A Discourse Upon the Origin and the Foundation of the Inequality Among Mankind

Rousseau's answer to a prize question he lost: human inequality is no law of nature but an invention, and it began the day someone fenced off a piece of land.

by Jean-Jacques Rousseau95 passages held

English, a translation held here, and your language

Original title: Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes
First published: 1755(aged 43)
Original language: French

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Overview

In 1753 the Academy of Dijon set an essay question: where does inequality among men come from, and is it sanctioned by natural law? Rousseau had won the same academy's prize three years earlier for a first Discourse; this time he lost. What he wrote became the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, published at Amsterdam in 1755, and its wager is that almost everything we call natural about human hierarchy is nothing of the kind. Strip society away, Rousseau argues, and you find not Hobbes's warring brutes but a solitary creature — healthy, wordless, self-sufficient, moved by self-preservation and a simple pity. Inequality begins later, and it begins with a fence: the first person to enclose a patch of ground, call it his, and find others credulous enough to believe him founded civil society and every chain that followed. Property invents law, law protects property, and the poor are talked into consenting to their own subjection. The force of the claim is that it is historical. If inequality has an origin in time, it was made by men and could have been otherwise — which is not what a reader in 1755 heard from pulpit or throne. Voltaire, sent a copy, returned mock thanks for the cleverest book yet written against the human race. The essay made plain how far Rousseau had drawn apart from the Encyclopédiste mainstream, and it planted the idea that a whole later tradition would grow: that inequality is not the order of things but the record of what was done.

Key concepts

What does Rousseau mean by the state of nature?

It is a hypothetical condition before society, used to see what in us is original and what was added. Rousseau's natural man is solitary, self-sufficient and content, moved by self-preservation and pity, not by the vices we call human. It is not a lost paradise or a real epoch he can date, but a measuring stick — a way to test which of our miseries are natural and which are our own work.

What are the two kinds of inequality he distinguishes?

Rousseau separates natural or physical inequality — differences of age, strength and health — from moral or political inequality, the ranks of wealth, honour and power that some enjoy at others' expense. The first is harmless and unavoidable; the second is a human institution. His whole essay is aimed at the second kind, denying it any warrant in the first and refusing to let natural difference excuse man-made hierarchy.

What role does pity play in his account?

Pity is the one social feeling Rousseau grants natural man: an immediate reluctance to see another suffer, prior to reason and reflection. It does the work later moralists assign to conscience or calculation, restraining the savage without any law. By rooting our decency in a feeling we share with animals rather than in cultivated reason, he makes goodness original to us and corruption the thing that has to be explained.

Why does he present inequality as a history, not a fact?

Because a thing with an origin in time was made and could have gone otherwise. If hierarchy were natural, it would be beyond appeal; by telling how it arose — through property, law and manufactured consent — Rousseau turns it into a human deed open to judgment. This is the essay's real force, and why a reader in 1755 heard something no pulpit or throne would say.

How does property figure in the birth of inequality?

Property is the hinge. The first person to enclose land, claim it as his own, and be believed founded civil society; from that act flow law, which protects the holding, and the long consent of the poor to their own subjection. Property is not merely one inequality among others but the origin that generates the rest, which is why Rousseau treats a fence, not a battle, as the first political event.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

The man society never touched

Strip away everything civilization added and what is left of a human being? Rousseau answers with a creature neither noble nor brutish, and stakes his whole politics on the portrait.

Against Hobbes, who read our present cruelty back into our origins, Rousseau imagines natural man as solitary, wordless and self-sufficient, moved only by self-preservation and an untutored pity at the suffering of others. Reason, vice and even lasting need come later; the savage is healthy because he depends on things rather than on other people. The point is polemical, not nostalgic: by showing that our worst traits are acquired, Rousseau denies that hierarchy and greed are written into the species, and clears the ground for the charge that follows.

human nature
state of nature
nature
pity
instinct
liberty
reason
passions
language
technology
violence

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The first fence

If men are equal by nature, where did rank, riches and servitude come from? Rousseau answers with a moment in time, which means they were made and could have been otherwise.

The first person to enclose a patch of ground, call it his, and find others credulous enough to believe him founded civil society and every chain that came after. Property invents law, law protects property, and the poor are argued into consenting to their own subjection. Rousseau's wager is that this is history, not metaphysics: inequality has an origin in time, so it is a human deed rather than the order of things. That reading horrified 1755 and seeded a tradition that treats hierarchy as a record of what was done, not a decree of nature.

inequality
property
civilization
morality
labor
agriculture
justice
despotism
history
human development
social contract

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Within this work

passages held: 95
distinct concepts: 221
by passages held, corpus-wide: #510

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “human nature” and “state of nature”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 17 pairings. 84 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
human nature	state of nature	9
civilization	state of nature	5
civilization	human nature	4
property	social contract	4
inequality	property	3
property	state of nature	3
civilization	technology	2
language	state of nature	2
property	technology	2
state of nature	technology	2
human nature	inequality	1
human nature	property	1
human nature	social contract	1
inequality	social contract	1
inequality	technology	1
language	property	1
social contract	state of nature	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1755 A Discourse Upon the Origin and the Foundation of the Inequality Among Mankind (Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes) you are here EN
1761 A Lasting Peace through the Federation of Europe and The State of War
Two short pieces from Rousseau's engagement with the Abbé de Saint-Pierre's peace project: the Abstract of 1761 and the Judgment published only in 1782, with the fragment The State of War. Slight beside his major books, but the seed of his thinking on war between states.
EN
1762 Emile, or Education (Émile, ou De l'éducation)
Rousseau's longest book and the one he valued most, published in 1762 the same season as the Social Contract and condemned with it. Read now as a founding text of modern child-centred education.
EN
1762 The Social Contract and Discourses (Du contrat social, ou Principes du droit politique)
Published the same year as Emile and burned beside it, this short treatise sets out Rousseau's positive politics where the Discourse on Inequality had only diagnosed the disease. Ignored in his lifetime, it became the most contested book of the French Revolution.
EN

— or open another of their works