Jean-Jacques Rousseau - The Origins and Effects of Inequality - Essay Example

Jean-Jacques Rousseau - The Origins and Effects of Inequality Jean-Jacques Rousseau was one of the most prominent philosophers and writers of the Enlightenment, whose political and social ideas influenced the French Revolution and contributed immensely to the development of modern sociology, political science and education. Rousseau’s numerous works mostly written in the form of a dialogue with his thinkers of the past such as Plato, Locke and Hobbes offered a new perspective on social, moral, political, and economic relationships between people. The founding principles of Rousseau’s sociological ideas and political philosophy are clearly identified in the introductory paragraphs of his famous Discourses. The Dedication to the Republic of Geneva summarized the essence of Rousseau’s views in the following statement: “If I had had to make choice of the place of my birth, I should have preferred a society which had an extent proportionate to the limits of the human faculties; … in which every person being equal to his occupations, no one should be obliged to commit to others the functions with which he was entrusted; a State, in which all the individuals being well known to one another, … and in which the pleasant custom of seeing and knowing one another should make the love of country rather a love of the citizens than of its soil”(Rousseau, 1993, pp.32-33). The Republic of Geneva was perfectly line with Rousseau’s understanding of an ideal state: a moderate democracy occupying an adequate territory, governed mostly by the laws based on traditions with citizens living relatively plain and calm life. The main paradox emphasized by Rousseau is the following: people prescribe laws to other people without proper knowledge the natural state of human being. However, this natural law did not exist in contemporary European society that “offered a corrupt form of the species and the inequality inherent in its societies should not be taken as a standard for assessing either other cultures or other species” (Moran, 1993, p.140). For Rousseau who believed that human character was “…deeply shaped by society” (Divine, 2000, p.291) it seemed impossible to unveil the true nature of humans in the European context where people had been squeezed by unfair laws and customs for centuries. The philosopher argued that the true measure of man that would not depend upon contemporary laws and customs could be found only in ‘natural’ places such as African jungles. Rousseau drew strong parallels between the natural state of human beings and the state of animals. Human beings began as animals having no potent mean of communication such as language, and could not convey much of their knowledge and experience to their offspring, lacked foresight and history. These seemingly disadvantageous features gave the natural men one essential benefit: they did not suffer from the fear of death while contemporary humans feared death virtually every moment of their life (Rousseau, 1993, p.52). Rousseau positioned the natural man “at equal distances from the stupidity of brutes and the fatal enlightenment of civil man” (Rousseau, 1993, p.53). For Rousseau the fatality of enlightenment or civilization meant that it deprived man of the natural desire to exploit the potential of his body to full extent making it an instrument in achieving the balance with nature: “The body of a savage man being the only instrument he understands, he uses it for various purposes, of which ours, for want of practice, are incapable: for our industry deprives us of that force and agility” (Rousseau, 1993, p.53). Civilization brought the understanding that cooperation and mutual help would improve the results of labour, and in the process of such cooperation humans came to realize that some men were better hunters, some were better thinkers, some were stronger, etc. The understanding of inequalities between human beings was, in Rousseau’s opinion, the crucial point: “…from the moment one man began to stand in need of the help of another; from the moment it appeared advantageous to any one man to have enough provisions for two, equality disappeared, property was introduced, work became indispensable, and vast forests became smiling fields, which man had to water with the sweat of his brow, and where slavery and misery were soon seen to germinate and grow up with the crops” (Rousseau, 1993, p.74). Acquisition of language is viewed by Rousseau as another important step on the way toward keeping human beings away from their natural state of equality. Language brought reason, and reason in its turn called into being such notions as virtue and vice, i.e. human beings applied reason to their natural qualities that did not need any reasoning because they were natural. People began to value themselves only in comparison with others regardless of their own understanding of things, which meant the natural self-love transformed into vanity. And finally, emergence of the concept of property sealed the departure from the natural state of equality and transition to the civilized and highly unequal society: “The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, 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” (Rousseau, 1993, p.84). The existence of property introduced fixed inequality: before that the distinctions between humans were more or less transient and property fixed them and turned into permanent. Property divided humans into two groups or classes: the class of rich and the class of poor who must toil for the rich. Evidently, such division promoted increasing hostility between the two classes, and those who were rich lived in constant fear that the poor would deprive them of their property. In order to protect their property and lives the rich gradually established laws that in accord with which the present state of affairs was legal. Further enforcement of such laws led to introduction of slavery in different forms and “…it was iron and corn, which produced civilized men and ruined humanity” (Rousseau, 1993, p.92). Such understanding of social progress implied that Rousseau rejected the possibility that political authority in contemporary form could be justified. As power was consolidated by a shrinking group of individuals, the citizens gradually lost their individual freedom and moved further from the state of nature. In Rousseau’s opinion the end point of this movement was authoritarian government in which one ruler was placed high above the rest. That was the pure state of inequality where people, in fact, returned to the laws of power in a society founded on corruption and unfairness (Rousseau, 1993, pp.92-100). Generally, the opinion of Rousseau of the civilization can be formulated as follows: civilized people voluntarily and deliberately made themselves subjects for the rule of public opinion where the opinion of a single man had little to no value unless that man did not belong to the small group of high and mightiest. Society based upon vanity that replaced the natural self-love was a society where people secretly hated each other and permanently feared that they would be ill-opinioned by others. This fear had grave implications for morale inherent in the civilized society where, “…after having swallowed up treasures and ruined multitudes, the hero ends up by cutting every throat till he finds himself, at last, sole master of the world. Such is in miniature the moral picture, if not of human life, at least of the secret pretensions of the heart of civilized man” (Rousseau, 1993, p.98). Rousseau’s analysis of civilization went in two major directions: the criticism and proposed solution of the social and political problems brought by the civilization. In many respects Rousseau’s criticism was well-reasoned and based upon extensive and thorough observations of the author. On the other hand, if Rousseau’s ideas about the natural state of human being and origins of inequality were true, the solution proposed by him was utopia: the philosopher claimed that people should return to their natural state, laws of traditions and patriarchal society. Although the idea itself might be reasonable, the main problem is that relevance of any theory or solution is measured in terms of its feasibility in the first turn. Unfeasibility of the solution brought forth by Rousseau was clear even from the perspective of the philosopher’s own theory. Though one of Rousseau’s postulates was the unsocial nature of human being, he also maintained that educability was also an inherent characteristic of human being. As James Devine (2000) reasonably noted, “…he [Rousseau] saw our character being deeply affected by society” (p.291) meaning that despite natural goodness men were also highly susceptible to social influences. Therefore, it would be correct to assume that centuries of life in a society, coupled with the availability of language as the key instrument of experience and knowledge transmission could produce a change in the naturally unsocial background making the human being a genuinely social creature. Rousseau’s theory of the natural state of human has several other weak points. First of all it concerns the methodology the philosopher employed to provide justification of the natural state of human being: it was pure speculation that rejected all scientific achievements available at that time. In fact, Rousseau himself confessed that his theory was rather speculative when he claimed that the only method that might improve our knowledge about the natural state was to sift out the effects of civilisation: “Let us begin then by laying all fats aside, as they do not affect the question” (Rousseau, 1993, p.50). This means Rousseau’s theory was a purely hypothetical reconstruction of a phenomenon hidden under an extremely thick layer of social convenances and customs. Despite being praised for adoption of an evolutionary approach, Rousseau in fact turned the evolution backward. Human beings were in their natural state only when they behaved and lived like animals with self-love being the most essential characteristic. Over the period of gradual development and evolution people moved from that initial state of happiness toward life that contradicted their natural state as described by Rousseau. From this point of view the biological, social and economic evolution had to be considered as absolutely useless and even harmful process that brings nothing but misery and degradation of human being. References Devine, J., 2000, “The Positive Political Economy of Individualism and Collectivism: Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau”, Politics & Society, Vol.28, No.2, pp.265-304 Moran, F., 1993, “Between Primates and Primitives: Natural Man as the Missing Link in Rousseau's Second Discourse”, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 54, No. 1, pp. 37-58 Rousseau, J.-J., 1993, The Social Contract and The Discourses [Translated by G.D.H. Cole]. London: David Campbell Publishers Ltd. 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