How Inequality Was Born: Rousseau's "Discourse on Inequality"

Before he wrote The Social Contract, Rousseau wrote the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, and it is in some ways the more startling book. In it, Rousseau attempts a kind of imaginative archaeology of the human condition: to strip away everything that civilization has added to us and picture what humans were like in their natural state, before society, before property, before the great inequalities that now seem so permanent. His conclusion was scandalous in its time and remains provocative now, that inequality is not natural at all, but a human invention, and that much of what we call progress has been a long fall away from a freer, simpler condition.

Here is what the Discourse taught me about natural man, about the fateful invention of property, and about the difference between two kinds of inequality.

Key takeaways

• Natural inequality (of strength, age) is small; social inequality is vast and man-made.
• “Natural man” was solitary, free, and content, not the brute Hobbes imagined.
• Property is the origin of inequality: “this is mine” began endless conflict.
• Amour-propre, the craving for status and comparison, corrupts us.
• Civilization brought chains along with its arts and comforts.

Two kinds of inequality

Rousseau opens by drawing a crucial distinction. There is natural or physical inequality, the differences in strength, health, age, and ability that nature distributes, and there is moral or political inequality, the differences in wealth, power, rank, and privilege that exist only because human beings have established and consented to them. The first kind is modest and unavoidable. The second, the kind that actually shapes our lives and divides us into rich and poor, master and servant, is entirely artificial, a human creation. This distinction reframes the whole question. The vast inequalities we treat as facts of nature are, Rousseau insists, facts of history, things we made and could, in principle, remake.

The fall into property

Rousseau’s account of how inequality arose is one of the most famous passages in political philosophy. The first person, he writes, who, having enclosed a piece of ground, took it into his head to say “this is mine,” and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. From that first act of ownership, he traces a long descent: property leads to the division of labour, to wealth and poverty, to envy and competition, to laws that protect the rich from the poor, to the whole apparatus of inequality dressed up as justice. He even imagines how much war, crime, and misery might have been spared if someone had pulled up the stakes and cried that the fruits of the earth belong to all. It is a vision both nostalgic and revolutionary, and it would echo through every later critique of private property.

The poison of comparison

The psychological heart of the Discourse is Rousseau’s distinction between two kinds of self-love. There is amour de soi, a natural, healthy self-preservation and self-care that natural man possessed. And there is amour-propre, a corrupting, comparative self-regard that arises only in society, the craving to be esteemed, ranked, admired above others. Once we live among other people and begin to compare ourselves, Rousseau argues, we are no longer content simply to be; we need to be more, to be seen as superior, and this restless competition for status poisons our happiness and our relationships. I found this devastatingly accurate. So much modern misery, the envy, the status anxiety, the endless measuring of ourselves against others, is exactly this amour-propre, and Rousseau named it two and a half centuries ago.

What I’m taking with me

The Discourse on Inequality is a book that makes the familiar strange, forcing me to see the inequalities I take for granted as human inventions rather than natural laws. I do not share Rousseau’s full nostalgia for a lost state of nature, which is more myth than history. But what I am taking from him is permanent: the insight that most inequality is made, not given, and so is open to question; the recognition of property’s enormous role in shaping human society; and, most personally, the warning against amour-propre, the corrosive habit of measuring my worth by comparison with others. Rousseau leaves me less willing to accept that things simply are as they must be.

Frequently asked questions

What is Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality about?

It explores the origins of human inequality, arguing that while some natural differences exist, the great social and political inequalities are human inventions that arose with property and civilization rather than facts of nature.

What did Rousseau say about property?

That it is the origin of inequality. The first person to enclose land and declare “this is mine,” he wrote, founded civil society and began the long history of competition, conflict, and inequality.

What is the difference between amour de soi and amour-propre?

Amour de soi is natural, healthy self-care and self-preservation. Amour-propre is a corrupting, comparative self-regard, the craving to be esteemed above others, which arises only in society and poisons our happiness.

References & further reading

1. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. A Discourse on Inequality. (1755; translated by Maurice Cranston, Penguin Classics, 1984.)
2. Starobinski, Jean. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction. University of Chicago Press, 1971.
3. Cranston, Maurice. Jean-Jacques: The Early Life and Work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Allen Lane, 1983.