Rousseau - Part One Rousseau opens by distinguishing between two types of inequality: the natural or physical and the

moral or political. There is nothing to be done about the first, but we are responsible for the second, which depends on our consent (293). To address this problem, he proposes to reconstruct the "moment when, right taking the place of violence, nature was subjected to law" (293). He is well aware that he is dealing in "hypothetical and conditional reasonings" (294). The inquiry is normative, not historical. We are interested in two things: first, how various forms of political inequality have been accepted by the subordinate members and, second, what sort of political arrangement might actually be justifiable. (The second topic is treated more fully in "The Social Compact.") The state of nature presented in the "Discourse" is of a decidedly Romantic cast. Rousseau envisions primitive (or "savage") man as individually self-sufficient in a pristine environment. Natural abundance provides for all bodily needs. We have only come together now and again to copulate. Furthermore, primitive man, lacking culture, has no moral knowledge, and, Rousseau contends, doesn't need it: "So much more profitable to these [primitives] is the ignorance of vice than the knowledge of virtue is to those [in society]" (299). We see prefigured here Rousseau's deep-seated ambivalence towards society, which, on the one hand, facilitates new modes of "self-perfection" but which also, on the other, is the source of inauthenticity, vice, and social inequality. Primitive man lives according to his "instinct," and, Rousseau claims, it does not lead him astray. To live in society, however, man must cultivate his reason, and this faculty can lead to all kinds of trouble (298). Reason, for Rousseau is closely linked with the ability to resist our immediate impulses and to elect from among competing desires (296). It is this sort of reflective self-distantiation that enables us to develop and pursue an ideal of self-perfection (though, as I've indicated, reason may also "turn man against himself" and engender "egocentrism" (300)). Rousseau, like Hobbes and Locke, and unlike the Ancients or Medievals, views the passions as more basic than reason, so that what is rational must effectively be derived from the passions. We perfect our reason by means of the passions, which provide the necessary evidence about what kinds of thing we like and what kinds of things are good for us (297). Rousseau differs from his early modern predecessors, however, in what he identifies as the key passion. Hobbes and Locke leaned heavily on our drive toward self-preservation, fear of injury, and desire for security. But in Rousseau's idyllic state of nature, such anxieties have no place. What he proposes as the fundamental passion is "pity," an entirely natural virtue, defined as "an innate repugnance to seeing his fellow men suffer" (299). All social virtues, Rousseau claims, can be derived from pity: generosity, mercy, and humanity are pity applied to the weak, the guilty, and human species in general (300).

Rousseau - Part Two In my previous post I claimed that the topic of the second part of the "Discourse" was the emergence of society from the state of nature. Re-reading it, however, I find Rousseau to be decidedly vague on the emergence of society. It has something to do with the geographical spread of the race, the development of technologies, and the emergence of property. If you can reconstruct a succinct argument, please do share. The real focus of this section, as I now see it, is the transformative effects of civilization on "savage man." As with Hobbes and Locke, property takes center-stage in Rousseau's treatment. It affords him this opening: "The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say 'this is mine' and found people simply enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society" (302). So his attitude toward this development--property as a sort of ruse on the simple-minded--we can see, is markedly different than his predecessors'. A bit later he writes, "in short, competition and rivalry on the one hand, opposition of interest[s] on the other, and always the hidden desire to profit at the expense of someone else[:... a]ll these ills are the first effect of property and inseparable offshoot of incipient inequality" (309). So what Hobbes, certainly, and Locke to a lesser extent, invoke society to remedy, Rousseau accuses it of introducing. Society introduces the vice of inauthenticity. People become unduly interested in public esteem (305). How we appear to others becomes crucial to our own self-assessment, and this leads to vanity, contempt, envy, and shame. Furthermore, provided with leisure time, people develop a taste for new "conveniences," so that "being deprived of them became much more cruel than possessing them was sweet, and they were unhappy about losing them without being happy about

possessing them" (305)--a criticism of consumer culture as relevant as ever today. So there are two issues on the table: why do some people claim property, and why do others accept their claims? As Rousseau would have it, the poor are essentially duped by the wealthy. The poor lack resources to protect what little they possess, and so they readily agree to property regulations proposed by the rich, effectively legitimizing inequitable distribution (310). Hence the natural inequality that allows some men to work more efficiently than others is transformed into political inequality. And this is passed along through generations via inheritance so that this inequity becomes disassociated even from one's natural productive capacities.