A Discourse on Inequality by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1754)

I have spent the last two weeks being deeply immersed in Western Civilization from the Age of Enlightenment up to the present.  I am reading a textbook to my youngest son, and he has been listening to audiobooks of the other readings for the course.  One of his very generous history teachers in high school listened to these books with him, and helped him to understand what they were talking about.  She provided the historical context for him, which was a tremendous amount of work.   So I wouldn't necessarily have had to read this book, but I never read some of the classic works that made up the political theories of the time, and it seemed like a good opportunity to play some catch up ball.

I have been making a small but concerted effort to read some non-fiction as an over-50 year old, for whom college was a very long time ago.  My husband noted to me over the weekend that it was probably okay to take a hiatus from that, because as Ethan progresses through college with us acting as his main tutors, I am very likely to read a lot of non-fiction.  I got a glimpse of that as I read his American Studies class reading to him last fall, but we are going through the work for this course in a much more compressed time frame, and in the course of helping him learn, I am learning too.

Rousseau was living in France when he wrote this essay (he later returns to Geneva where he is from), and he saw massive inequality all around him.  The drawing on the book pretty much sums up what he saw--the peasants were literally carrying the clergy and the noblemen.  They did most of the work and they paid all the taxes, and they lived lives of quiet desperation.  Where did this inequity come from and how did it begin?

This is the interesting part--Rousseau thinks that if you go back to man at the beginning of time that he was a loner--he didn't live with other people.  I have some trouble with this, because when man is born he is a baby, and he needs care, and so at the very least somebody is going to have to take care of him, so there are at least two people together, but as far as I can tell, he never really talks about child rearing at the beginning of time.  The part I liked best is that Rousseau thought that man was basically good then.  He disagreed with Hobbes that man needed government and religion because he was basically bad--Rousseau felt that there were other roots of society, and that those were the things that led to inequality, but that man left to his own devices was a good guy.