Rousseau’s First and Second Discourses*

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) launched the first modern philosophic rebellion against
the Enlightenment – that vast cultural revolution whose philosophic foundations we have
studied in Machiavelli, Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, and Montesquieu. As we have seen, the
Enlightenment entails a lowered conception of humanity’s moral nature. This new, lowered
view of humanity is to be popularized, spread to the mass of mankind, by the philosophers and
their followers writing as educational propagandists. Philosophers aim to reshape Christianity
into a religion of (modern) reason, and to make scientific philosophy, rather than pious
traditions, the source of mankind’s conceptions of “nature’s God.” This constitutes a dramatic
break with the classical view of the proper relation between rationalist philosophy or science
and healthy political society. The ancients, starting with Socrates, had taught that philosophy
or science should keep muted or hidden its critical questioning, because healthy republican
society, centered on self-transcending moral and civic virtue, needs to live in a medium of
tradition and opinion that is endangered by philosophic skepticism.

Rousseau returns to something like the Socratic view of the relation between philosophy and
healthy civil society. But he does not do so on the basis of Socratic or classical political
philosophy. He contends that we can and must appreciate the practical wisdom and virtue of
classical political life on a modern or even ultramodern philosophic and scientific basis.
Otherwise stated, Rousseau effects a kind of synthesis between ancient practice and modern
theory, or between classical republicanism and the modern philosophic and scientific
conception of nature and of human nature. It is a synthesis that subordinates the ancient
ingredient to the modern. But Rousseau argues that his modern predecessors have failed to
grasp the full, radical, and problematic meaning and implications of their own discoveries
about human nature.

The Historical Context of the First Discourse

In his Confessions, Rousseau tells us in some detail how he was provoked and inspired to write
his explosive first major work. In 1750, a prominent scientific club or “academy” in the city of
Dijon announced an essay contest on a curious topic: “Has the Restoration of the Sciences and
the Arts Tended to Purify Morals?” The topic indicated that some in that academy were
morally troubled by the cultural revolution that was the Enlightenment – and wanted to
stimulate some critical discussion. Rousseau had been living in Paris, as an intimate friend and
collaborator of some of the foremost figures in the French Enlightenment, but he had also for
years been studying the works of the ancients, especially Plato – and thinking long and hard.
When he read in a newspaper the announcement of the essay contest, he was walking to visit
in prison a friend, the famous Diderot, who was the editor and leader of the great multivolume
work called The Encyclopedia(which was in a sense the Bible of the Enlightenment). Diderot
had been imprisoned by the censorship authorities for published writings of his deemed
impious. This alerts us to something that we must never forget about the historical context in
which Rousseau was writing. The threat of persecution – imprisonment and book burning – on
grounds of impiety, was still very real, just as it had been for Socrates in Athens. In order safely
to publish anything that involved questioning of orthodox Christian teachings, one had to
adopt some version of rhetorical accommodation, hiding, writing between the lines. But the
partisans of the Enlightenment, led by Diderot, were struggling to change the world so as to
make this no longer so necessary; they were constantly pushing the envelope, and sometimes
getting punished as a consequence.

One might think that this situation – Rousseau visiting a close friend imprisoned for promoting
free thought and speech – might have intensified Rousseau’s attachment to the
Enlightenment. Instead, something like the opposite happened. As he read the announcement
of the topic for the essay contest, there was provoked in him a kind of awesome inner
revelation. He suddenly realized that this question spoke to the profound doubts he himself
had been developing about all that was going on around him culturally. He was inspired to
bring together and to begin articulating a complex new conception of human nature and of the
human condition that had been gestating deep in his mind.

The essay Rousseau wrote won the prize, but much more came as a result of it. Almost
overnight he became the most famous, and the most hated, man in Europe. For he had dared
to attack – with staggering rhetorical power and subtlety of thought – everything that was
thought to be the triumphant wave of the future. He did so while at the same time making
clear that he was no reactionary, that he was as opposed to traditional Christianity and
monarchy as anyone. From the beginning, he was met with a bewildered mixture of
admiration and revulsion. He came to be shunned, for the rest of his life, by many of his
previous closest friends. He was labeled a lunatic, and was persecuted and driven from places
in which he tried to live – sometimes by governments, sometimes by stone-throwing popular
mobs. His books were publicly burned in various cities, most notably in his native Geneva.

But those books had an amazingly wide and deep popular as well as intellectual influence. In
the first place, Rousseau had a profound influence on the French Revolution, and especially on
its radical left wing, under Robespierre and St. Just. But Rousseau was also, in the second
place, the chief inspiration of the greatest antipolitical artistic movement in human history –
Romanticism. He wrote an enormously popular romantic novel (Julie or the New Heloise), as
well as a novel on education (Emile). All the great novelists and playwrights and artists of the
rest of the eighteenth and the early nineteenth century were deeply inspired by his example
and thought (e.g., Lessing and Goethe and Schiller and Hölderlin in Germany, Austen and
Thackeray in England, Stendhal in France, Tolstoy in Russia, Hawthorne in America). In the
third place, through his philosophic student, Immanuel Kant, Rousseau gave the decisive
impetus to the philosophic movement known as German idealism, with its “philosophy of
history,” reaching through Hegel and Fichte and Schelling and culminating in Marx. In the
fourth place, Rousseau was the most influential theologian of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. Especially in his “Confession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar” (in Emile) he laid the
foundations for modern liberal Protestantism, as a religion centered on compassion,
humanism, and nature, without the ideas of sin and hell and the need for miraculous
redemption. He was the chief source of the image of Jesus as not God but instead a suffering,
compassionate, marvelous human paragon of natural virtues.

The amazing diversity of these influences reflects the baffling complexity and tension-ridden,
apparently contradictory, character of Rousseau’s thinking. Each of his influential followers
seized on one or another major parts of his teaching and felt compelled to reject other parts as
incompatible. But Rousseau himself insisted that there was a consistent, integrating basis for
all the apparently contradictory or conflicting aspects of his thought – and that no one, at least
in his lifetime, had ever grasped the unifying core of his thought. He insisted that the
bewildering complexity and apparent contradictions in his writing were an accurate reflection
of the truth about our human being, which is rife with tensions and contradictions. Rousseau
also suggested that it was in his first short discourse – despite or because of its immaturity –
that he had brought everything synoptically together, more than in any of his longer and more
elaborate later works, each of which develops more thoroughly a part of his multi-faceted
outlook.

The New Meaning of “Virtue”

In the “Preface” to the First Discourse (33) Rousseau announces his intention to attack all that
is most respectable in his time, knowing that he will as a consequence become “universally”
hated and misunderstood, by all except “a few wise men.” But he proclaims that he is one of
those few who are not “destined to be subjugated by the opinions of their century, their
country, their society,” and that he plans to have an influence far into the future.

He commences the body of the discourse (34) by associating himself with the famous
paradoxical formula of Socrates, in Plato’s Apology: He will speak as “an honorable man who
knows nothing and yet does not think any the less of himself.” He speaks as if he were on trial,
before judges who will not easily understand his complex outlook: “It will be difficult, I feel, to
adapt what I have to say to the tribunal before which I appear. How can one dare blame the
sciences before one of Europe’s most learned Societies,” and “reconcile contempt for study
with respect for the truly learned? I have seen these contradictions, and they have not
rebuffed me.”

He begins to show immediately what it is in the name of which he will “blame the sciences”: “I
am not abusing science, I told myself; I am defending virtue” (emphasis added). Rousseau’s
first theme or task is to explain what he means by virtue. He identifies virtue as “integrity,”
truthfulness – linked to the upholding of “a just cause” (34b). He then turns to indicate what
he does not mean by virtue. Here he speaks indirectly, for this is a dangerous topic: “That part
of the world which is today so enlightened lived, a few centuries ago, in a condition worse than
ignorance. A nondescript scientific jargon, even more despicable than ignorance, had usurped
the name of knowledge” (35m). These words implicitly deprecate Thomas Aquinas and the
whole tradition of Christian theology; however, Rousseau will never be so imprudent as to say
so explicitly.

He proceeds (36–38) to elaborate what he means by virtue and the virtuous man. Virtue is
“the strength and vigor of the soul” that disdains all “ornamentation.” The virtuous man “dares
to appear as he is.” Virtue is the opposite of “base and deceptive uniformity”; virtue is the
proud and joyous display of oneself in one’s “difference” or uniqueness. Among the virtuous,
“differences of conduct announce at first glance differences of character.” The virtuous person
loves competition – but not over money and power. Virtue loves competition that tests and
displays the genuine, distinct or individual, talents and capacities of each competitor while
inviting and inspiring others, one’s competitors, to do the same: “The good man is an athlete
who likes to compete in the nude.” Virtue means living among others in a society of
spiritual transparency, “seeing through each other” – which is the necessary basis for “real
esteem,” “well-based confidence,” and “sincere friendships.” In all the preceding aspects,
virtue is the expression of “human nature,” of the “natural” in the sense of “that original
liberty for which men seem to have been born” – liberty that is covered, repressed, stifled,
enchained by the iron conventionalities of our social existence.

The newly emerging, supposedly “enlightened” form of society shapes people more and more
to live a conformist life of hypocrisy, of deep dishonesty about themselves and even to
themselves. People more and more pretend to be, and pretend to feel, what they are not and
do not really feel. People are not competitively expressing their true and unique selves, but
instead live a life dominated by vanity, or the constant struggle to appear before others in
ways that will impress and make each seem superior in conventional ways, while pretending to
respect and to care for one another.

Rousseau here launches his critique of what he later will christen the bourgeois character of
modern society and its moral outlook (Social Contract 1.6 note; Emile, bk. 1 beg.). He attacks
what we saw to be at the heart of Hobbes’s “laws of nature” – the new moral outlook that
Hobbes and Locke promote. According to that outlook, secure civilization rests on and requires
the artificial subduing and repressing of a murderously dangerous and ugly, self-centered
human nature. Rousseau contends that this is a terrible misunderstanding and degradation of
human nature, which is fundamentally not dangerous and ugly in its true, natural self-
centeredness. Humans are not naturally murderous; they do not naturally seek for power after
power, over and against one another; they do not naturally seek for prestigious display and
domination. They canand do become distorted into such monstrous beings, but that happens
on account of unhealthy social and political conditions. And the new kind of society being
brought into existence under the guidance of the liberal capitalist individualism is peculiarly
sick.

Rousseau is the philosophic founder of the conception of virtue as sincerity, authenticity,

daring to uncover and to be true to one’s inner, unique self – and on this basis, for the sake of
this, determining one’s own life, as independently as possible, in a fraternal community with
others whom one truly knows and respects. All this he designates as true freedom, which is
practically identifiable with virtue as he is characterizing it.

We can now begin to see the complex way in which Rousseau both resembles and differs from
the ancients. Like the ancients, he sees nature and the natural as a positive standard, as the
source of health and of virtue as strength of soul. But to a greater extent than the ancients,
Rousseau sees our human nature as something easily lost, something that has to be recovered,
rescued from society’s attempts to repress and to cover it over with artificial, conformist,
pseudo-virtues. Rousseau’s stress on individuality shows from the start that he agrees with
Hobbes and Locke, against Aristotle and the classics, that humans are by nature not political or
social animals but instead independent equals. Against Hobbes and Locke, however, Rousseau
insists that as independent equals, we are by nature not anxiously power-hungry, acquisitive,
prestige-obsessed animals. It is true that all society has a terrible tendency to corrupt us in this
direction – and this shows that we have a terrible natural weakness or susceptibility to such
corruption. But Hobbes and Locke, and their political philosophies, mistake that corrupt state
for our natural state; they propose as a cure a new form of social existence that exacerbates
our alienation from our deeper, truer, healthy nature.

Rousseau is sure that humans feel this corruption in themselves, without understanding it. He
is convinced that the whole vast modern cultural revolution that is the Enlightenment is bound
to fail, because of the ultimately intolerable degree to which it forces humans into unnatural
forms of self-expression. Rousseau means to offer a way out, at least in the sense of a way to
understand what we truly are and, on that basis, to begin to take a deep inner distance from
the artificial spiritual cage into which modern society tries to lock us. But Rousseau also wants
to preserve what he regards as the most important achievement of modernity: its liberation of
humanity from traditional, medieval Christianity, which in another way takes humans far away
from their natural wholeness.
The Least Unhealthy Political Order

The big question Rousseau’s opening account of virtue provokes is: How can any political
society ever accord with human nature and natural virtue? Rousseau characterizes all society
as imposing “iron chains with which men are burdened” (36t; see also the opening of the first
chapter of The Social Contract). But Rousseau insists that civil societies can nevertheless be
ranked as more or less unnatural; he insists that different kinds of polity differ enormously in
the degree to which they distort and enslave human nature.

To show this, Rousseau proceeds (40–47) to give a historical sketch of a variety of examples of
societies. He first gives examples of historical societies that have been more or less afflicted
with, and have foreshadowed, the evils being brought by scientific enlightenment. He then
turns to examples of societies that have minimized the spiritual illnesses that attend all social
existence. He thus provides concrete examples of the political standard by which he judges the
emerging modern capitalist society to be so defective. The kind of society most in accord with
or least distorting of human nature is exemplified by the ancient civic republics: republican
Rome (before it became imperialist); original Persia (as a small civic society in the mountains,
before it conquered Asia); and, above all, Sparta. At the start of the Second Discourse Rousseau
lays out his standard more systematically, in the dedicatory letter addressed to his native city
of Geneva (78ff.). Rousseau praises Geneva in a way that states the essential elements that are
needed for the healthiest kind of human society; he uses Geneva as a kind of template for his
conception of the best civil society. This means, however, that he idealizes Geneva, making it
more perfect than it actually was. Most obviously, he drastically downplays the Calvinist
Christian element in the Genevan republic and turns the Genevan religion into a purely civil
religious spirit, akin to Roman paganism.

But we have obviously encountered a baffling paradox. How does Rousseau move from his
new conception of virtue or freedom – as a deeply honest individualistic self-expression – to
his contention that the best political situation for humans is full-time citizenship in an
extremelyhomogeneous and conformist republic? The answer is found in asking
correctly the basic political question. The correct question is not: “What sort of polity is best
because it suits human nature?” That question has a null answer: No society suits human
nature, or can. The correct question is: “What sort of polity is best because it artificially
disfigures and corrupts human nature the least, by allowing its citizens to live lives that are
the least dependent on competition to dominate one another, the least vain and deceptive
and hypocritical, the most self-determining or independent, and the most honest and sincere
and caring in their interdependency?”

Citizens of a small, conformist, participatory republic can, through their direct share in
collective rule, be guided by what Rousseau calls in The Social Contract “the general will”: a
disposition that makes each person will, for public policy, only what each can understand that
all the partner-citizens would join in willing. It is true that each thereby conceives of himself as
a part, and hence only a partial individual. But each has a truly meaningful and respected
partial share. The collectivity is one in which each citizen counts and is treasured by fellow
citizens. The citizenry can, and must, genuinely sympathize with one another – truly knowing
and feeling one another’s simple, similar needs and concerns intimately. This requires that all
live the same way, with the same needs and hopes and fears. They must live in substantial
equality – economic and social as well as political. Their economic equality is, compared with
modern society, a kind of equality in poverty, because they live with limited, very basic, and
frugal property. Each family has just enough to be contented, as self-sufficient, small-scale
farmers. They thus live free of need for all sorts of material goods and as a band of brothers
and sisters – caring for and cared for by one another, while expressing and seeing one another
for what they genuinely are, as similar citizens. They live in “a state where, all the individuals
knowing one another, neither the obscure maneuvers of vice nor the modesty of virtue could
be hidden from the notice and judgment of the public, and where that sweet habit of seeing
and knowing one another turned love of the fatherland into love of the citizens rather than
love of the soil” (78b–79t).

The government of such a society must be a “democracy,” but one that is “wisely tempered.”
This means first and foremost that all must be “so subject to the laws that” none “could shake
off their honorable yoke: that salutary and gentle yoke, which the proudest heads bear with all
the more docility because they are suited to bear no other” (79b). But precisely because
humans arenot naturally political, or naturally obedient to the “yoke” of law, it takes a very
long time to get people living reliably in conformity to the essentially artificial lawful habits
that enable them to cooperate as fraternal republican citizens with a true general will: “A
happy and tranquil Republic” is one “whose antiquity” is “in a way lost in the darkness of
time.” It is a republic that has no memory of civil strife, and has “experienced only those
attacks suited to display and strengthen courage and love of fatherland in its inhabitants” (80–
81). Rousseau goes on to describe something very close to what Aristotle described as the
mixed democratic regime, where final legislative authority rests with the whole assembled
citizenry, meeting occasionally, but where the administration of daily affairs is put in the hands
of a small elected magistracy chosen for their superior political wisdom and public spirit (82b–
83t). The regime needs to be supported by a shared, established “civil religion” (religion civile,
a term invented by Rousseau – Social Contract 4.8), whose priests inspire and lead a piety that
unqualifiedly promotes the civic virtues and patriotism; Rousseau claims that the example of
Geneva shows that at least some version of Protestant Christianity can do so (88). But the fact
that he even here reminds us that he honors pagan Rome (80) and Sparta (89) more than
Geneva shows that he is viewing religion strictly as a means to fraternal civic virtue.

Even more important than “civil religion” is the civic role of women, as upholders and teachers
of civic virtue and as models of chastity, allowing sexual pleasure only in marriage that
supports the family, and thus preventing the erotic competition that breeds vanity, luxury,
conspicuous consumption, and the slide into the worst social illnesses. Women, Rousseau
insists, always dominate the men in deciding the moral tone of a society. Only if the women
show that they have no use for vanity, or dishonesty, especially in love, and are dedicated to
frugal and chaste family life, can the egalitarian simplicity, equality, and transparency of mores
be preserved. The female citizens are “that precious half of the Republic which creates the
happiness of the other and whose gentleness and wisdom maintain peace and good morals.”
Addressing his “virtuous citizenesses” (vertueuses citoyennes) Rousseau exclaims (89): “The
fate of your sex will always be to govern ours. It is fortunate when your chaste power,
exercised solely in conjugal union, makes itself felt only for the glory of the State and the
public happiness! Thus did women command at Sparta and thus do you deserve to command
at Geneva.”

It is in the light of this political standard that Rousseau diagnoses in part two of the First
Discourse the peculiarly terrible sickness of the emerging modern civil society, especially
inasmuch as it is characterized by the popularization and authority of science.

The Evils of Scientific Enlightenment

Humans who live in a society that makes popular scientific enlightenment the heart of its
education undergo three specific forms of degradation. In the first place, science induces in
people a corrosive moral skepticism. Science promotes deep doubts about any grounding in
nature for civic virtue and patriotism and for any self-transcendence of individual interest. By
the same token, science induces deep doubts about all traditional religious beliefs that support
civic virtue: “These vain and futile declaimers go everywhere armed with their deadly
paradoxes, undermining the foundations of faith, and annihilating virtue. They smile
disdainfully at the old-fashioned words of fatherland and religion, and devote their talents and
philosophy to destroying and debasing all that is sacred among men” (50). Contemplating
modern schooling, Rousseau laments: “I see everywhere immense institutions where young
people are brought up at great expense, learning everything – except their duties.” “Your
children,” he predicts, “will not even know what the words magnanimity, equity, temperance,
humanity, courage are; that sweet name fatherland will never strike their ear; and IF they hear
of God, it will be less to be awed by him than to be afraid of him” (56).

In the second place, science promotes, instead of virtue and religion, materialism and
hedonism, or the false belief that what matters in life is ever-increasing economic power,
prosperity, and even luxury: “Luxury rarely develops without the sciences and the arts, and
they never develop without luxury” (50b). Science makes people think that the only reality is
material, and that physical security or health and comfortable self-preservation are the only
solid concerns. Science thus undermines the natural human capacity to risk life and limb for
one’s liberty as an individual or as a citizen. “While living conveniences multiply, arts are
perfected and luxury spreads, true courage is enervated, military virtues disappear, and this
too is the work of the sciences” (54m). Free people, Rousseau stresses, are always heroic
fighters in the cause of their liberty, and free republics need spirited defenders because they
are small and poor and hence mortally threatened by big, rich, imperialistic societies.

But there is a third, deeper and more corrosive, poison that afflicts people living in societies
where scientific talent, ability to contribute to technology, and artistic talent are most highly
honored. Respect for scientific ability and artistic talent necessarily feeds and intensifies the
sick human desire to devote one’s life to appearing superior to others in ways that
do not express what one truly is; popular education in science and the fine
arts necessarily encourages a culture of false vanity. Why? Because genuine scientific and
artistic talents are rare. In truth, only a few people genuinely find deep spiritual satisfaction,
find their true self-expression, in the pursuit of science and the arts. And as scientific and
artistic talent become highly valued in a society, those few become drawn into a sense of
superiority, while most people become infected with the desire and need to pretend to have
and to enjoy the highly valued talents. This fuels the competition to have possessions, and to
be able to talk and to act in ways that make one appear to share in the talents. Conspicuous
consumption makes one appear to be good at, and to enjoy doing, what society honors.
Money can buy the appearance of talents. Humans more and more lose sight of the deeper
and more important sense in which they are truly by nature equal – which is in their capacity
for virtue. All humans have the capacity to live and to express themselves as self-sufficient,
economically modest, proud but not vain individuals; all have the capacity to live as virtuous
fellow citizens in a participatory republic. But a society that values highly scientific and artistic
talent is necessarily inegalitarian: “What brings about all these abuses if not the disastrous
inequality introduced among men by the distinction of talents, and the debasement of
virtues?” That “is the most evident effect of all our studies and the most dangerous of their
consequences.” We “have physicists, geometers, chemists, astronomers, poets, musicians,
painters”; we “no longer have citizens” (58–59).

Artists, Rousseau stresses, are especially corruptible, on account of their hunger for popular
applause (52–53). Artists very easily slip into a life dominated by vanity or the lust to appear
superior through apparent artistic talent. But precisely because the artists are more
dependent on public approval than are scientists, artists and the fine arts are not quite so
intrinsically dangerous to civic health. Artists can to some degree be made to support civic
virtue and religion, patriotism, and to respect civic traditions. Thus, in ancient Greek republics,
artistic and theatrical festivals were embedded in the civil religion. Art and religion were
partners in ancient Greece and Rome. But for this to work, the arts must be properly regulated
and even censored or self-censored. Artists must be compelled – as they were in ancient
Greece and Rome – to accept a sense of civic responsibility, to appreciate the grave dangers in
their powers, and to recognize the benefit they can bring, by adorning and making more
attractive the genuine and the civic virtues, while attacking the corruption brought by science.

The Outstanding Exception: Socratic Science

There is, however, one kind of science or philosophy that Rousseau praises, even in the midst
of his attack on the pernicious consequences of the influence of science and philosophy.
Rousseau presents Socrates as living in Athens at a time when that city was beginning to
become corrupted by the rise of popular enlightenment. Socrates (as Rousseau presents him)
responded by in effect turning philosophy against itself. Socrates, as Rousseau presents him,
used his enormous philosophic talents to attack and to expose as ignorance the pretended
wisdom of the sophists and the sophisticated artists. Socrates refuted these sophisticates in
their claims to know things that cast doubt on or debunked the traditional civic virtues.
Socrates upheld the wisdom of the traditional religious authority, the Delphic oracle, and
advocated the unsophisticated, unscientific and un-philosophic wisdom of civic virtue. This,
Rousseau claims, is the message of Plato’sApology, which he quotes at length (43b–45). This
Socratic model, of the citizen-philosopher, is evidently what Rousseau presents himself as
following.

Now as we know from our earlier study of Socrates’ complex speech in Plato’s Apology of
Socrates, there is something very fishy about all this. If we compare what Rousseau claims he is
quoting from the Apology with what Socrates actually says in the Apology, we see that
Rousseau drastically misquotes, invents words, and thus completely transforms the Delphic
oracle story. Rousseau changes the text so as to make the radical skepticism of Socrates totally
disappear. He misquotes so as to make the Apology read as if Socrates were simply supportive
of traditional civic virtue and religion. He completely drops the first and leading part of
Socrates’ cross-examinations; he leaves out Socrates’ exposure of the ignorance of the
democratic statesmen, the civic leaders. Rousseau likewise drops Socrates’ cross-examination
of the artisans or craftsmen, and substitutes instead a cross-examination of the artists – in
addition to the poets! And Rousseau totally invents Socrates’ cross-examining of the sophists –
which is not in the Apology’s presentation at all.

What is Rousseau up to? Why introduce the Platonic Socrates, in his Delphic image,
as themodel, while so dramatically misquoting and changing the whole meaning of the passage
as we find it in Plato?

We can begin to understand Rousseau’s subtlety if we recall that in our study of

Plato’sApology, we noted what Socrates himself does by giving two contradictory portraits of
himself. Socrates covers over his first self-portrait given in the Delphic oracle story, as a radical
skeptic, by giving a very different portrait, in the gadfly section, after the cross-examination of
Meletus. If we bear this in mind, and everything it shows us concerning Socratic rhetoric, we
can see that Rousseau is doing in his own way what the Platonic Socrates did. Rousseau is
adopting a modified form of deceptive, Platonic-Socratic rhetoric. He goes a step farther than
Socrates, by conflating the two accounts in the Apology, so as to hide even more completely
the skeptical side of Socratic philosophy. Rousseau indicates that he is largely in agreement
with Plato’s Socrates on the major issue of how genuine philosophy should understand its
relation to political society. He agrees that radical skepticism is indeed a core aspect of
genuine philosophy, and of philosophic self-expression and self-discovery, but needs to be
kept hidden. And if we next look through the First Discourse and bring together all the things
Rousseau says or hints about himself, we see that Rousseau – imitating the Platonic Socrates –
presents himself, and philosophy or science, in two contradictory ways.

On one hand, and most apparently, Rousseau presents himself, on the title page, as a
nameless “citizen of Geneva,” just as on the last page (64) he identifies himself as one of the
“common men, not endowed by heaven with such great talents and not destined for so much
glory.” He presents himself as a simple, common person – a citizen. But on the other hand, he
also says, in the preface (33) that he is writing because (as he puts it) he “wants to live beyond
[his] century.” In the foreword (32), he notes that this essay indeed made him “famous.” And
he says in the preface (33) that he is, as he puts it, “honored by the approval of a few wise
men.” In other words, he reveals that his truest audience, the audience that most gratifies him
in its approval, is a tiny elite. On the title page (31), where he signs himself a nameless citizen
of Geneva, there is also an epigraph – in Latin, the language of the sophisticated and learned.
It is from the poet Ovid, who in these words is declaring and predicting that people will not
understand him and therefore will call him a barbarian. Ovid became famous for all time as a
poet of private erotic love, not of civic virtue, and he wrote under the corrupt empire, not the
republic. In the poem from which Rousseau takes this epigraph, Ovid is complaining about
being exiled from the corrupt pleasures of Rome and forced to live among simple people in the
provinces.

But the most vivid manifestation of the fact that Rousseau is writing on at least two levels,
with different messages, is the frontispiece, the engraving that Rousseau commissioned and
directed in every detail. It is, as Rousseau says, an allegory – which demands interpretation. In
the note in the text, to which he refers us (47–48), Rousseau stresses that the mass of the
Greek citizens understood Prometheus to be a god unfriendly to mankind, because he brought
the light of the sciences. Rousseau stresses that the other, traditional gods were believed to
have punished Prometheus for bringing science to mankind. But Rousseau also points out that
in his own new version of the myth, as depicted in this frontispiece, Prometheus is warning
away an ugly satyr. And if we look, we see that Rousseau leaves a key part of the allegory
unexplained. Prometheus is giving the torch to a beautiful human, who looks like a statue
ready to come to life. Who or what does this beautiful person represent? Why is the one who
is warned away a satyr – a subhuman being? In a public letter written a few months later,
defending himself against attacks, Rousseau gives a thumbnail interpretation, in which he
presents himself as Prometheus, the god who brings true science to the few true geniuses,
while warning the masses away from it. Rousseau is not a simple citizen – that is a role, a
mask. Rousseau is in fact a god, higher even than the geniuses, because Rousseau is the
philosopher who truly understands both the greatness of science and its limitations.
All of this helps us to understand the biggest contradiction in the First Discourse, which crops
up near the end (59ff.). Rousseau suddenly starts to backtrack and to soften his attack on
science and its effects. First, he suggests that it is possible that it would be good for the
sciences to be promoted by academies led by scientists, if the scientists had a clear sense of
the dangers science poses to virtue – if they were scientists with a deep sense of civic
responsibility, who strove to avoid undermining, and even strove to foster, civic virtue. It could
seem that Rousseau is here merely flattering the Academy of Dijon so as to soften the blow of
his earlier words and to help himself win the prize. Yet on the next page (60) he returns to the
attack on the present situation of science. We thus begin to see that he is pointing toward an
unrealized possibility – of a far more politically responsible kind of science and philosophy. This
prepares for the startling denouement: “But if the development of the sciences and arts has
added nothing to our true felicity,” if it “has corrupted our morals, and if the corruption of
morals has impaired purity of taste, what shall we think of that crowd of elementary authors
who have removed the difficulties that blocked access to the temple of the muses and that
nature put there as a test of strength for those who might be tempted to learn?” What shall
we think of “those compilers of works who have indiscreetly broken down the door of the
sciences and let into their sanctuary a populace unworthy of approaching it; whereas it would
be preferable for all who could not go far in the learned profession to be rebuffed from the
outset and directed into arts useful to society?” Those “whom nature destined to be her
disciples needed no teachers. Verulam [Bacon], Descartes, Newton, these preceptors of the
human race had none themselves.” If “a few men must be allowed to devote themselves to
the study of the sciences and arts, it must be only those who feel the strength to walk alone in
their footsteps and go beyond them” (62–63). Rousseau here suddenly praises the fact
that ancient science and philosophy were kept largely hidden from the mass of men, as a
sacred thing that the masses are unworthy even to approach (see also 211). The reason
Rousseau now gives why science needs to be kept hidden is not mainly that science corrupts
society. Now the main reason is, rather, that science is corrupted by society; science is
contaminated and debased by being made popular. Rousseau now discloses that he is at least
as concerned for the true good of science or philosophy as he is for the good of civil society. By
keeping science hidden, in books that are very hard to understand and decipher, obstacles are
placed in the way of most people easily becoming involved in science. Those obstacles are a
healthy “test of strength” that selects the truly talented, to whom the obstacles give the
challenges that “teach them to exert themselves,” to “feel the strength to walk alone.”

In other words, in the closing pages of the First Discourse, Rousseau reveals that philosophy or
science is the truest expression of the genuine and self-sufficient individuality of those very
few who are gifted. Such geniuses, Rousseau goes on to say (63–64), should find a home in
corrupt societies, in monarchies (i.e., not republics). Such geniuses can live well in such corrupt
places and even become honored and powerful, without becoming corrupted themselves and
while diminishing the corruption around them.

Is not Rousseau speaking of himself as exactly such a person? After praising such rare geniuses,
he seems to answer that he is not. At the end, he identifies himself with the simple citizen, the
unsophisticated, a follower of Sparta against Athens. But Rousseau implicitly identified himself
earlier with Socrates, who never left Athens – although he always praised Sparta. Rousseau
quietly indicates that he is in fact one of those who has the strength to walk alone, for whom
philosophy and science is true self-realization. But he veils his own genius – thus setting an
example for the way the philosopher should hide himself and do everything he can to honor
un-philosophic civic spirit, to defend the dignity of ordinary people living simple,
unpretentious, and maximally self-sufficient lives within corrupt modern society.

The Project of the Second Discourse

To see the fuller grounds for Rousseau’s complex position, and to clarify his disagreement with
classical political philosophy, we need to turn to the work in which – Rousseau says in
hisConfessions – his philosophical principles are “completely developed” and “are made
manifest with the greatest boldness, not to say audacity”: The Discourse on the Origin and
Foundations of Inequality among Humans. At the outset, Rousseau makes plain his agreement
with the moderns against the ancients; to understand human nature we need to conceive of
humans as originally in a “state of nature” of radically disconnected individuals. But Rousseau
criticizes his modern predecessors for failing to think through what is necessarily implied in this
illuminating concept: “The philosophers who have examined the foundations of society have
all felt the necessity of going back to the state of nature, but none of them has reached it”
(102–103). If we are truly to understand human nature as not inherently directed to structured
social existence, then we must think our way back to what strange kind of being the human
animal must have been, for “thousands of centuries” (120t), before society came into being (by
some long chain ofaccidents). Only by such imaginative reconstructive cogitation will we begin
to uncover what is truly natural at our psychological core, under the layers that historically
constructed convention and custom have imposed on us since childhood. Only thus can we
begin to understand the deep reasons for, and character of, our social and psychological ills –
the contradictions between our deepest natural impulses and needs, and the artificial needs
and demands and repressions and distortions that society imposes on us. Only thus can we
begin to obtain truly natural standards, standards of natural right or law – of what is right or
best according to human nature (91–92, 95–96). This uncovering of our natural core is the task
Rousseau executes in part one of the Second Discourse. In part two, he takes up a successor
task: to speculate on what the accidental process was by which humans gradually acquired all
the artificial psychological attributes that characterize us now, as social beings.

Rousseau stresses, however, that we immediately confront a massive problem: The true state
of nature no longer exists anywhere that we know of. The human race appears everywhere
entirely socialized. Rousseau admits and stresses that he can only initiate a very long
investigation that needs to be continued by others (92b–93t). He means to launch a new
scientific project (what came to be called “anthropology”). Especially in his crucial footnotes,
he shows that he makes use of whatever empirical evidence he can find about primitive
peoples, and also other primates – some of whom, he speculates, might even be humans still
in the natural condition (204–209). Yet all primitive tribal peoples are already living in some
form of society. And the fact that the apes cannot be humanized, even in captivity, seems to
show that they belong to nonhuman species. We can see that humans must be a unique kind
of apelike animal that is, paradoxically, naturally capable of a dramatic, artificial distortion or
repression and restructuring of its original natural living conditions.

The most important and compelling, immediately available, body of evidence for the state of
nature as presocial is the pathology that humans exhibit everywhere in society. All around us
we witness humans desperately trying to escape their condition of existence – through alcohol
and other narcotics, through so-called entertainments and vacations, through the “escapism”
of thrills of risk, in gambling, in dangerous actions and relationships of all sorts. Every vigorous
animal obviously longs and seeks to escape its cage, its confinement, its trap. Who ever heard
of a vigorous animal that longed and sought to escape the environment that is naturally suited
to it? How then can anyone seriously claim that society as we know it is the natural
environment suited to the human animal? How can society be natural for humans, if in society
humans act like neurotic animals trapped in cages? Rousseau contends that only something
like the speculation he lays out is sufficient to explain this pervasive and profound empirical
evidence of the terrible dislocation humans suffer in their social existence.

But before he can proceed, Rousseau must also confront another enormous practical as well as
theoretical difficulty, in publishing his speculations: the powerful, punitive censorship
exercised by the Christian churches, backed by the governments of every country of Europe. In
Rousseau’s time, prison, exile, or even death is dealt out to anyone who openly suggests that
the Bible is not the literal truth, revealed by God. And as we have seen, the Bible has its own
authoritative explanation of the reason for the agonized human awareness of dislocation,
alienation, and inner contradiction in the way we are forced to live in society. The Bible
teaches that all this is caused by the Fall: the contamination of original sin and God’s condign
punishment of the whole human race. Rousseau’s state of nature teaching is profoundly
contrary to this biblical teaching. Indeed, perhaps the deepest and most important purpose of
Rousseau’s teaching is the overthrowing of the biblical account and conception of the human
condition. But in order to get his book published, and not immediately burned when
published, and also, at the same time, in order to bring to the thoughtful reader’s attention
this most fundamental issue, Rousseau begins by claiming to disavow everything he is going to
say and claiming to avow his acceptance of the biblical account in Genesis: “It did not even
enter the minds of most of our philosophers to doubt that the state of nature had existed,
even though it is evident from reading the Holy Scriptures that the first man, having received
enlightenment and precepts directly from God, was not himself in that state”; and, “that giving
the writings of Moses the credence that any Christian philosopher owes them, it must be
denied that even before the flood men were ever in the pure state of nature” (102b–103). We
see on close inspection that this wording suggests how ironical, not to say playfully impious,
Rousseau is being, especially since he immediately goes on to indicate his true view. “I shall
imagine myself in the Lyceum of Athens, repeating the lessons of my masters, with Plato and
Xenocrates for judges”; “O man, whatever country you may come from, whatever your
opinions may be, listen: here is your history as I believed it to read, not in the books of your
fellow-men, which are liars, but in nature, which never lies” (103b–104t).

The Original State of Nature

Hobbes and Locke argue that the ugly truth about human nature, and about what the original
state of nature must have been like, reveals itself when we witness the way humans behave
when one removes the artificial constraints of civil society – when there is a breakdown of law
and order: Then you see human nature in the raw. Rousseau exposes the fallacy in this
reasoning. What we are observing in such situations, he submits, is what happens to beings
who have been artificially addicted to social and political existence, and have then
been deprived of that to which they have been addicted. To claim that such observation
reveals the true nature of humans is as absurd as claiming that when you see a drug addict in
withdrawal symptoms, you are seeing his true nature as a human. Besides, there is
overwhelming empirical evidence in the rest of animate nature suggesting that we
should not assume that the natural condition of humans was or could be “a state not to be
endured” (as Locke asserts). Everywhere we look in nature, we find animals well adapted to
their natural condition of undomesticated existence. Animals are found ill adapted only where
humans have domesticated them (111). It is reasonable to proceed on the hypothesis that the
same holds, or once held, for the human animal: That in its natural, wild state, the human was
well adapted to the conditions of its existence (107–112). If this were not true, would it not
become a mystery how the human race could have survived? Is this not a crushing problem for
the whole outlook of Hobbes and Locke? If the state of nature is or was as dangerous as
Hobbes and Locke say, how could the human species have lasted long enough to figure out
and to construct all the artificial things it had to figure out – starting with language – in order
to forge “social contracts” to overcome the natural state?

We must, Rousseau argues, think through the state of nature hypothesis much more carefully
and consistently. We must stick intransigently to the hypothesis that humans survived for
countless generations as independent and equal beings. This means that we need to conceive
the state of nature as a state in which the human animal, like other animals, is well adapted to
its environment. We must conceive of a condition in which there is not anything that leads or
drives humans to need others. We must suppose that humans eventually became social only
on account of a long series of “accidents” that were “the chance combination of several
foreign causes which might never have arisen, and without which man would have remained
eternally in his primitive condition” (140, 112). These accidents placed humans
in stressed conditions, where they were compelled to change and distort their natural
tendencies and behaviors.

On this more reasonable hypothesis, it follows that the original, presocial, individual state
would not have been a condition of scarcity, anxiety, or frustration. It would not have been a
state of unresolved tensions or contradictions that propelled humans toward constructing
society. Each individual could meet his or her needs through his or her own independent
efforts. The most important implication for human relations Rousseau makes explicit (at 134–
135): There must have been no family by nature, and no love between the sexes. Reproduction
would have been purely “physical”; copulation would have been casual and momentary, but
also rare, since humans would have lived dispersed, not in groups, but more like wolverines or
cougars or orangutans (119, 121, 137, 142, 222). There would be by nature nothing “moral”
about sex. There would be no reason for any sense of exclusive attachments, or belonging to
one another; no sense of fidelity or infidelity, no jealousy or competition; no special
preference and no awareness even of beauty or merit or admiration. But Rousseau is still more
radical: He draws into question most of the naturalness of motherhood. He suggests that if
human females are naturally independent individuals, there would be by nature no mothering
instinct or direct love of the offspring. Even a mother’s care for her own children can be
imagined to be not a strong natural drive or need but only a kind of incidental consequence of
another natural need. Mothers who had given birth would at first suckle the child simply to
relieve the pain in the breast, with no affection whatsoever for the child. Then purely by habit
mothers would get used to having the baby around and become attached to it and its needs
(121).

This goes with Rousseau’s stress on natural man’s (and woman’s) likely hardiness and courage.
Humans must have been quite capable of defending themselves from other animals, or
running away, or climbing, or hiding. “Always near danger” (the state of nature is not
paradise!), “his best-trained faculties must be those having as principal object attack and
defense, either to subjugate his prey or to save himself from being the prey of another animal”
(112; see also the long passage on 107–109).

It follows that the fundamental human experience by nature is not fear and anxiety (as Hobbes
and Locke and Montesquieu claim). It is rather courageous self-sufficiency and sweet
contentment in solitude, punctuated by very short-term desires, readily satisfied. Once they
satisfied their modest needs, the human individuals would have lapsed into a state of repose,
lightly napping most of the time, like cats, and suffused by a pleasant animal feeling of being
alive – a feeling of their own satisfied, solitary existence. Prior to society and hence language,
there would have been very little imagination, and hence almost no care for the future beyond
the most immediate. Above all, and momentously, Rousseau contends that by nature humans
would have no fear of death (116, 109) – because, like other animals, they would not have a
conception of death (as opposed to pain). As we saw above (in the quote from 112), of course
the human animal would, like all other animals, care for its “self-preservation.” But the animal
does so without thinking of preservation from death. Humans, like other animals, would
preserve themselves by seeking the pleasures of satisfied natural needs and by avoiding the
pains caused by the frustration of those needs.

Closely linked to the lack of knowledge of death is the most significant absence of all. There is
nowhere in the state of nature any sign of any religious belief or experience of God or anything
divine whatsoever. This is of course a teaching that it is not safe for Rousseau to put into plain
words. He expresses this most important and dangerous dimension of his teaching on human
nature by his conspicuous silence and by implication (see especially 96, 102, 110, 117 – the last
two passages making clear that there is no natural human impetus toward thinking or
philosophy) – and of course, in the midst of his footnotes: note O (222).

At the core of the natural human experience is what Rousseau calls the “sentiment of
existence”: The natural human’s “soul, agitated by nothing, is given over to the sole sentiment
of its present existence without any idea of the future, however near it may be, and his
projects, as limited as his views, barely extend to the end of the day” (117). This deeply
contented feeling of existence is closely linked to self-preservation: “Man’s first sentiment was
that of his existence, his first care that of his preservation” (142). Humans are drawn to
preserve themselves partly or even mainly by the recurring sweet feeling of existence; the
sweet sentiment is mentioned first, or is prior. Contrary to what is taught by Hobbes and
Locke, humans are not naturally driven by fear of death, but instead attracted by the joy of
feeling alive. In Rousseau’s later autobiographical writing (the fifth promenade of the Reveries
of a Solitary Walker), he contended that humans today can recover a version of this deepest,
original, natural sense of wholeness and contentment. Rousseau tells us that he himself often
experienced this. He suggests that this experience is the richest and most satisfying, the most
in accord with our nature, that we can have. It is not the same experience as the original
human would have, because we have and articulate it with all the mental development of
historical culture. It is in that way a fuller, richer version of what the primitive human animal
had.

What Distinguishes Humans from Other Animals

There are two respects in which human nature must always have been distinct from the nature
of other life-forms. First, and most conspicuously, Rousseau claims that humans must always
have had some experience, however dim at first, of free will. It is in this awareness of freedom,
of acting on the basis of choice, rather than in any thinking, that the human is set apart from
the other animals. Rousseau here takes his stand on the limits of modern mechanistic physics –
which cannot account for the direct experience every one of us has, of being free to choose
how one is going to act (114; see also 208t).
Yet as soon as he makes this claim about free will, Rousseau admits that it is problematic or
disputable; he goes on to offer in its stead a more certain, undeniable, second distinction
between the human and other animals – “another very specific quality,” about which “there
can be no dispute”: “perfectibility” (perfectibilité), a “faculty which, with the aid of
circumstances, successively develops all the others, and resides among us as much in the
species as in the individual.” By contrast with a human, “an animal is at the end of a few
months what it will be all its life; and its species is at the end of a thousand years what it was
the first year of that thousand” (114b–115t). We get some help in understanding what this
means if we recall an important passage near the beginning, in which Rousseau stressed that
humans are from the beginning distinguished by their lack of fixed instincts, and hence their
capacity to imitate: “Dispersed among the animals,” humans “observe and imitate their
industry”; humans have “the advantage, that whereas each species has only its own proper
instinct, man – perhaps having none that belongs to him – appropriates them all to himself,
feeds equally well with most of the diverse foods which other animals share, and consequently
finds his subsistence more easily than any of them can” (105b–106t). “Perfectibility” seems to
mean the malleability that makes it possible for humans to adapt to circumstances with a
dramatic degree of plasticity, and hence to become, over time, radically different from their
original nature. To put it another way, Rousseau sees that humans have an astounding range
of unnecessary potentialities, which can lie fallow and unrealized but can be triggered into
action and take on a fantastic variety of forms, in response to accidental pressures of all sorts.
Yet if this is what he means, the word Rousseau uses for this adaptability is curious and
thought-provoking. Why designate this plastic adaptability by the highly laudatory term
“perfectibility,” rather than by some more neutral or even pejorative term? What is more,
Rousseau here characterizes the natural condition as one of “imbecility”! Does Rousseau not
suddenly raise the possibility that leaving the natural condition is a kind of ascent or
“perfection” – rather than simply a corruption and degradation? Rousseau here certainly
speaks of “perfectibility” in ambiguous evaluative language: “Perfectibility” is “the source of all
man’s misfortunes,” by drawing him “out of that original condition in which he would pass
tranquil and innocent days”; “in the long run” it makes him “the tyrant of himself and of
nature.” But in the process, perfectibility “brings to flower over the centuries” man’s
“enlightenment and his errors, his vices and his virtues” (115, our emphasis). Rousseau thus
begins to disclose that he is not unqualifiedly condemning the departure from the natural
condition: There are large benefits, as well as perhaps worse costs, in that transition. We are
thus introduced to a complexity and ambiguity in Rousseau’s understanding of human nature,
especially as norm or standard.

But before we get into that more complicated dimension of Rousseau’s normative conception
of human nature, we need to have more fully in view what Rousseau argues would
characterize the relations that humans would have had when they did encounter one another
in their original, purely natural, scattered state. First and foremost is something negative, that
we have already stressed: Humans would have had no desire for superiority or domination. By
nature they would not care what others think of them – except momentarily, when they get in
a fight over food or a sexual partner and want to frighten one another. In a crucial note to his
text, Rousseau elaborates, distinguishing amour de soi-même, or self-love, from amour propre,
or vanity – “two passions very different in their nature and their effects.” “Love of oneself” is a
“natural sentiment which inclines every animal to watch over its own preservation, and which,
directed in man by reason and modified by pity, produces humanity and virtue.” In contrast,
vanity is “only a relative sentiment, artificial and born in society, which inclines each individual
to have a greater esteem for himself than for anyone else, inspires in men all the harm they do
to one another, and is the true source of honor” (Rousseau’s note O, 221b–222). The natural
absence of vanity, as the chief emotional spring causing endless murderous struggle, is a major
justification for Rousseau’s asserting toward the end of the discourse (193) that he has
“demonstrated” that humans are by nature “good.” Rousseau does not mean by natural
“goodness” strong mutual care, love, or moral virtue (129b–130t). Human “goodness” is found
at its purest when humans are totally ignorant of and lack virtue, as morality.

Still, Rousseau goes on here (130) to speak in the second place of a more positive form of
natural goodness. He contends that humans share with other animals a certain pity, or an
aversion to the suffering of other animals, especially fellow members of the same species; this
is the forerunner and natural root of what becomes compassion in society. Yet as one reads
Rousseau’s impassioned praise of pity or compassion as the one “natural virtue” (131), one can
wonder if he is not exaggerating, in order to strengthen what he thinks is an
important social virtue for his readers. He puts the matter most lucidly in the following
formulation: “In the state of nature,” pity “takes the place of laws, morals, and virtue”; it “will
dissuade every robust savage from robbing a weak child or an infirm old man of his hard-won
subsistence, if he himself hopes to be able to find his own elsewhere.” Instead of “that sublime
maxim of reasoned justice, Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” pity “inspires
all men with this other maxim of natural goodness, much less perfect but perhaps more
useful”: “Do what is good for you with the least possible harm to others” (133). Like Hobbes,
Rousseau replaces the golden rule with a rule that is more selfish, but Rousseau traces the
new, more effective, natural substitute not (or not simply) to reason, but to the pre-rational
passion of pity.

The History of Our Humanity

In part two of the Second Discourse, Rousseau develops his conjectural account of the long
series of stages through which human existence became alienated from its natural state.
Throughout this process, and still today, each of us remains at our core an animal that would
find true contentment in the original state that Rousseau sketches in part one. In a sense,
every baby, at the moment of birth, exists momentarily in that state. But immediately after a
baby is born, in developed society, it is subjected to terrific pressures that mold its
“perfectibility” so as to socialize it, repressing its natural animal individuality and forcing its
spirit into artificial habits that harness it to society and to artificial social behaviors.

One can put Rousseau’s thesis another way by saying that almost everything we call human,
and certainly everything civilized, is a product of history – of successive human constructions
over time, in response to accidental stresses. Human nature’s “perfectibility” allows but does
not impel or guide historical human action that gradually constructs civilized humanity. The
process occurs in ways that are almost never fully self-conscious on the part of the humans
who are reconstructing themselves through social changes. By tracing the major steps,
Rousseau is showing how mankind has acquired a kind of second nature, or a very thick shell
of ingrained habituation that overlays and hides the original nature that remains deep within
us.

Rousseau commences by leaping ahead to spotlight the most terrible turning point: the
“founding of civil society,” or “the last stage of the state of nature” – which is the moment
when someone fenced off land and thus invented private landed property. “What crimes,
wars, murders,what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared by
someone who, uprooting the stakes or filling the ditch, had shouted to his fellow-men:
‘Beware of listening to this imposter; you are lost if you forget that the fruits belong to all and
the earth to no one!’” Rousseau thus begins by directly opposing Locke and Locke’s whole
thesis. But Rousseau immediately adds a pregnant, deeply complicating qualification: “But it is
very likely that by then things had already come to the point where they could no longer
remain as they were” (141b–142). Humans must already have undergone vast changes in their
ways, changes that had already made them dependent on all sorts of by nature unnecessary
goods and relationships. Yet strangely enough, Rousseau here calls this moment “the last stage
of the state of nature.” He thus suddenly speaks as if the state of nature itself is not a static
condition, but a mutating condition, with “stages.” And, as he goes on (142b) to summarize
what he has said in part one about original humanity and its condition, he now, curiously, calls
the human described in part one not “natural man,” but instead “nascent man.” He thus opens
up the possibility that the original state of nature is not the wholeof the condition that is
natural for humanity, that it is only the beginning of a process of change that is as a
whole somehow natural, or at least not simply unnatural. The meaning of human “nature” for
Rousseau becomes more explicitly ambiguous. In the pages that follow, the speculative
account that Rousseau gives of the way humans might have been transformed over time
surprises us by being less violent, or less wrenching, than we might expect. The account
sounds in its early stages more like a gradual unfolding. This is true especially of “the first
revolution” in human existence – the building of crude huts (146).

The Birth of Human Social Existence

This “first revolution” gave humans “a sort of property” and the beginnings of the family. “The
first developments of the heart were the effect of a new situation, which united husbands and
wives, fathers and children in a common habitation.” The “habit of living together gave rise to
the sweetest of sentiments known to men: conjugal love and paternal love.” The “sweetest”
sentiment is not, then, the original sweet sentiment of individual existence. The parental and
conjugal joy of loving and being loved is not strictly natural, but it suits and delights humans.
This first, familial, society is rooted in “affection and freedom,” not compulsion. Yet this first
society entailed the momentous division of labor, and differentiation in the way of life, and
resulting interdependence, between the two sexes. And this primary loss of independence was
soon followed by another: Since there was leisure, “they used it to procure many kinds of
commodities unknown to their fathers; and that was the first yoke they imposed on
themselves without thinking about it, and the first source of the evils they prepared for their
descendants.” For these commodities “degenerated into true needs,” so that “being deprived
of them became much more cruel than possessing them was sweet” (146–147; cf. 120b).

The second revolution grows out of this first. “Young people of different sexes live in
neighboring huts; the passing intercourse demanded by nature soon leads to another kind no
less sweet and more permanent through mutual frequentation.” With the birth of extrafamilial
erotic love, “people grow accustomed to consider different objects and to make comparisons;
imperceptibly they acquire ideas of merit and beauty which produce sentiments of
preference.” The “tender and gentle sentiment” of erotic love becomes, “at the least obstacle,
an impetuous fury. Jealousy awakens with love; discord triumphs, and the gentlest of the
passions receives sacrifices of human blood” (148b–149t). Rousseau distinguishes between
love within the family (even sexual love, which was originally simple and uncomplicated) and
the very different, much more artificial and complex, romantic love between unrelated young
people. The original, sweetest sentiment of affection is not romantic love, but rather a kind of
bond of intimate familiarity between housemates, which one has not chosen, which one
simply grows up with. But once sexual attraction and attachment becomes extrafamilial, then
everything changes, and the erotic competition contributes to other forms of competitiveness
that quickly emerge, linked closely to the emergence of the arts, primarily music: “People grew
accustomed to assembling in front of the huts or around a large tree”; “song and dance, true
children of love and leisure,” became “the occupation of idle and assembled men and
women.” 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 adroit, or the most eloquent became the most highly considered; and that
was the first step toward inequality and, at the same time, toward vice” (149, 134–135, 139t,
142).

Here is the original source of the moral life of man: Morality is born out of erotic vanity and
contempt, shame and envy, and the concomitant demand for dignity and respect. “As soon as
men had begun to appreciate one another, and the idea of consideration was formed in their
minds, each one claimed a right to it, and it was no longer possible to be disrespectful toward
anyone with impunity.” From this “came the first duties of civility, even among savages,” and
from this “any voluntary wrong became an outrage, because along with the harm that resulted
from the injury, the offended man saw in it contempt for his person which was often more
unbearable than the harm itself.” Thus, “everyone punishing the contempt shown him by
another in a manner proportionate to the importance he accorded himself, vengeances
became terrible, and men bloodthirsty and cruel.” This is “precisely the point reached by most
of the savage peoples known to us” (149b–150t).

Having thus shown how ambiguous is the evolution from what at first appeared a harmless
and even sweet “revolution,” Rousseau restates very strongly the standard he had established
earlier, in his account of what he now calls the “first state of nature” or the “primitive state” –
the condition of solitude described in part one, whose superiority he now ringingly affirms
more than before. It was in that original state that man was “placed by nature at equal
distances from the stupidity of the brutes and the fatal enlightenment of civil man” (150t).

But no sooner has Rousseau thus placed the original state on a spiritual pedestal than he
shifts, in the midst of his criticism of nascent society, to a praise of nascent society: “[A]lthough
men had come to have less endurance and although natural pity had already undergone some
alteration, this period of the development of human faculties, maintaining a golden
mean between the indolence of the primitive state and the petulant activity of our vanity,
must have been thehappiest and most durable epoch.” “The more one thinks about it,”
Rousseau muses, “the more one finds that this state was the least subject to revolutions, the
best for man, and that he must have come out of it only by some fatal accident, which for the
common good ought never to have happened” (150b–151t, our emphasis). That the Second
Discourse means to celebrate the state of “nascent society,” the state of “savage peoples”
(108, 110, 113, 132, 189) as much if not more than the “primitive,” “true,” original state of
nature (the state of “savage man” – 102b, 106, 111, 112, 115, 117, 119, etc.), is also indicated
by the frontispiece, designed by Rousseau, and explained in his note P (225–226): The
engraving depicts a human renouncing today’s developed society in order to return, not to the
original state of nature, but rather to the savage social state.

Rousseau thus makes it clear that he is deeply ambivalent about the original pure natural
state. After all, it was only when human life underwent the transformation into tribal existence
that the mind and heart developed, along with a heightened self-consciousness, an active
imagination, the sweetest sentiments of family love, and bittersweet romantic love. Besides,
Rousseau suggests that the savage social condition is the most stable or durable, a sign of how
well it suits the human being. Moreover, this condition does still exist today, Rousseau stresses
(179). Many humans in many parts of the world, including North American Native peoples,
remain in this familial or tribal social state; this carries with it major implications for modern
culture. For one thing, it implies that “savage peoples” still living in this condition will be better
off if they are left in it, that is, left alone by the “civilized” Europeans. The whole Second
Discourse, and especially the frontispiece, implies a severe rebuke of European colonialism
(see especially 223–260). Another and still more telling implication is elaborated in Rousseau’s
novels. In them Rousseau tries to show that even within commercial modern society, we can
and should strive to recover something of the more honest and more intimate relations of the
simple familial love that flourished in “nascent society.” Such a recovery is possible, for many
people, whereas the original solitary condition seems, to say the least, much less retrievable.
Accordingly, the question with which Rousseau’s novels wrestle is, to what extent and in what
conditions can (and cannot) romantic love lead to or harmonize with, become consummated
in, familial love. This question becomes the chief theme of the novels of romanticism that
dominate nineteenth-century literature. We see here in this passage of theSecond
Discourse the seed of that cultural movement, as inspired by Rousseau. In this light, we may
say that a major part of Rousseau’s project as a writer is exploring and clarifying which aspects
of the historical overlay of sociability are more, and which less, deeply set and essential, once
the human condition has left behind forever the original solitary and dispersed situation.

The Termination of the State of Nature

But of course, vast portions of mankind did leave behind the savage social state – by
undergoing a new, third, and far more devastating accidental revolution: the twofold
development of agriculture and metallurgy. The creation of these arts went together with the
development of exclusive property rights in land, and the subsequent appropriation and
enclosure, by a few, of all the good farm and mining lands. The vast majority was thereby
reduced to having to work for the few landholders and owners of the mineral resources. Why
and for what reason did this happen? Here again we see a massive disagreement with Hobbes
and (especially) Locke. Rousseau presents the development of agriculture and metallurgy as
something that was not necessary for human comfort and security. He repeats (at 151–152)
his earlier suggestion (at 141–142) that there was nothing in the condition of savage society
that made men truly need to acquire what agriculture and metallurgy provide. Rousseau even
argues that agriculture must have come after the other arts, involving metalworking. For there
was no need, he insists, for abundant food until many men were no longer hunting and
gathering and instead had to spend their labor working in mines or in crafts involving metal
and iron. Nonetheless, once agriculture and metallurgy were developed, there set in ever-
growing inequality, caused most fundamentally by the unequal ownership of land and the
division of labor, but fueled, above all, by the steadily increasing valuing of specific talents that
are unequally distributed among humans.

Rousseau at this point (155–156) summarizes the key thesis of the First Discourse, according to
which, as we’ve seen, the valuing of scientific talents goes together with an enormous
pressure to appear to be other than what one truly is. The intensely dangerous competitive
condition that results from the further development of this third stage leads to a general state
of war. Rousseau agrees, then, that what Hobbes and Locke describe as the state of nature did
and does come about – but only as the last stage of an eons-long development. Moreover for
Rousseau, in contrast to Hobbes and Locke, the state of war that explodes in the final stage of
the state of nature is less a war of all against all, as individuals or small gangs, than it is
a class warfare: a combat between the small class of big property holders and the working-
class majority, who have become slaves or who have to sell their labor power in order to
survive (see especially 162). What Hobbes and Locke call the state of nature, Rousseau insists
is already an organized social state, with economic classes and a class consciousness on the
part of rich and poor. Consequently, while Rousseau agrees with Hobbes and Locke that the
state of war is ended by a social compact, which constitutes the artificial justice devised by
shrewd reasoning that constructs a way out of the state of war, Rousseau evaluates this
contract and its justice very differently. The original social contract he decries as a swindle
perpetrated by the clever among the conniving rich landowners: They persuaded the poor
majority that in order to gain security and peace, and an end to dangerous violence, all must
agree, consent, and contract to establish a “supreme power” that will protect everyone
equally, and their property – without redistributing the property. “Crude” and “easily
seduced,” with “too many disputes among themselves,” and “too much avarice and ambition,”
the poor majority “ran to meet their chains thinking they secured their freedom.” The birth of
lawful political society “destroyed natural freedom for all time, established forever the law of
property and inequality,” and “changed a clever usurpation into an irrevocable right”; “civil
right” replaced the pure “law of nature” except in international relations, which descended
into ever more heinous warfare and hostility, fueled by vanity or so-called honor (158b–161).

Natural Right

Having presented this account of the origin of political society, Rousseau acknowledges that
there are other contrasting and not implausible accounts; however, “the choice among these,”
he declares, “is indifferent to what I want to establish” (161b). What, then, does he want to
establish? That actual consent is the only sound and effective basis of government, because it
is the only basis that is consistent with the passion to be free – which in political society
means, having a significant role in determining the laws that govern one’s own life, and not
living under the arbitrary will of others. Rousseau proceeds to insist that there is a continuum
from the wild animal’s resistance to entrapment or domestication, through the savage’s fierce
love of freedom, to civilized people’s demand for government by consent. Here we see the
meaning of politically relevant “natural right”; here we see how the account of the pre-political
state of nature provides the natural basis and natural standard for all positive right, law, and
government: “As an untamed steed bristles his mane, paws the ground with his hoof, and
breaks away impetuously at the very approach of the bit,” so “barbarous man does not bend
his head for the yoke” but “prefers the most turbulent freedom to tranquil subjection.” And
“therefore it is not by the degradation of enslaved peoples that man’s natural dispositions for
or against servitude must be judged, but by the marvels done by all free peoples to guard
themselves against oppression.” “I see,” Rousseau says, speaking empirically, “animals born
free and despising captivity,” who “break their heads against the bars of their prison”; “I see
multitudes of entirely naked savages scorn European voluptuousness and endure hunger, fire,
the sword, and death to preserve only their independence”; and similarly, “I see” that free
peoples “sacrifice pleasures, repose, wealth, power, and life itself for the preservation of this
sole good” – political liberty (164–165, our emphasis). Thus does original, integral human
nature speak in and to political life, laying down the fundamental law of nature, which declares
that liberty is the sole overriding political good and the only solid foundation of all the other
political goods.
If we resist the temptation to be dazzled by Rousseau’s eloquence here, if we mingle our
appreciation for his eloquence with some critical reflection, we see that our political
philosopher lends edifying rhetorical strength to the natural right basis of political liberty by
blurring some very important distinctions – above all, between the kinds of freedom
exemplified by (a) dutiful, patriotic, moral, and even pious Spartans, such as Brasidas, (b) tribes
of “barbarous,” naked “savages,” and (c) wild animals. Besides, the closer we look, the more
we may be provoked to wonder why Rousseau is silent here on the attachment to freedom
that would have characterizedsolitary man in the original state of nature. Could it be because
“nothing is so gentle as man in his primitive state” (recall 150, 139, 142b–143t, 195)? The link
between the human’s original, natural, and gentle attachment to personal liberty and the
citizen’s virile attachment to civil liberty would seem to be more tenuous than Rousseau’s
civic-spirited rhetoric here suggests.

Still, if the link is somewhat exaggerated here, it is far from being spurious. Original natural
man may have asserted his freedom more often by running away or hiding than by fighting,
but when necessary he fought for it because he loved it, or at least loved his sentiment of
individual existence (107–108, 139–140, 179, 205, 207). The original social contract, even if it
were a fraud perpetrated by the wealthy, must have promised to defend everyone’s freedom
to some extent. If this hadn’t been so, early civilized man would have rejected the contract
(161–164). “Even the wise” (who as such were not fooled by the fraud) “saw the necessity of
resolving to sacrifice one part of their freedom for the preservation of the other” (160t, our
emphasis; cf. 172). On this basis, Rousseau attacks existing political theories as well as
governments for failing adequately to esteem and to defend freedom (164–168). He explains
how “a true contract between the people and the chiefs it chooses for itself” obligates both
parties “to observe laws that are stipulated in it and that form the bonds of their union” (169t).
This sketch of the constitutional basis for civil liberty is richly improved in The Social
Contract (especially 1.6–7, 2.1–6, 3.1).

But given the gulf between lawful liberty and the pre-civil forms of liberty that are more
natural – whose remnants easily veer toward bloody anarchy when civil society breaks down –
Rousseau speaks with reserve of the people’s right to revolution. They do have such a right,
but it is “fatal.” The people’s “right to renounce their dependence” on their rulers entails such
“frightful dissensions,” such “infinite disorders,” that “human governments” need “a basis
more solid than reason alone”: It was “necessary for public repose that divine will intervened
to give sovereign authority a sacred and inviolable character” (170b). While in The Social
Contract Rousseau stresses how essential it is that the norms of reason be supported, in the
best civil society, by the habitual piety of a “civil religion,” here, toward the end of the Second
Discourse, he stresses the importance of religious sanctions for all governments (see also 202–
203).

Rousseau sees, however, two difficulties with religion as a basis for government in the modern
world. The first is religious fanaticism, with the wars of religion to which it leads (171t). The
second and now graver problem is the one Rousseau painted so vividly in the First Discourse; it
is paradoxically the result of the recent attempt to solve the first. The success of the
Enlightenment is causing traditional religion to atrophy. What is needed now is a new civil
religion that will exalt and support the love of civil liberty – that will sanction no claims of
superiority or inferiority and will instead present communal, lawful self-rule as the noble end
in itself, favored and intended by God as the author of nature in its goodness (see especially
97, 201–202). In this way, vanity oramour propre, which cannot be removed from the souls of
today’s humans, will be directed against itself; it will not give rise to arguments for ruling over
others, but will instead support government based on the general will. Such suprarational
guidance is especially crucial at this historical juncture, because all forms of government have
now degenerated into intolerable oppression (175, 177), and revolution may well be imminent
and justified, as it has been time and again in the past (172–173, 177b, 180b–181t).

In the closing pages of the Second Discourse, Rousseau paints a gloomy picture of human
political history, as largely the story of the exploitation of the vast majority by the few rich,
who themselves fall continually into both international and civil conflict for prestige and
power, leading usually to the final institution of one or another form of despotism, bringing a
grim peace in servitude – the Hobbesian Leviathan state – followed by revolution and a new
ruling class. There have been only a few islands in the dark sea of civilized history, islands
where wise and public-spirited lawgivers have created totally different, small, participatory
republics – exemplified by Lycurgus in Sparta, the ancient Hebrew republic of Moses, and the
early Roman republic (163t, 164b, 171b, 173t).

The Puzzling Legacy

What is so deeply frustrating about Rousseau and his philosophy is the absence in his thought
of any clear path to a political solution, or even an unambiguous mitigation, of the terribly
deformed human condition as he describes it within modern “bourgeois” commercial society.
Rousseau points in three very different directions for remedies – each of which has enormous
difficulties.

First is his celebration of the small participatory republic such as the Geneva of his time. But
this is a rare possibility, one that can and should be preserved and protected wherever it exists
but that cannot be looked to as a practical remedy for most developed societies, most
obviously because it requires slowly developed traditions.

Second and more widely available is something that Rousseau promoted not so much in his
political writings as in his novels: a vastly deepened appreciation for the redeeming
possibilities that may be found by retrieving some version of intimate family life, as the
culmination of romantic love and as blessed by Nature’s God. Rousseau, and the enormous
influence he had, especially through the romantic novel, is the source of what are today called
“family values,” which are often associated today with Christian religious faith. In fact, the New
Testament, as we have seen, has little talk of husband and wife as lovers of one another, and
still less talk of romantic love. It was above all Rousseau’s influence, as theologian and as artist,
that profoundly changed Christianity, making it much more centered on the family and
appreciative of romantic love leading to marriage.

Third, Rousseau through his autobiographical writings founded the cult of the lonely thinker as
artist – as the conscientious objector against modern commercial, bourgeois society. He
exalted the life of the bohemian artist as a rebel who uses his art to remind others of the
pretensions and heartlessness of bourgeois commercial society, and who through his art gives
to all those trapped in bourgeois commercial society some outlet and access to the
appreciation and celebration of lost natural individuality. Rousseau is the founder of the
modern cult of art or “aesthetics” as a kind of substitute for religion, as the source of a kind of
escape from or transcendence of competitive commercial society.

But Rousseau always insisted on confronting the very grave limits on any possibility of solving
the human problem. He remained convinced that we can understand only the reasons for –
that we cannot hope to overcome – most of mankind’s profound spiritual unhappiness. We are
doomed to experience a profound sense of not belonging in this world in which history has
placed us.

The leading thinkers in the subsequent century found much of Rousseau’s diagnosis of the
spiritual deficiencies of modern commercial, bourgeois society compelling, but could not rest
satisfied with Rousseau’s failure to show a way to overcome those deficiencies. The most
important innovation in political theory was to suggest that what Rousseau had shown (see
especially 178–180) was that since civilization as we know it is a product, not of our core and
original nature, but instead of a historical development over time, then we should cease to
look so much to nature and instead look to history for our fundamental standards and
guidance.

* The best translation of the First and Second Discourses is by Roger D. Masters and Judith
R.Masters: The First and Second Discourses (New York: St. Martin’s, 1964). Our citations are to
page numbers of this translation. The translation has sometimes been slightly emended.