About the author
Genevan philosopher, composer, and novelist (1712–1778), the most disruptive thinker of the French Enlightenment and a decisive influence on the French Revolution and on Romanticism. Rousseau's insistence that humans are naturally good and corrupted by society, and his theory of the general will in The Social Contract, made him both the patron saint of radical democracy and a perennial target for liberals who feared where his ideas led.
Synopsis
Written for a 1754 prize essay, Rousseau imagines humanity in a 'state of nature' — solitary, self-sufficient, moved by self-preservation and pity, and largely equal. He then narrates a conjectural history of how cooperation, agriculture, metallurgy, and above all the enclosure of land produced property, dependence, vanity (amour-propre), and finally a political order that locks unjust inequality into law. The Discourse is less anthropology than a moral indictment of civilisation's trajectory.
Quote to notice
Direct quote · Public domain“The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying 'This is mine,' and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.”
Rousseau locates the origin of injustice in a single act of appropriation that everyone else was credulous enough to accept. By making property the root of inequality rather than its remedy, he reframes the entire question of justice: the social order we treat as natural is, on his telling, a historical theft dressed up as law.
To avoid a bubble
Pair with Locke's Second Treatise, which defends property as a natural pre-political right, and with Smith or Hayek for the argument that the very commercial inequality Rousseau laments is the engine of prosperity and freedom.
Reading note
Read the dedication and Part I for the state of nature, but the heart is Part II's account of how property and dependence corrupt an originally free creature. Hold Rousseau's conjectural history to the same skeptical standard he applies to others — and read Locke first or alongside to feel the force of the disagreement.
Best paired with
John Locke, Second Treatise of Government; Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations.