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Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
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Part 2, Pages 160-181Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2, Pages 160-181 Summary
As soon as one political society formed, it became necessary for other human beings to organize themselves similarly since such a society had the organizational capacity to prey upon less developed peoples. Soon, people thought of themselves as members of their national community, weakening any lingering notion of common humanity. States then fought wars with one another and subjected their citizens to even greater misery, as they kill and die by the thousands merely at the whim of their leaders. At this point, Rousseau’s historical progression essentially stops, and he turns to compare his depiction of social development against alternative explanations. The first alternative is the strong rule by right of conquest. Rousseau finds this absurd, as there can be no question of right when people have been forcibly subjugated. Furthermore, the concept of strength and weakness does not reflect any natural disparity but rather derives from wealth and poverty. It is absurd to think that the poor would consent to a condition that exacerbated their condition.
Early government in all likelihood lacked a clear distinction between rulers and ruled since there was nothing like an administrative body capable of enforcing an expansive set of laws. Government began with general rules and gradually expanded its power to address new concerns. Therefore, it took a long time for an official class of rulers (Rousseau calls them “magistrates”) to appear. Rulers then depict themselves as having had their position from the beginning. Early human beings clung to their last vestiges of freedom, and it was only with long and subtle efforts that the rich were able to trick them into giving it up.
Another alternative explanation for rule is “paternal authority” (165), that government rules over people as a father does a household (or God over humanity as a whole). Rousseau does not find this to be any more convincing than the right of conquest, since fathers earn authority by keeping their children close. If they behave tyrannically, the children would leave, and the father would have no one to rule. Fathers keep their children close by showing them affection and equipping them for adulthood. They may have to exert discipline, but children accept it only when they know that the father has their best interests at heart. Rulers might claim that this is what they are doing, but that is simply another way to rationalize their oppression.
The rights of both conquest and paternal authority assume that the people must obey whereas the rulers can do as they please. Rousseau argues that the only legitimate way to create a society is through a contract, and a contract by definition must establish obligations for all parties—even King Louis XIV of France declared himself to be a subject of the laws. Nor can any valid contract entail the people completely giving up their freedoms, even if the rulers promise them security. Anyone can freely give away their possessions, which are purely conventional, but freedom is an intrinsic condition that no one can ever fully lose, even if they are unable to enjoy it. People believed that in entering the social contract they were preserving their freedom, and so the contract was made under false pretenses if their freedom is not respected.
Rousseau accepts that humanity has reached the point where there must be magistrates who carry out the laws and that people should obey the laws, but the only legitimate purpose of those laws is to advance the good of the community. There should be a common interest where the people accept an authority that provides them both order and the most possible freedom, and the magistrates understand that abusing their power would effectively dissolve the contract. Since there is no authority above rulers and people, each of them retains the right to judge when the contract is no longer valid, and so magistrates may either give up their power or have it taken from them.
In early governments, people still had enough freedom to select magistrates by election, often selecting the old due to their wisdom. When the old kept dying, power struggles broke out and the most ambitious seized on the opportunity to impose their rule by force and turn the government into the exclusive privilege of their family. As society developed and people were drawn further and further away from their natural condition, it became easier to keep people in perpetual submission. The result is that the overwhelming majority of humanity is once again equal in their lack of freedom, living for the sake of others in a state of misery and corruption, the inverse of their natural condition. Humanity is once again in a kind of state of nature, governed only by the law of the stronger. This means that the people can summon their strength and overthrow their tyrants with perfect legality.
Part 2, Pages 160-181 Analysis
Rousseau is most often contrasted with Hobbes for their portraits of the state of nature, but there is another noteworthy difference in how they assess the consequences of the social contract. They agree that when all of humanity falls under the rule of various political societies, the relationships among those societies are subject only to the law of nature, as there is no international authority above them. They may conduct trade and diplomacy and form alliances or treaties, but these are purely conventional and are broken as easily as they are made. Hobbes and Rousseau agree that in this international state of nature, each society is a kind of person. There is a rough analogy between the lone person dedicated to their survival, interacting only fleetingly with others, and a nation that similarly values its preservation and engages with others on a purely voluntary basis.
The difference is that Hobbes regards this condition as a dramatic improvement. Since the state of nature is a state of war, the sovereign turns a group of squabbling individuals into a unified citizenry who can then defend themselves against external rivals. To the extent that the sovereign can be thought of as a person, Hobbes imagines it as far more rational than the flesh and blood person, since their existence is far more secure and so they are free to think in the long-term. For Rousseau, matters go from bad to worse. A person is subject to an authority that is unlikely to have their best interest at heart. Furthermore, an organized society then makes it easier for the ruling class to marshal the collective energies of their people to prey on others. As a result, people now have to worry about dying at the hands of people they never would have encountered, much less had any conflict with, simply to serve the ever-expanding appetites of their rulers
Rousseau’s bitter descriptions of war do not readily align with his admiration of Sparta, which he expresses in many of his other works. The ancient Greek city-state was famous for having war as its sole preoccupation, training boys from the age of six to be soldiers for life. Like his admiration for Locke’s state of nature, the advantage of Sparta is its durability. With its extreme austerity and discipline, Sparta was able for many centuries to avoid The Corrupting Influence of Technology and Society that infiltrated seemingly every other society. Its rule was harsh but not arbitrary, and burdens fell on all citizens equally. Rousseau does not mention that Sparta’s unique social structure depended on maintaining a large pool of slave labor.
The closing portion of the discourse shows why Rousseau was heralded as a hero during the French Revolution, which broke out not long after his death. Rousseau’s citing of Louis XIV as a model of the law-abiding king is surely ironic, as Louis was an absolute monarch who plunged Europe into war for the exclusive benefit of his political dynasty. He is best known for the phrase “‘l’etat c’est moi” (“I am the state”). Rousseau then goes on to claim that all peoples throughout the world are victims of arbitrary rule, that the societies in which they live have no claim on them, and that revolution is the only solution. The French Revolution was inspired by the American one a decade earlier, but there are important differences in their philosophical justifications. The Americans hewed much closer to Locke, citing a natural right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (which includes the right to own property) which governments existed to protect. They cited specific violations of those rights by the King and asserted a right of revolution to better secure those rights for their people.
For Rousseau, by contrast, governments are nothing more than well-organized bandits, and every day they remain in power, the worse it is for the human race. One can readily identify a connection between Rousseau’s all-or-nothing proposition and the extraordinary violence of the French Revolution, which sought to obliterate all traces of the old order in France before unleashing its armies to do the same across all of Europe. It would be wrong to use historical events as a way to criticize a philosophical treatise—such events result far more from social circumstances than the reading of texts. Nevertheless, Rousseau’s vision of freedom contains a demand for purity that leads to the conclusion that the world is hopelessly corrupt. If the sole basis of political society is violence, then it is hard to see how anything other than violence can effect meaningful change.
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