Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality Among Men, 1754

In the human species I see two forms of inequality: one I call natural or physical, because it is established by nature and consists of the differences in age, health, bodily strength, and qualities of the mind or soul, and the other one can be called moral or political inequality, because it depends on some kind of convention and because it is established or at least authorized by the consent of men. This latter inequality consists of different privileges which some men enjoy to the detriment of others, like being more rich, more honoured, or more powerful than they are, or even that they can make the others obey them.

We cannot ask what the source of natural inequality is, because the answer is announced in the simple definition of the word. One can even less seek whether there might be some essential link between the two inequalities, for that would amount to asking, in other terms, if those who command are necessarily worth more than those who obey and if the powers of the body or the mind, wisdom, or virtue are always found in the same individuals in proportion to power or wealth, a good question perhaps to discuss among slaves while their masters are listening, but not one suitable for reasonable and free men who are seeking the truth.

So what precisely is the issue here in this Discourse? It is to mark in the progress of things the moment where, once right had taken over from violence, nature was subjected to law, and to explain by what sequence of miracles the strong could resolve to serve the weak and the people to purchase imaginary repose at the expense of actual happiness.

The philosophers who have examined the foundations of society have all sensed the necessity of going right back to the state of nature, but none of them has arrived there. Some have not hesitated to attribute to man in this state the idea of just and unjust, without taking the trouble to demonstrate that he had to have this idea or even that it was useful to him. Others have talked about the natural right which each man has to keep what belongs to him, without explaining what they mean by belong. Others, assigning at first to the strongest the authority over the weakest, have immediately had governments born, without thinking of the time which must have elapsed before the meaning of the words authority and government could have existed among men. Finally, all of them, talking endlessly about need, greed, oppression, desires, and pride, have brought into the state of nature ideas which they have derived in society. They have spoken about savage man, and they have given a portrait of social man. It has not even entered the mind of most of our writers to doubt whether the state of nature existed, although it is evident from a reading of the Sacred Books that the first man, once he had received his understanding and precepts directly from God, was not himself in this state and that, once we accord the writing of Moses the faith which every Christian philosopher owes them, we must deny that, even before the flood, men ever found themselves in the pure state of nature, unless they fell back into it by some extraordinary event. This paradox is very embarrassing to defend and completely impossible to prove.

So let us begin by dispensing with the facts, for they are not relevant to the question. We must not take the investigations which one could enter into concerning this subject for historical truths, but only for hypothetical and conditional reasons, more suitable for illuminating the nature of things than for showing the true origin, similar to those made everyday by our physicists concerning the formation of the earth. Religion orders us to believe that God Himself took men out of the state of nature immediately after the creation and that they are unequal because He wanted them to be. But religion does not forbid us from forming conjectures drawn only from the nature of man and the beings surrounding him concerning what the human race could have become if it had been left to itself. That is what I have been asked and what I propose to examine in this Discourse. Since my subject deals with man in general, I will try to use a language suitable to all nations; or rather, forgetting times and places so that I think only about the men to whom I am speaking, I will assume that I am in the school of Athens, repeating the lessons of my masters, with Platos and Xenocrateses for judges, and the human race as my audience.

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As far as illnesses are concerned, I will not repeat the vain and false rants which the majority of people in good health deliver against medicine. But I will ask if there is some reliable observation from which one could conclude that in the countries where this art is most neglected the average life of man is shorter than in those where it is cultivated with the greatest care.  How could that be the case if we give ourselves more ills than medicine can provide remedies for? The extreme inequality in the manner of living, the excessive idleness among some people, excessive labour for others, the ease with which we stimulate and satisfy our appetites and our sensuality, rich people’s overly sophisticated food, poor people’s bad diets, which most of the time they even have to go without, a lack which leads them to over-cram their stomachs greedily when they have an opportunity, staying up all night, every sort of excess, immoderate transports of all the passions, times of fatigue, mental exhaustion, depressions, and the numberless sorrows which people feel in all levels of society and which constantly wear away their souls—there you have the fatal proofs that most of our troubles are our own work and that we would have avoided almost all of them if we had kept to the simple, uniform, and solitary way of life which nature had prescribed for us. If she destined us to be healthy, I almost venture to affirm that the state of reflection is a condition contrary to nature and that the man who meditates is a depraved animal. When one thinks about the good constitution of savages, at least of those whom we have not ruined with our strong liquors, when one realizes that they know hardly any sicknesses other than wounds and old age, one is very much led to believe that one could easily produce the history of human illnesses by following the history of civil societies.

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Up to this point I have considered only physical man. Let us now attempt to see him from the metaphysical and moral side.

***

Whatever moralists may say about the subject, the human understanding owes a great deal to the passions which, by common agreement, also owe a great deal to it. It is through their activity that our reason is perfected. We only seek to understand because we desire to find enjoyment, and it is not possible to conceive why someone who has neither desires nor fears would take the trouble of reasoning. The passions, in their turn, derive their origin from our needs, and their progress from our knowledge. For one cannot desire or fear things except through the ideas one can have about them or by simple natural impulse. And savage man, deprived of every kind of enlightenment, experiences only the passions of the latter sort: his desires do not go beyond his physical needs. The only goods he knows in the universe are his food, a female, and rest. The only bad things he fears are pain and hunger. I say hunger and not death. For an animal will never know what it is to die, and knowledge of death and its terrors is one of the first acquisitions which man made in moving away from his animal condition.

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I know that people constantly repeat to us that nothing could have been as miserable as man in this condition, and if it is true, as I believe I have proved, that man could not have had the desire and the opportunity to leave this state until after several centuries, that would be an indictment against nature and not against what she had constituted in this way. But, if I understand this term miserable well, it is a word which has no meaning or which signifies only a painful lack and physical or spiritual suffering. Now, I really would like someone to explain to me what could be the type of misery for a free being whose heart is at peace and whose body is healthy. I ask the following: Which of the two—civil or natural life—is most subject to becoming insupportable for those who go through it? Around us we see hardly any people who do not complain about their existence and several who even take away their own lives, to the extent they are capable of that, and the combination of divine and human laws is scarcely sufficient to stop this mess. I ask if anyone has ever heard it said that a savage at liberty has even dreamed of complaining about life and of committing suicide. So people should judge with less pride on which side true misery lies.

By contrast, nothing would have been so miserable as savage man dazzled by enlightenment, tormented by passions, and reasoning about a condition different from his own. It was by a very wise providence that the untapped faculties he had were to develop only with opportunities to practise them, so that they were neither superfluous nor a bother to him before then, nor belated and useless in a time of need. He had in instinct alone everything he needed to live in a state of nature. With a cultivated reasoning, he only has what he needs to live in society.

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Above all, let us not conclude, with Hobbes, that, since man has not the slightest idea of goodness, he is naturally evil, that he is vicious because he does not know virtue, that he always denies his fellow men services which he does not believe he owes them, nor that, by virtue of the right which he reasonably attributes to himself to things which he needs, he foolishly imagines that he is the sole proprietor of the entire universe. Hobbes saw very well the defect of all the modern definitions of natural right, but the conclusions he draws from his own definition show that he took it in a sense which is no less erroneous. In reasoning from the principles which he sets down, this author should have said that since the state of nature is the one in which care for our own preservation is the least prejudicial to the preservation of others, this state is consequently the most appropriate to peace and the most acceptable for the human race. He says precisely the opposite, because he made the mistake of allowing into savage man’s care for his own preservation the need to satisfy a multitude of passions which are the work of society and which have made laws necessary. The evil man, he says, is a robust child. It remains to be seen whether savage man is a robust child. If we granted him this point, what would he conclude from it? That if, when he is robust this man was just as dependent on others as when he is weak, there is no kind of excess to which he would not be carried, that he would strike his mother when she was too late giving him her breast, that he would strangle one of his young brothers when he annoyed him, that he would bite someone else’s leg when it kicked or bothered him? But being robust and being dependent in the state of nature are two contradictory assumptions. Man is weak when he is dependent, and he is free before he is robust. Hobbes did not see that the same cause which prevents savages from using their reason, as our legal advisors assert, prevents them at the same time from abusing their faculties, as he himself maintains, so that we could say that savages are not evil precisely because they do not know what it is to be good. For it is neither the development of enlightenment nor the restraint of law which prevents them from doing evil, but the tranquility of their passions and their ignorance of vice: That’s how much ignorance of vices has been more profitable to those men, than a knowledge of virtue has to these ones.*

There is in addition another principle, which Hobbes did not notice, and which, having been given to man to soften, in certain circumstances, the ferocity of his self-love [amour propre] or, before the birth of this love, the desire to preserve himself (15), tempers the ardour he has for his well being by an innate repugnance to seeing a creature like himself suffer. I do not think I have to fear any contradiction by ascribing to man the only natural virtue which the most extravagant detractor of human virtues has been forced to recognize. I am speaking about pity, a disposition appropriate to such weak beings and subject to as many evils as we are, a virtue all the more universal and all the more useful to man because in him it comes before he uses any reflection, and is so natural that even animals sometimes provide some perceptible signs of it. Without talking of the tenderness of mothers towards their young and the dangers they face to keep them safe, we see every day the repugnance horses have at stepping on a living body. An animal never goes past a dead animal of its own species without unease. There are even some who give them a kind of sepulcher, and the sad lowing of cattle as they go into a slaughterhouse indicates the impression they get of the horrible spectacle which strikes them. With pleasure we see the author of the Fable of the Bees, compelled to recognize man as a compassionate and sensitive being, departing from his cold and subtle style in the example he gives of that, in order to offer us the moving image of a man in prison who notices outside a wild beast ripping a child from its mother’s breast, crushing its weak limbs in its murderous teeth, and with its claws ripping out this child’s quivering entrails. What horrific agitation must be felt by this witness to an event in which he has no personal interest?* What anxieties does he not suffer from the sight, being incapable of bringing any help to the fainting mother or the dying child?

That is what the pure movement of nature is like, before all reflection. Such is the force of natural pity, which the most depraved morals still have trouble destroying, since we see every day in our theatres a man being moved and weeping at the misfortunes of some unfortunate person, a spectator who, if he were in a tyrant’s position, would increase even more his enemy’s torments, like bloodthirsty Sulla, who was so sensitive to the evils he had not caused, or like Alexander of Pherae, who did not dare attend the performance of any tragedy in case he was seen weeping with Andromache and Priam, and who nonetheless listened without feeling anything to the cries of so many citizens who were slaughtered on his orders every day: By giving tears, nature reveals that she gave the human race the softest hearts: By giving tears, nature reveals that she gave the human race the softest hearts.*

Mandeville well perceived that with all their morality human beings would never be anything but monsters, if nature had not given them pity to assist their reason. But he did not see that from this quality alone follow all the social virtues which he wants to deny to men. In fact, what are generosity, clemency, and humanity, if not pity applied to the weak, the culpable, or to the human species in general? Even benevolence and friendship are, properly understood, products of a constant pity fixed on a particular object. For desiring that someone does not suffer, what is that other than desiring that he is happy? Even if it were true that commiseration was only a feeling which places us in the position of the person suffering, an obscure and lively sentiment in savage man and developed but weak in civil man, how would this idea matter for the truth of what I am saying, unless to reinforce it? In fact, commiseration will be all the more energetic as the animal looking on identifies intimately with the suffering animal. 

Now, it is evident that this identification must have been infinitely closer in the state of nature than in the state of reasoning. It is reason which gives rise to self-love [amour propre], and it is reflection which strengthens it. That is what turns man back within himself—an action which separates him from everything which upsets and afflicts him: it is philosophy which isolates him. Through philosophy he says in secret at the sight of a man suffering: Perish if you wish; I am safe. Nothing troubles the calm sleep of the philosopher and drags him from his bed any more, other than dangers to all of society. One can slit the throat of his fellow man under his window with impunity; he only has to put his hands over his ears and argue with himself for a little while in order to prevent nature, which rebels within him, from identifying with the one being assassinated. Savage man does not have this admirable talent and, for lack of wisdom and reason, is always observed surrendering to the first feeling of humanity, without thinking about it. In riots and street quarrels, the populace collects together, the prudent man moves away. It is the rabble, the women of the market, who separate the fighters and prevent decent folk from killing each other.

Hence, it is certain that pity is a natural feeling which, by moderating in each individual the activities of his love of himself [amour de soi-même] contributes to the mutual preservation of the entire species. It is pity which inclines us to help those we see suffering, without reflecting about it, and which, in the state of nature, takes the place of laws, morals, and virtue, with this advantage—no one is tempted to disobey its soft voice. It is pity which will make every robust savage turn away from robbing a weak child or an infirm old man of the sustenance he has acquired with difficulty, if he himself has hopes of being able to find his own somewhere else. It is pity which, in the place of this sublime maxim of rational justice—Do to others what you wish others to do to you—inspires in all men this other maxim of natural goodness, much less perfect than the preceding one, but perhaps more useful: Do what is good for you with the least possible harm to others. Briefly put, it is in natural feeling rather than in subtle arguments, that we must seek out the cause of the repugnance which all men would experience at doing wrong, even independently of all the maxims of education. Although it could be appropriate for Socrates and minds of his calibre to acquire virtue through reason, the human race would have ceased to be a long time ago, if its preservation had depended solely on the reasoning of those who constitute the race.

With passions so rarely active and a healthy restraint, men more wild than evil and more attentive to keeping themselves from the harm they could receive than tempted to commit harm to others were not subject to very dangerous quarrels. Since they had no type of commerce with each other and, as a result, had no knowledge of vanity or consideration or esteem or contempt, since they did not have the least notion of yours and mine, or any true idea of justice, since they looked upon the violence which they could run into as a bad thing easy to fix and not as an injury which they must punish, and since they did not even dream of vengeance, except perhaps as an immediate mechanical reflex, like a dog which bites a stone someone throws at it, their disputes would rarely have had any bloody consequences, if they had no issue more sensitive than food. But I see a more dangerous matter which remains for me to speak about.

Among the passions which agitate man’s heart, there is one which is ardent and impetuous, which makes one sex necessary to the other, a terrible passion which endures all dangers, overturns all obstacles, and in its fury seems likely to destroy the human race which it is destined to preserve. What would become of men in the grip of this frantic and brutal rage, without shame, without restraint, and arguing every day about their loves at the expense of their blood?

First, we must concede that the more violent the passions are, the more laws are necessary to contain them. But other than the fact that those disorders and crimes which the passions cause every day among us sufficiently demonstrate the inadequacy of the laws in this matter, it would still be good to examine if these disorders were not born with the laws themselves. For then, even if they were capable of repressing these disorders, the least we should demand of laws would be that they stop an evil which would not exist without them.

Let us begin by distinguishing the moral from the physical in the feeling of love. The physical is that general desire which inclines one sex to unite with the other; the moral is what determines this desire and fixes it on a single object exclusively or which at least provides it with a greater degree of energy for that preferred object. Now, it is easy to see that the moral aspect of love is an artificial feeling, born from social habits and celebrated by women with a great deal of skill and care, in order to establish their empire and to make dominant the sex which should obey. Since this feeling is founded on certain notions of merit or beauty which a savage is not in a condition to have and on comparisons he is not in a position to make, it must be almost nothing for him. For since his mind cannot form abstract ideas of regularity and proportion, his heart is no more susceptible to feelings of admiration and love which, even without being noticed, are born from the application of these ideas. He listens exclusively to the temperament he has received from nature and not to the taste he has not been able to acquire, and any woman is fine with him.

Limited solely to physical love and happy enough to be ignorant of those preferences which stimulate the feeling and increase the difficulties it causes, men must feel the ardours of their temperaments less frequently and less vividly, so that the disputes with each other must be more rare and less cruel. The imagination, which wreaks so much havoc among us, does not speak to savage hearts. Each man waits peacefully for the natural impulse, surrenders to it without choosing and with more pleasure than fury, and once the need is satisfied, all desire is extinguished.

It is thus an incontestable point that love itself, like all the other passions, only acquires in society that impetuous ardour which makes it so often fatal to men, and it is all the more ridiculous to picture savages as continually killing each other in order to satisfy their brutality, since this view is directly contrary to experience, and since the Caribs, of all existing people the ones who, up to this point, have strayed the least from the state of nature, are precisely the most peaceful in their love and the least subject to jealousy, although they live in a burning climate, which always seems to generate greater activity in these passions.

With respect to the conclusions one could draw in several species of animals from the fighting of the males, who in every season bloody our poultry yards or make our forests in springtime echo with their cries as they quarrel over the female, it is necessary to begin by excluding all species where nature has manifestly established in the relative power of the sexes relationships different from those among us. Thus, cockfights do not provide a conclusion for the human species. In species where the proportion is better observed, these fights can be caused only by the scarcity of females with respect to the number of males or by the exclusive periods of time during which the female constantly refuses the male’s approach, a factor which goes back to the first cause. For if each female tolerates the male only for two months of the year, that is, in this matter, as if the number of females were reduced by five sixths. Now, neither of these two cases applies to the human species, where the number of females generally surpasses the number of males and where no one has ever observed that, even among savages, the females have times of heat and exclusion like those in other species. Moreover, among several of these animals, since the entire species goes into heat at the same time, there comes a terrible moment of common passion, tumult, disorder, and combat, a time which has no place among the human species, where love is never periodic. So one cannot conclude from the fights among certain animals for the possession of the female that the same thing would happen to man in the state of nature. And even if one could draw this conclusion, since these dissentions do not destroy other species, we must at least grant that they would not be more fatal to ours, and it is very apparent that they would cause even less havoc in that state than they do in society, above all in the countries where, since the traditional customs still count for something, lovers’ jealousy and husbands’ vengeance every day cause duels, murders, and still worse, where the duty for eternal fidelity serves only to produce adultery and where even the laws dealing with continence and honour necessarily foster debauchery and multiply abortions.

Let us conclude that wandering in the forests without industry, without speech, without a home, without war, and without relationships, with no need for his fellow men, and similarly with no desire to harm them, perhaps even without ever recognizing any of them individually, savage man, subject to few passions and self-sufficient, would only have had feelings and enlightenment appropriate to that condition, felt nothing but his true needs, looked only at what he thought he had an interest in seeing, with an intelligence which had not progressed any more than his vanity. If by chance he made some discovery, he could no more communicate it than he could recognize even his own children. Art died with the inventor. There was neither education nor progress. The generations multiplied with no purpose in view, and, since each one always set out from the same point, the centuries flowed past in all the crudity of the first ages. The species was already old, and man remained still a child.

If I have been dwelling for such a long time on the hypothesis of this primitive condition, the reason is that, having ancient errors and inveterate prejudices to destroy, I thought I should dig down right to the root and, in a picture of the true state of nature, show how far inequality, even natural inequality, is from being as real and having as large an influence as our writers claim.

In fact, it is easy to see that among the differences which distinguish men, several pass for natural which are exclusively the work of habit and the various ways of life which men adopt in society. So a robust or delicate temperament, and the strength or weakness which depend on that, often come more from the hard or effeminate manner in which people have been raised than from the original constitution of the body. It is the same with the forces of the mind, and education not only establishes a difference between cultivated minds and those which are not, but it increases the difference among the former group in proportion to their culture. For if a giant and a dwarf march along the same route, each pace the two of them take will give a new advantage to the giant. Now, if we compare the prodigious diversity in the forms of education and ways of life which govern the different orders of the civil state with the simplicity and uniformity of animal and savage life, where everyone feeds on the same nourishment, lives in the same manner, and does exactly the same things, we will understand how the difference between man and man must be less in the state of nature than in society and how much natural inequality must increase in the human species as a result of institutionalized inequality.

But if nature, in the distribution of her gifts, were to have demonstrated as much preference as people claim, what advantage would the most favoured have derived from that to the detriment of others in a state of things which does not admit of hardly any sort of relation between them? Where there is no love, what use will beauty serve? What is the use of wit for people who do not speak, and deception for those who have no interactions with others? I always hear it repeated that the strongest will oppress the weak. But let someone explain to me what they mean by this word oppression. Some will dominate with violence; the others will groan, enslaved to all their whims: that is precisely what I observe among us, but I do not see how that could be said of savage men, to whom people would have great difficulty even explaining what servitude and domination are. A man will be readily able to get a hold of fruits which someone else has gathered, of the game he has killed, of the cave which serves as his refuge. But how will he ever succeed in making others obey him, and what could be the chains of dependence among men who do not possess anything? If someone chases me away from a tree, I will leave to go to another. If someone annoys me in one place, who will stop me from moving on to somewhere else? Is a man to be found whose strength is sufficiently superior to mine and, in addition, who is sufficiently depraved, sufficiently lazy, and sufficiently ferocious to compel me to provide his sustenance while he remains idle? He would have to resolve not to let me out of his sight for a single instant and to keep me bound with very great care while he was asleep, for fear that I would escape or that I would kill him. In other words, he is obliged to expose himself voluntarily to a great deal more trouble than he wishes to avoid and than he gives me. After all that, does he relax his vigilance momentarily? Does an unexpected noise make him turn his head? I take twenty paces into the forest, my chains are broken, and he does not see me again in his lifetime.

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Second Part

The first man who, having enclosed off a piece of land, got the idea of saying "This is mine" and found people simple enough to believe him was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, what wars, what murders, what miseries and horrors would someone have spared the human race who, pulling out the stakes or filling in the ditch, had cried out to his fellows, "Stop listening to this imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits belong to everyone and the earth belongs to no one." It seems very likely that by that time things had already come to the point where they could no longer continue as they had been. For this idea of property, which depends on many previous ideas which could only have arisen in succession, was not formed in the human mind all of a sudden. A good deal of progress had to take place—acquiring significant industry and enlightenment, transmitting and increasing them from one age to the next—before arriving at this last stage in the state of nature. So let us resume these matters further back in time and try to gather under a single point of view this slow succession of events and knowledge, in their most natural order.

Man’s first sensation was that of his own existence, his first care his own preservation. The productions of the earth provided him all the necessary help; instinct prompted him to make use of them. Hunger and other appetites made him try in turn various ways of life. One appetite invited him to perpetuate his species, and this blind inclination, lacking all heart-felt feeling, produced only a purely animal act. Their needs satisfied, the two sexes no longer recognized each other, and even the child was nothing to the mother as soon as it could do without her.

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Eventually these first advances made man capable of making more rapid ones. The more the mind was enlightened, the more industry perfected itself. Soon he ceased to sleep under the first tree or to withdraw into caverns and found some sorts of hatchets made of hard, sharp stones that would serve to cut wood, dig the earth, and make huts out of branches, which they later decided to coat with clay and mud. This was the age of a first revolution which led to the establishment and differentiation of families, which introduced a form of property, and from which perhaps arose many quarrels and fights. However, as the strongest were probably the first to make themselves lodgings they felt capable of defending, it is plausible that the weak ones found it quicker and safer to imitate them rather than to try to dislodge them. And as for those who already had huts, each one must have rarely sought to take over his neighbour’s, less because it did not belong to him than because it was useless to him and he could not have seized it without exposing himself to a lively fight with the family who occupied it.

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Everything began to change how it looked. Men who have up to this point wandered in the woods, once they take up a more fixed situation, slowly come together and are united in various bands and finally form in each country a particular nation, unified in their customary morals and characters, not by regulations and laws but by the same way of life and diet, and by the common influence of the climate. Having permanent neighbourhood life cannot fail to engender eventually some intercourse among the various families. The young people of different sexes live in neighbouring huts, and the casual interaction demanded by nature soon leads, through time spent in each other’s company, to another no less sweet and more permanent companionship. People grow accustomed to considering different objects and making comparisons: they acquire imperceptibly ideas of merit and beauty, which produce feelings of preference. By dint of seeing one another, they can no longer go without seeing each other again. A tender and sweet feeling insinuates itself in the soul and at the least opposition turns into an impetuous rage. Jealousy awakens with love, discord triumphs, and the softest of passions receives sacrifices of human blood.

To the extent that ideas and feelings follow on each other, the mind and heart are trained, the human race continues to become domesticated, relationships expand, and bonds are tightened. People got used to assembling in front of the huts or around a large tree: singing and dancing, true children of love and leisure, became the amusement or rather the occupation of idle men and women gathered together. Each one began to look at the others and to want to be looked at himself, and public esteem had a value. The one who sang or danced the best, the handsomest, the strongest, the most skilful, or the most eloquent became the most highly thought of, and that was the first step towards inequality and, at the same time, toward vice. For from these first preferences were born, on the one hand, vanity and scorn and, on the other, shame and envy, and the fermentation caused by these new leavening agents eventually produced compounds fatal to happiness and innocence.

As soon as men had started mutually to appreciate one another and the idea of respect was formed in their minds, each one claimed a right to it, and it was no longer possible to fail to respect anyone with impunity. From that emerged the first obligations for civility, even among savages, and from that all voluntary wrong became an outrage, because as well as the harm resulting from the injury, the offended party often considered the contempt for his person more insupportable than the harm itself. And so, because each man punished the contempt which had been shown to him in a manner proportional to his own self-esteem, acts of vengeance became terrible, and men grew bloody and cruel. That is precisely the stage reached by the majority of savage people known to us. And because they have not sufficiently distinguished among ideas and observed how distant these savage people already were from the first state of nature, several men have rushed to conclude that man is naturally cruel and needs civilization to moderate him, whereas nothing is as sweet as he is in his primitive condition, when, placed by nature at equal distances from the stupidity of animals and the lethal enlightenment of civil man and equally limited by instinct and reason to protecting himself from the harm which threatens him, he is restrained by natural pity from doing harm to anyone himself, since nothing gives him an inclination to do so, not even after he has been harmed. For, according the axiom of the wise Locke, where there is no property there is no sense of injury.*

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Societies multiplied or extended themselves rapidly and soon covered the entire surface of the earth. It was no longer possible to find a single corner of the universe where one could free oneself from the yoke and duck out from under the often badly wielded sword which each man saw permanently suspended above his own head. Since civil right thus became the common rule for citizens, the law of nature had no place except among the various societies, where, under the name of the law of nations, it was tempered with a few tacit conventions to make commerce possible and to take the place of natural commiseration, which by losing all the power between one society and another which it had had between man and man, no longer resides anywhere other than in some great cosmopolitan souls, who transcend the imaginary barriers separating peoples and who, following the example of the Sovereign Being who created them, embrace all the human race in their benevolence.

Since the political bodies in this way remained in a state of nature among themselves, they soon felt the inconveniences which had forced individuals to leave it, and this state became even more lethal among these great bodies than it had ever been before among the individuals of whom they were composed. From that emerged national wars, battles, murders, reprisals which make nature tremble and shock reason, and all those horrible prejudices which place the honour of shedding human blood in the ranks of virtue. The most decent people learned to reckon among their duties the slaughter of their fellow men. Finally, men were seen massacring each other by the thousands without knowing why. And more murders were committed in a single day of fighting and more horrors in the capture of a single town than had been committed in the state of nature during entire centuries over the whole face of the earth. Such are the first effects one glimpses of the division of the human race into different societies.

***

What a spectacle these harsh and envied labours of a European minister are for a Carib! How many cruel deaths would this indolent savage not prefer to the horror of such a life, which is not even mitigated by the pleasure of doing good? But to witness the purpose of so many cares, his mind would have to have a sense of the words power and reputation, he would have to learn that there is a type of man who counts the estimation of the rest of the universe as something and who knows how to be happy and content with himself on the basis of what other people say rather than on his own testimony. Such is, in fact, the real cause of all these differences: the savage lives in himself; social man, always outside himself, can live only in the opinions of others, and it is, so to speak, only from their judgment that he derives the feeling of his own existence. It not my relevant to my subject to show how from such a disposition emerges such a great indifference to good and evil, together with such fine discourses on morality, how, with everything reducing itself to appearances, it all becomes artificial and false—honour, friendship, virtue and often even vices, which we finally discover the secret of boasting about; how, in a word, by always asking others what we are and never daring to ask ourselves that question, in the middle of so much philosophy, humanity, politeness, and sublime maxims, we have only a deceptive and frivolous exterior, honour without virtue, reason without wisdom, and pleasure without happiness. It is sufficient for me to have proved that this is not man’s original condition and that it is only the spirit of society and the inequality which it gives rise to which change and alter in this way all our natural inclinations.

I have tried to expose the origin and the progress of inequality, the establishment and the abuse of political societies, as much as these matters can be deduced from the nature of man by the light of reason alone and independently of sacred dogmas which give to sovereign authority the sanction of divine right. It follows from this account that inequality, which is almost non-existent in a state of nature, derives its strength and growth from the development of our faculties and from the progress of the human mind and finally becomes stable and legitimate through the establishment of property and laws. It follows further that moral inequality, authorized only by positive right, is contrary to natural right, whenever it is not combined in the same proportion with physical inequality, a distinction which determines sufficiently what we should think in this regard of the sort of inequality which reigns among all civilized peoples, since it is manifestly against natural law, no matter how it is defined, that a child gives orders to an old man, that an imbecile leads a wise man, and that a handful of men stuff themselves with superfluities while the starving crowds lack necessities.