Rousseau, A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality

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Can human society be held responsible for every man's evils? According to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his Discourse of the Origin of Inequality, the civilizing society has done nothing but enslaving people to needs, vices, or tyrants. But how could it be possible, as civilization has brought mankind, with the passing centuries, a peaceful way of life, apparently as egalitarian as it can be? For Thomas Hobbes, in Leviathan, man, in his natural state is looking for his own satisfaction, and having no knowing of the others, is inevitably aggressive and violent towards them: ?homo homini lupus?1. Life in community seems an anti-natural process, which needs efforts to be established and, above all, conserved. This way, according to Kant in his Perpetual Peace, civil societies have to be built on rigorous laws which can prevent their citizens from the ?the stream of those hostile passions?2. Why would people have made so many efforts to create a structure which is the source of man's unhappiness whereas it had the contrary for goal? And, this way, why has civilization lasted so long?

Extraits

[...] Today, the question is not to wonder whether societies are at the origin of inequalities, and have to disappear. It's about finding a solution to those inequalities as well between people in a country as between countries around the world, because, Rousseau is right about it: they are the origin of unhappiness. Man began by being an animal, he became a member of a community, a citizen of a country, let's try to make it, as Kant would have said, world citizen” Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes, http://radicalacademy.com/philfthomashobbes.htm, consulted on 11/05/ Perpetual Peace, Immanuel Kant, http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/kant/kant1.htm, consulted on 11/05/ http://www.memo.fr/Dossier.asp?ID= consulted on 11/05/05. [...]

[...] Indeed, Rousseau argues that pity is a natural feeling which is a brake to the development of self-love, and “contributes to the mutual preservation of the whole species”. For him, reason, reflection and philosophy take man away from his natural instincts such as pity, which have had a large role in the conservation of the human race. As destructive feelings and passions such as jealousy, vengeance, property, and sometimes, love, are the consequences of life in community, Rousseau concludes this first part by saying that the savage man, who wasn't subject to passions, who had no material needs, and no relations with others, “remained in a state of childhood”. [...]

[...] In fact, even though the reflection of Rousseau is concerning unhappiness of man in society in a way, it can be extended to communities: how could a society assure the safety and happiness of its citizen if it depends on the relations with other society? Envy, jealousy, property, have been extended from single beings to communities. Could societies have been created unconsciously by men to appease their instinctive needs of possession and domination at a large scale? It could, but according to Rousseau, those needs come precisely from life in society. If we follow this way, Rousseau would be wrong, and man would have been instinctively attracted by those needs of domination. [...]

[...] But Rousseau, despite this state, which had for only laws the ones of vengeance, thinks it was real youth of the word”. Indeed, for him, what followed, like the dependence of one on another, or property, has lead to the “decrepitness of the species”. To conclude, the creation of one society has forced the creation of the others to face it, and that's how mankind has succeeded in creating his own unhappiness; the one that makes him dependant on the others. [...]

[...] It is the century of the Lights, of religious and political criticism, where people start to speak about happiness on Earth. The rationalist movement should not however hide another movement, which deals with dream and imagination: sensitivity is another manner of understanding the world. Rousseau is the main representative of this movement, preaching the respect of nature warning of the dangers of the “theory of progress”3. Rousseau refuses to consider the existence of a natural inequality. He's seeking the source of social inequality, created by the human race. [...]