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Discourse Upon the Origin and Foundation of Inequality Among Mankind

Jean-Jacques Rousseau · philosophical discourse, 1755·2 hrs in the original·original at Project Gutenberg
The 30‑second version2 hrs → 50 sec
  • He splits inequality into two separate kinds. He names natural inequality (age, health, strength) and moral inequality, which depends on convention and "the common consent of mankind." He insists his account of the state of nature is not history but "hypothetical and conditional reasonings."
  • Natural man's body was hardened, not designed. He compares primitive man's upbringing to Sparta: nature "renders strong and robust, and destroys all the rest." He argues a naked, unarmed savage would beat a civilized man stripped of his tools.
  • Vanity is born at a tree, not a war. Families start gathering to sing and dance, and "he who sings or dances best... comes to be the most respected." Rousseau calls this moment, not violence, "the first step towards inequality, and at the same time towards vice."
  • He names one era as humanity's happiest. The stage before metallurgy and agriculture, he writes, held "a just mean between the indolence of the primitive state and the petulant activity of self-love" and was "the happiest and most durable epoch" of the species.
  • One sentence invents property, war, and murder. "The first man who, after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his head to say, 'This is mine'... was the true founder of civil society." He blames the pairing of iron and corn, not gold or silver, for civilizing and ruining mankind.
  • He ends on hunger beside luxury. The closing line indicts a world where "a handful of men should be ready to choke with superfluities, while the famished multitude want the commonest necessaries of life."
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•Why it earns a slot

Why it earns a slot: it is the essay that handed the French Revolution its grievance, tracing every chain on man back to one sentence spoken over a fence.

Rousseau argues that man was born free and equal, and it was property, not nature, that shackled him.

This distillation is written from the freely available original, which is always the better read when you have the time: Project Gutenberg.

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