figures of the French Revolution, like Danton and Robespierre, it followed from Rousseau's argument that the only truly legitimate social arrangement is one in which human beings are equal and once again in control of their own destinies—as they were in the state of nature.
