Jean Jacques Rousseau Discourse On Inequality Summary

Jean-Jacques Rousseau describes the origins of humanity in his book, Discourse on Inequality. Although Rousseau takes a hypothetical approach rather than a factual, historical approach to surmising the history of humankind, he effectively analyzes the foundations of human inequality and whether it is sanctioned by natural law. Throughout the book, Rousseau strives to outline the history of human development, beginning from the state of nature to the establishment of civil society in order to determine the origins and consequences of inequality and to question the legitimacy of political institutions.

In the state of nature, physical inequality is the only type of inequality that exists. Moral or political inequality consists of privileges

Following the development of language and the increasing prevalence of human interaction, people became self-conscious and concerned with reputation, leading to vanity and the desire for prestige. In the state of nature, there was no desire to impress or to gain power; however, the desire for power emerged from the desire to impress others as sociality increased. As sociality continued to increase, people began to gather in groups to participate in singing and dancing together, and people began observing the skills of those around them. The person who demonstrated the greatest skills in singing, dancing, or any other activity that was important to the group earned prestige and admiration, characterizing the first step towards inequality. The invention of agriculture then facilitated the process of dividing land because labor provided the grower with the right to the crops of the land, thereby providing the grower with the land itself, leading to the emergence of private property. This institution of private property is closely associated with vanity as people developed the desire for property in order to display that they possessed more land than others around them. When property was introduced, labor became required, and this competition between people

The state uses force to coerce people into obeying laws and threatens to punish those who refuse to obey these laws. Rousseau believed that life for people was free and equal in the state of nature; however, with the introduction of property and laws, individual freedom and rights were surrendered to the “general will,” which is the will of the people as a community. Therefore, through the Social Contract, the state was created to “promote equality,” even though in reality, it was created to protect those with private property to ensure that they maintain their wealth and prestige. According to Rousseau, political institutions thereby “put new shackles on the weak and gave new powers to the rich” (Rousseau 69). Political philosophy was used to persuade people into believing that the state was necessary to promote equality, especially targeting those who were weaker as the weak believed they were securing their liberty. Although Thomas Hobbes, another influential philosopher, argued that life in the state of nature is nasty, brutish, and short due to the lack of centralized government and social order, Rousseau argues the opposite, believing that the state and political philosophy itself promoted inequality through the