Book: Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men

Context and Aim

Rousseau addresses a prize question from the Academy of Dijon: what is the origin of inequality among humans, and is it authorized by natural law? He distinguishes two kinds of inequality. Natural or physical inequality arises from differences in age, health, strength, or mind. Moral or political inequality is established by convention and depends on privileges enjoyed by some to the detriment of others. The inquiry seeks to trace how the second kind, now dominant in civil society, could have emerged from a condition where it scarcely existed.

Method and State of Nature

Rousseau proceeds by a conjectural history rather than archival evidence, stripping humans of all social attributes to imagine their earliest condition. In the state of nature, humans are solitary, robust, and guided chiefly by self-preservation and pity. They have few needs, little foresight, and no settled dependence on others; language and reason are rudimentary. Against Hobbes, the natural condition is not a war of all against all. Because natural pity restrains aggression and needs are simple, conflict is rare and limited. Inequality here is minimal and largely physical, producing no authority or subordination.

From Independence to Comparison

Gradually, accidents and innovations draw humans together. Huts appear, families form, and people begin to live in small groups. Social contact brings leisure, nascent languages, and the first comparisons. A new passion takes shape: amour-propre, a concern for esteem and relative standing, distinct from the instinctive self-love that seeks mere preservation. This stage yields some conveniences and gentle sentiments, yet it also plants the seeds of rivalry, shame, and vanity. Still, dependence remains limited and inequality modest.

Agriculture, Metallurgy, and the Birth of Property

A decisive revolution occurs with metallurgy and agriculture. Tools and cultivation multiply productivity, divide labor, and tether livelihood to land and skill. Surplus, storage, and exchange create durable differences of possessions and power. The first enclosure, someone fencing a plot and persuading others to respect the claim, marks the origin of civil society. Once people count on others’ recognition for the security of their goods, inequality becomes structural. Dependence grows: the weak need the strong, the poor serve the rich, and mutual aid turns into subordination.

Law, Magistrates, and Despotism

Conflict over property and rank invites a political settlement. Laws and magistrates are instituted, ostensibly to protect all, but in practice to consolidate the advantages of possessors. The social pact, far from restoring natural equality, legitimates prior usurpations. Rousseau sketches a sequence: the establishment of laws to secure property, the creation of magistracies to enforce them, and the slide from legitimate authority to usurpation and finally despotism. As power centralizes, moral inequality, wealth, honor, and command, dwarfs the natural differences that once prevailed.

Human Nature, Perfectibility, and Morality

The engine of this transformation is human perfectibility, the capacity to develop new faculties and desires. Perfectibility makes language, arts, and institutions possible, but it also multiplies needs, refines comparisons, and inflames amour-propre. Natural pity, strong in the state of nature, weakens amid competition and dependence. Civilized man gains knowledge and refinements while losing independence, goodness, and genuine freedom. The more social life prizes opinion, the more people live by appearances and chains of reciprocity that mask domination.

Assessment and Afterthought

Rousseau does not argue that one can return to the primitive state, nor that natural law endorses entrenched political inequality. He exposes the contingent path by which convention magnified slight natural differences into vast hierarchies and warns that institutions often sanctify injustice under the guise of order. The Discourse sets the stage for a search for legitimate political arrangements grounded in consensual authority, anticipating questions later treated in The Social Contract, while offering a powerful diagnosis of how prosperity and progress can corrode equality and moral health.