Rousseau: Nature, Society, and Education

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) developed one of the Enlightenment's most original and, in several respects, most critical voices. In his Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men (1755), written for a prize competition of the Academy of Dijon, Rousseau constructed a hypothetical "state of nature" in which solitary, self-sufficient humans lived guided by amour de soi, a benign instinct of self-preservation, and natural compassion (pitié), free of the vices bred by society. He distinguished natural or physical inequality, arising from differences in age, health, or strength, from moral or political inequality, which he traced to the invention of private property: the moment, he famously wrote, when a man enclosed a piece of ground, declared "this is mine," and found others simple enough to believe him. From that act, Rousseau argued, flowed competition, dependence, the corrupting passion of amour-propre — self-love that depends on comparison with and the esteem of others — and ultimately the coercive apparatus of civil society, which entrenched rather than remedied inequality.