The Essential Writings Of Rousseau

CONTENTS

COVER ABOUT THE AUTHOR ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR ALSO BY JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU TITLE PAGE INTRODUCTION by Leo Damrosch

DISCOURSE ON THE ORIGIN AND FOUNDATIONS OF INEQUALITY AMONG MEN [COMPLETE]

ON THE SOCIAL CONTRACT, OR, PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL RIGHT [COMPLETE] ÉMILE, OR, ON EDUCATION JULIE, OR, THE NEW HÉLOÏSE CONFESSIONS REVERIES OF THE SOLITARY WALKER

TIMELINE BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE NOTES FURTHER READING ACKNOWLEDGMENTS THE HISTORY OF VINTAGE COPYRIGHT

About the Author

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born in Geneva in 1712. He was a writer and political theorist of the Enlightenment. In 1750 he published his first important work A Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts (1750) where he argued that man had become corrupted by society and civilisation. In 1755, he published Discourse on the Origin of Inequality and in The Social Contract (1762) he argued, ‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains’. This political treatise earned him exile from his home city of Geneva and arguably inspired the French Revolution (his ashes were transferred to the Pantheon in Paris in 1794). He also wrote Èmile, a treatise on education and The New Eloise (1761). This novel scandalised the French authorities who ordered Rousseau’s arrest. In his last 10 years, Rousseau wrote his Confessions. In Confessions he remembers his adventurous life, his achievements and the persecution he suffered from opponents. His revelations inspired the likes of Proust, Goethe and Tolstoy among others. Rousseau died on 2 July in France in 1778.

Peter Constantine’s honours include the PEN Translation Prize, the National Translation Award, the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize, and Greece’s Translators of Literature Prize. He translated Machiavelli’s The Prince for Vintage Classics.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

PETER CONSTANTINE, winner of the PEN Translation Prize and a National Translation Award, has earned wide acclaim for his translations of The Undiscovered Chekhov and of the complete works of Isaac Babel, as well as for his Modern Library translations, which include Gogol’s Taras Bulba, Voltaire’s Candide, Machiavelli’s The Prince, and Tolstoy’s The Cossacks.

ALSO BY JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU

Discourse on the Arts and Sciences

Narcissus

Discourse on Political Economy

Pygmalion

Confessions

Constitutional Project for Corsica

Considerations on the Government of Poland

Essay on the Origin of Languages

JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU

The Essential Writings of Jean- Jacques Rousseau

TRANSLATED BY

Peter Constantine

EDITED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

Leo Damrosch

INTRODUCTION

Leo Damrosch

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the most original thinker in the great movement known as the Enlightenment, although he was probably not the best at any single thing, nor did he aspire to be. Unlike Voltaire or Hume or Diderot, Rousseau had never been a brilliant student; in fact he was never a student at all. Entirely self-taught, he freely acknowledged the handicaps that that entailed. But as an outsider who saw eighteenth-century culture from a uniquely independent perspective, he penetrated to depths that nobody else did. Instead of proposing gradual reforms in society, which was the normal program of the Enlightenment, he mounted a profound critique of its unexamined assumptions. In the sense in which the word philosophe means an imaginative intellectual rather than a formal philosopher, Rousseau has a claim to be considered the greatest of them all.

Indeed, Rousseau was so far ahead of his time that reviewers dismissed his books as merely paradoxical. “He can’t really believe that” was a frequent reaction. But he said, “I would rather be a man of paradoxes than a man of prejudices,”1 and as his challenge sank in, his influence grew. The distinguished Rousseauian Jean Starobinski says of the groundbreaking Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, “The immense echo of these words expanded in time and space far beyond what Rousseau could have foreseen.”2

Rousseau was born in the militantly Protestant city of Geneva in 1712, the son of an affectionate but temperamental watchmaker named Isaac Rousseau. Shortly after giving birth to him his mother died of an infection, and it has been suggested that he bore a lifelong burden of guilt as a result. In later life he idealized the compact city-state—Geneva was then an independent republic, not yet part of Switzerland—and believed that it inspired his belief in the emotional loyalty that citizens need to feel to their community. Praising Genevan mores in a polemical work, he recalled a scene when a citizen

militia had finished drilling in the square below the apartment where he and his father lived:

Most of them gathered after the meal in the Place Saint-Gervais and began dancing all together, officers and soldiers, around the fountain, on to which drummers, fifers, and torch- carriers had climbed. … The women couldn’t remain at their windows for long, and they came down. Wives came to see their husbands, servants brought wine, and even the children, awakened by the noise, ran around half-dressed among their fathers and mothers. The dance was suspended, and there was only embracing, laughter, toasts, caresses. … My father, hugging me, was overcome by trembling in a way that I can still feel and share. “Jean- Jacques,” he said to me, “love your country! Do you see these good Genevans? They are all friends, they are all brothers, joy and concord reign in their midst.”3 [Translations in the introduction are by Leo Damrosch.]

But between the lines in the autobiographical Confessions one senses a lonely and discouraging childhood, which concluded in an apprenticeship from which Rousseau impulsively ran away at the age of sixteen.

Mainly as a way of getting financial support, he converted to Catholicism. After a year in Turin, during which he was reduced to working as a humble lackey, he went to Annecy in the Savoy (not yet part of France) and became the protégé of a beautiful young Catholic convert named Mme de Warens. Under her influence, and that of kindly priests and monks in her social circle, he began to read seriously and to develop a lifelong passion for music. He still had no plans, however, and it began to look as if he would always be a drifter. When his patroness seduced him he was seriously alarmed, since he regarded her as virtually his mother, while for her part she soon tired of responsibility for an apparently shiftless young man.

In due course Rousseau moved to Lyon, where he took a job as tutor to two small boys, and then to Paris. There he became close to Denis Diderot, a brilliant polymath his own age, who did much to expand his thinking. Meanwhile he acquired a partner for life, a young servant girl named Thérèse Levasseur. Their relationship was in effect a common-law marriage, but never a legal one, and when Thérèse bore five children, Rousseau insisted on consigning them to a home for foundlings. Years later his reputation would be seriously damaged when Voltaire, who hated him, made this conduct public.

In 1749, when Rousseau was thirty-seven, he set out on foot to visit Diderot, who had been incarcerated in the château of Vincennes near Paris because of irreligious hints he had published. (To assure ongoing publication

of the great Encyclopédie, of which he was co-editor, Diderot promised never to transgress again and was released.) Pausing to rest, Rousseau idly opened a newspaper and found his life permanently changed. The obscure Academy of Dijon was offering a prize for the best essay on the topic “Whether the restoration of the sciences and arts has contributed to purify morals.” It was a trite question, practically taking for granted an affirmative answer, but when Rousseau suddenly saw a new way of arguing the negative, “I beheld a different universe and became a different man.” He was overcome by “dizziness like that of drunkenness,” his heart pounded, and tears drenched his shirt. Under a tree, he scribbled a speech by an ancient Roman who returns from the past to denounce modern sophistication, crying, “Madmen, what have you done?” Rousseau won the prize, his Discourse on the Sciences and Arts was published, and it was an immediate sensation.

The more searching Discourse on the Origin of Inequality followed in 1755, and in 1761–62, in the space of eighteen months, Rousseau produced no fewer than three great books. Julie, or, The New Héloïse, a novel about romantic passion transformed into friendship, became an international bestseller. Émile, or, On Education, urging that children should be allowed to develop their individual talents, has influenced educational reforms ever since. And the Social Contract, insisting that a government gains legitimacy only from the shared commitment of its citizens, would have explosive effect a generation later.

Rousseau was now a celebrated writer in a remarkable range of fields, and in fact his work was far from miscellaneous, since—as he said himself—it all flowed from a single foundational idea. Man, he held, is naturally good, and it is society that has made him wicked. In those days, whatever was wrong in the world was conventionally ascribed by preachers to the sin of pride, and by political theorists to insubordination against superiors. Rousseau held that in the state of nature, “natural man” would have been self-sufficient and uncompetitive, and although civilization has brought benefits that we can no longer bear to give up, we should strive to recover as much of our natural selves as we can. In romantic relationships, we should break free from possessive passion; in education, we should encourage individuality to blossom; and in politics, we should respect the freedom of the individual.

The heart of Rousseau’s thinking, his fundamental paradox, was to honor individualism but at the same time to submit it to a devastating critique.

Progressive writers in the Enlightenment thought that the good of society was served by competition among individuals, who find it in their own interest to cooperate as well as compete; Adam Smith extolled the virtues of sociability even as he called for a free market. Rousseau took a more pessimistic view of self-interest, like that of seventeenth-century moralists such as Pascal, who said grimly in his Pensées, “Each me is the enemy of all the others, and would like to be their tyrant.”4 But whereas Pascal ascribed selfishness to original sin, Rousseau ascribed it to society, and he imagined a new kind of society in which “every individual, in uniting with everyone else, will still only be answerable to himself and remain as free as before.”5

From social criticism, Rousseau’s thinking naturally moved to individual psychology. In his own life he had experienced the ways in which a trusting, affectionate child could become selfish and dishonest, and he now preached an ideal of “sincerity” in which inside and outside would be in harmony, as he believed they once were for natural man. Eventually he had to acknowledge that it was harder to be sincere than he first thought, but this, too, produced a striking insight: we are conditioned so effectively to play artificial roles that we mistake them for our true nature. Rousseau saw that when he had been acting as a righteous counterculture critic, truth telling had actually been a kind of playacting:

I was no longer that timid person, more shamefaced than modest, who didn’t dare to introduce himself or speak, whom a playful word would disconcert and a woman’s glance would cause to blush. … The contempt that my profound meditations inspired for the mores, maxims, and prejudices of the age made me impervious to the mockery of those who entertained them, and I crushed their little bon mots with my pronouncements as I would have crushed an insect between my fingers.6

Most of the philosophes took it for granted that we are by nature role- players and in fact are defined by our roles. Rousseau, inner-directed rather than other-directed, sought what would later be known as authenticity: commitment to a true self that lies deeper than any role. In a riposte to Diderot’s treatise The Paradox of the Actor, he described the skill of accomplished performers as simply a specialized version of what everyone is conditioned to do. In an eloquent critique that has much in common with the Calvinist values of his native Geneva, and also with Plato’s rejection of the arts in The Republic, he rose to moral outrage:

What is the talent of the actor? The art of counterfeiting himself, clothing himself with another character than his own, appearing different than he is, becoming passionate in cold blood, saying something other than what he thinks as naturally as if he really thought it, and at last forgetting his own place by taking someone else’s. What is the profession of the actor? A trade by which he gives himself in performance for money, submits himself to the ignominy and affronts that people buy the right to give him, and puts his person publicly on sale.7

This was not conventional moralizing but serious reflection on the insight that civilization encourages and rewards inauthentic behavior.

During these years, Rousseau was still living in France, but his religious and political ideas provoked official outrage there. The Catholic Church, which controlled education and censored every legally published book, was scandalized by the liberal treatment of religion in Émile. The Social Contract was similarly unacceptable to the authoritarian monarchy, and both books were publicly burned. Other philosophes often held subversive views, but they published them anonymously. Rousseau defiantly signed his own name to his books, and he was singled out as a scapegoat for the entire Enlightenment movement. A warrant was issued for his arrest, and he was given warning just in time to flee the country.

Return to Geneva was impossible, even though he had reconverted to Protestantism, since Émile and the Social Contract were proscribed there, too. Instead, he made his way to the territory of Neuchâtel, ruled at that time by Frederick the Great of Prussia, who liked to think of himself as a philosopher king. Thérèse soon followed, replying when Rousseau said he would understand if she didn’t share in his persecution, “My heart has always been yours and will never change, so long as God gives you life and me as well. … I would go to join you even if I had to cross oceans and precipices.”8

Three years later, after local Calvinist ministers stirred up mob hostility on account of Rousseau’s religious views, he and Thérèse were driven from Switzerland, too. At the invitation of David Hume they moved to England, in what proved a highly unfortunate choice. Rather than stay in London, where French was widely understood, they retreated to a remote village in the Midlands, and by the end of a bitterly cold winter Rousseau had become alarmingly paranoid. Convinced that Hume, of all people, was masterminding a vast plot against him, he fled back to France and went into hiding there. Eventually he resolved to return to Paris and confront his accusers. They

failed to appear. By that time he had ceased publishing, and the authorities were reluctant to make a martyr of him.

So Rousseau lived out his final decade in Paris, enjoying music and pursuing an avocation of collecting plants in the countryside. Speaking of himself in his late, unpublished Dialogues, he explained: “It is through idleness, nonchalance, and aversion to dependency and bother that Jean- Jacques copies music. He does his task as and when it pleases him; he doesn’t have to account for his day, his time, his labor, or his leisure to anyone. … He is himself, and for himself, all day and every day.”9 In effect he was trying to re-create the condition of natural man.

The paranoia remained, but it was successfully compartmentalized, a firewall that enabled Rousseau to avoid uncomfortable contact with strangers and to enjoy the simple pleasures of life. The younger writer Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, who often accompanied him on his walks, recalled an eloquent comment of his on the singing of the nightingale: “Our musicians have all imitated its high and low notes, its runs and capriccios, but what characterizes it—its prolonged piping, its sobs, the sighing sounds that go to the soul and pervade its song—that is what no one has been able to capture.”10

A collision in the street with a galloping Great Dane resulted in concussion and lasting brain damage, and Rousseau died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1778, at the age of sixty-six.

After his death several posthumous works were published, most notably the great Confessions, which stands with its namesake by Saint Augustine as the most original and influential auto biographies ever written. Rousseau seems to have been literally the first writer to do what now seems inevitable, to seek the roots of personality in early relationships and experiences. The title of Marcel Proust’s great cycle of novels, À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, could easily be Rousseau’s: “In Search of Lost Time.” His richest recoveries of the past are concentrated in the first three books of the twelve- book Confessions, which are included in their entirety in this volume.

One of the most memorable passages in the later books recreates a sensation of unalloyed contentment that Rousseau liked to call le sentiment de l’existence, the consciousness of simply being alive. He and Mme de Warens had just moved to a country house known as Les Charmettes:

Here begins the brief happiness of my life; here come the peaceful but rapid moments that have given me the right to say I have lived. Precious moments that I miss so much, ah! begin again for me your pleasant course; flow more slowly in my memory, if that is possible, than you actually did in your fleeting succession. If all of that consisted in doings, in actions, in words, I would be able to describe and render it to some extent; but how can I say what was never said, or done, or even thought, but tasted and felt, so that I can name no object for my happiness except the feeling itself? I got up with the sun and was happy, I took a walk and was happy, I saw Maman [Mme de Warens] and was happy, I left her and was happy, I roamed the woods and hills, I wandered in the valleys, I read, I was idle, I worked in the garden, I gathered fruit, I helped around the house, and happiness followed me everywhere. It wasn’t in any single thing one could identify, it was entirely in myself, and it couldn’t leave me for a single moment.11

In truth, this was a flight of imagination more than an accurate reminiscence; we know from Rousseau’s letters that most of the time at Les Charmettes he lived alone, unhappy and neglected.

Rousseau’s influence as an analyst of culture developed gradually; his influence as a political thinker bore fruit more immediately. When Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, two years before Rousseau’s death, that all men are created equal and possess unalienable rights, he was using Rousseauian language. And in 1789 the political time bomb of the Social Contract burst. The leaders of the French Revolution, with their ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity, hailed Rousseau as a prophet. His remains were reinterred with immense pomp in the Panthéon in Paris, and according to the official account of the occasion, “The moon that shed its pale and colorless light gave this procession the aspect of those ancient mysteries whose initiates were pure or washed clean of their faults.” Especially notable was a delegation from his native city, marching with a banner that read “Aristocratic Geneva proscribed him, a regenerated Geneva has avenged his memory.”12

In the ensuing years Rousseau’s influence continued to spread. Romanticism, with its emphasis on originality, imagination, and oneness with nature, was profoundly in his debt. The growing recognition that governments should reflect their people’s will, together with the conviction that social inequality is intrinsically unjust, have profound roots in his thought. The concept of childhood as a crucially formative stage of development is Rousseauian at its heart. And psychoanalysis, searching for hidden foundations of the self, carries forward the quest that he launched in the Confessions.

Rousseau never wanted to found a system, and he didn’t. His mission was to expose the unreconciled conflicts that make human life so difficult and that conventional systems of politics and education and psychology try to iron out. At a friend’s house, he once took a peach from the bottom of a pyramid of fruit, upon which the whole thing fell down. “That’s what you always do with all our systems,” she commented; “you pull down with a single touch, but who will build up what you pull down?”13 By pulling down, he challenged later generations to build up again in new ways, and his style of questioning has become inseparable from our culture. “The friends of Rousseau,” one friend of his remarked, “are as though related to each other through his soul, which has joined them across countries, ranks, fortune, and even centuries.”14 Many people who have barely heard of him are, at a deep level, friends of Rousseau.

LEO DAMROSCH, is Ernest Bernbaum Research Professor of Literature at Harvard University. He is the author of numerous books, including Tocqueville’s Discovery of America and Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius, a finalist for the 2005 National Book Award in nonfiction.

DISCOURSE ON THE ORIGIN AND FOUNDATIONS OF INEQUALITY AMONG MEN

In 1755, five years after Rousseau’s Discourse on the Sciences and Arts made him unexpectedly famous, he once again responded to an essay competition announced by the Academy of Dijon. The topic this time was “What is the origin of inequality among men, and is it authorized by natural law?” The Academy rejected his submission because it greatly exceeded the length limit, which didn’t matter to Rousseau, because it was immediately published and proved to be a work of extraordinary originality.

Instead of tracing the phenomenon of inequality historically, as would have been usual at the time, this second Discourse is a thought experiment that attempts to discover what would be truly natural to human beings if society had never shaped them at all. “Natural man” is imagined as essentially an animal, solitary and unsocial, open to feeling but with no need of reason, and with no wish or occasion to exploit other people. The development of society brought with it much that was good, particularly the mutual love and support of family life, and we could never return to the state of nature. But the negative consequences have been immense: the very fact of needing other human beings has led everywhere to joyless labor, inequality, and oppression. Rousseau’s central message—immensely influential in later generations—is that social inequality is universal but it is also wrong. Still, to the extent that “natural man” survives at a deep level inside us, we can try to live according to Nature and to open ourselves to spontaneity of feeling.

PREFACE

The most useful of the natural sciences, yet the least advanced, strikes me as being the science of man, and I will venture to say that at the Temple of Delphi the only inscription contained a precept more important and difficult than all the copious volumes of the moralists.15 I also regard the subject of the following discourse as consisting of the most interesting questions that philosophy can propose and, unfortunately for us, one of the most contentious that the philosophers seek to resolve. For how can we understand the source of the inequality among men if we do not begin by understanding them? And how can man ultimately succeed in seeing himself as nature formed him through all the changes that the succession of time and circumstances must have produced in his original constitution, and disentangle what is innate in him from what circumstances and his progress have added or changed in his original state? Like the statue of Glaucus, which time, the sea, and storms had so disfigured that it resembled less a god than a wild beast, the human soul, altered in the bosom of society by a thousand perpetually recurring causes, by the acquisition of a mass of knowledge and multitude of errors, by the changes befalling the constitution of the body and by the continual impact of the passions, has changed so as to be hardly recognizable.16 And one no longer finds beings that always act according to firm and invariable principles, beings with the celestial and majestic simplicity that their creator imprinted on them; instead one finds the misshapen contrast of a passion that believes it reasons and an understanding that is frenzied.

What is even more cruel is that all progress made by the human species ceaselessly moves it ever further from its original state: the more discoveries we make and the more new knowledge we accumulate, the more we deprive ourselves of the means of acquiring the most important knowledge of all, and it is in a sense, through studying man that we have made ourselves incapable of knowing him.

It is clear that it is in these successive changes of the human constitution that one must look for the initial origin of the differences that distinguish men who were, by common consent, naturally as equal among one another as the animals of every species until diverse physical causes introduced the varieties that we see in them. In fact, it is not conceivable that these first changes, however they may have come about, would have altered all the individuals of a species at once and in the same manner; while some would have been improved or caused to deteriorate, having acquired various good or bad qualities that were not inherent in their nature, others would have remained longer in their original state. Such was the first source of inequality among men, and it is easier to present it in general terms such as these than to assign its true causes with precision.

Let my readers therefore not imagine that I dare flatter myself at having seen what seems to me so difficult to see. I have initiated some arguments and hazarded a few conjectures, less in the hope of resolving the question than with the intention of shedding light on its true state. Others will be able to go further along the same path without it being easy for anyone to reach the end, since it is not an easy task to disentangle what is original from what is artificial in man’s present nature, and to know well a state that no longer exists and that perhaps never has existed nor ever will, and yet of which it is necessary to have precise notions in order to judge our present state correctly.17 He who would undertake to determine the precise steps necessary to make sound observations on this subject would certainly need more philosophy than one would imagine, and a good solution to the following problem strikes me as being worthy of the Aristotles and Plinys of our day: “What experiments would be necessary to achieve an understanding of natural man, and what are the methods by which such experiments should be conducted within society?” Far from undertaking to resolve this question, I believe I have meditated enough on the subject to dare reply in advance that the greatest philosophers would not be suitable for conducting these experiments, nor the most powerful sovereigns to perform them. It is hardly reasonable to expect such a collaboration to succeed, particularly as it would need perseverance, or rather a confluence of intellect and goodwill on both sides.

And yet such an investigation, which is so difficult to undertake and to which until now such little thought has been given, is the only means left to us of dispersing a multitude of difficulties that prevent our knowing the true foundations of human society. It is the ignorance of man’s nature that casts so much uncertainty and obscurity on the true definition of natural right: for the idea of right, says Monsieur Burlamaqui,18 and even more that of natural right, are incontestably ideas relating to the nature of man. It is from the very nature of man, Monsieur Burlamaqui continues, and from his constitution and condition, that the principles of this science must be deduced.

It is with some surprise or shock that one notes how little agreement prevails on this important matter among the authors who have treated these issues. Among the soundest, one will not find two who are of the same opinion on this point—not to mention the ancient philosophers, who seem to have made it their mission to contradict one another on the most fundamental principles. The Roman jurists indiscriminately placed man and all the other animals under the same natural law, since they considered natural law the law that nature imposes upon itself rather than the one it prescribes; or because of the specific meaning under which these jurists understood the word law, which in this instance they seem to have taken to mean the expression of the general relations established by nature among all animate beings for their preservation. As men of our era understand law only to mean a rule prescribed to a moral being (that is to say, a being that is intelligent, free, and considered in its relation to other beings), they consequently restrict the domain of natural law to the only animal endowed with reason, that is to say man. But while they all define this law in their own way, they base it on such metaphysical principles that there are, even among us, very few people capable of understanding them, let alone discovering them of their own accord. Accordingly, all the definitions provided by these learned men, who are otherwise in perpetual disagreement with one another, agree only on this point: that it is impossible to understand the law of nature, and consequently to obey it, without being a truly great thinker and profound metaphysician. What this means is that for the establishment of society, men have had to employ an intelligence that develops only with great difficulty, and for very few people, in the bosom of society itself.

With such limited knowledge of nature and such a lack of agreement on the meaning of the word law, it would be quite difficult to agree on an adequate definition of natural law. Consequently, all the definitions found in books have, besides the defect of lacking in consistency, the further defect of being derived from several fields of knowledge that men do not have innately, and from advantages of which they cannot conceive until after they have left the state of nature.19 One begins by considering what rules would be appropriate for men to establish among themselves for the common interest, and one then gives the name natural law to the collection of these rules without any other proof than the good that one feels would result from their universal implementation. This is certainly a convenient way of creating definitions and explaining the nature of things through concurrences that are almost arbitrary.

But so long as we do not know man in his natural condition, it is in vain that we seek to determine the law that he has received or the one that best suits his constitution. The only thing about this law we can see clearly is that for it to be a law, the will of him whom it binds must be able to submit himself to it consciously; but in order for this law to be natural, it must also speak immediately with the voice of nature.

Casting aside all the scientific books that only teach us to see men as they have made themselves, and reflecting on the first and most simple operation of the human spirit, I believe I perceive two principles antecedent to reason, of which one interests us intensely in our well-being and self-preservation, and the other inspires in us a natural repugnance at seeing any sentient being, particularly a fellow human, perish or suffer. It is from the collaboration and combination of the two principles of which our minds are capable, without it being necessary to introduce the principle of sociability, that, it seems to me, all the rules of natural law flow; rules that reason is then forced to reestablish on other foundations when, by its successive developments, it has succeeded in stifling nature.

In this way, one is not obliged to make man into a philosopher before making him into a man. His duty toward others is not solely dictated by belated lessons of wisdom, and so long as he does not resist the inner impulse to commiserate he will never do harm to another man or another sentient being, except in the legitimate case where his self-preservation is concerned,

in which he is obliged to give preference to himself. By these means one also ends the ancient disputes as to whether animals are part of natural law, as it is clear that since they lack intellect and freedom, they cannot recognize this law; and yet, sharing to some extent as they do in our nature through the sensibility with which they are endowed, it would seem that animals ought also to share in natural right, and that man is subject to some form of duty toward them. In fact, it would appear that if I am obliged not to do any harm to a fellow man, it is less because he is a rational being than because he is a sentient one, a quality which, being common to both man and beast, must at least give the one the right not to be needlessly ill-treated by the other.

This same study of original man, of his true needs and the fundamental principles of his duty, is furthermore the only good means of dispelling the myriad difficulties that arise concerning the origin of moral inequality, the true foundations of the body politic, the reciprocal rights of its members, and a thousand other such questions, which are as important as they are opaque.

Looking at society with a calm and objective eye, it at first appears to exhibit only the violence of powerful men and the oppression of the weak. Our minds are repelled by the harshness of the former, and we are driven to lament the blindness of the latter. Nothing is less stable among men than these external relationships, which are more often the product of chance than of wisdom, and which one calls weakness or power, wealth or poverty; consequently, the institutions of man seem at first glance to be built on sand. It is only upon examining them up close, when the dust and sand that surround the edifice have been swept away, that one can see the unshakable foundations upon which it is built and learns to respect these foundations. For without the serious study of man and his natural faculties and their successive development, one will never succeed in making such distinctions and in separating in the present state of things what the divine will has done from what human skill claims to have done. The political and moral investigations to which the important question I am examining give rise are consequently useful in every way, and the hypothetical history of government is in every way an instructive lesson for man. By considering what we would have become had we been abandoned to ourselves, we must learn to bless Him whose beneficent hand, by correcting our institutions and giving them an unshakable foundation, has anticipated the disorders that would have

resulted, thus instigating our happiness by means that seemed destined to complete our misery.

DISCOURSE ON THE ORIGIN AND FOUNDATIONS OF INEQUALITY AMONG MEN

It is of man that I have to speak, and the question I shall examine assures that I will be speaking openly, as one does not propose such questions to one’s fellow men when one is afraid of honoring the truth. I will, therefore, defend the cause of humanity with confidence before the wise men who invite me to do so, and shall be pleased if I prove worthy of my subject and my judges.

In my view there are two sorts of inequality in the human species: one I call natural or physical, because it is established by nature and consists of differences in age, health, physical strength, and qualities of the mind or soul; the other, one might call moral or political inequality, because it depends on some sort of mutual agreement, and is established, or at least authorized, by the consent of men. This inequality consists of the various privileges that some enjoy at the expense of others, such as being wealthier, more honored, and more powerful than they, or even making themselves obeyed.

One cannot ask what the source of natural inequality is, because the simple definition of the term would be provided as an answer. Even less can one inquire if there is not some essential connection between the two inequalities, for that would be to ask in different terms if those who command are necessarily better than those who obey, and if the power of the body or the mind, and wisdom or virtue, are always found in the same individuals in proportion to their power or wealth: this is a good question, perhaps, in a debate among slaves within earshot of their masters, but it is not fitting for free men of reason who are engaged in a quest for truth.

What, then, is this discourse about? Its aim is to mark within the progression of things the moment in which rights succeeded violence, and nature was subjected to law; to explain by what sequence of miracles the powerful might resolve to serve the weak and the people purchase an imaginary repose at the price of true happiness.

All the philosophers who have examined the foundations of society have felt compelled to go back to the state of nature, but not one has succeeded. Some have not hesitated to suppose that men living in a natural state had the notion of what was just and unjust, without troubling to show that they must already have had that notion, or even that it would have been useful to them to have it. Others have spoken of a natural right that each individual has to protect what belongs to him, yet without explaining what they understand by belongs. Others again, after first granting authority to the more powerful over the weaker, immediately created a government without giving thought to the time that had to elapse before the words authority and government could attain meaning among men. Finally, all the philosophers, speaking constantly of need, greed, oppression, desires, and pride, imbued the state of nature with ideas they had found in society. They spoke of savage man but depicted civilized man. It did not even occur to most of our philosophers to doubt that the state of nature once existed, whereas it is evident from the Holy Scriptures that the first man, having instantly received intellect and precepts from God, was himself not in a state of nature at all; and if one gives the writings of Moses the credence that every Christian philosopher owes them, one must say that even before the Deluge men never existed in a pure state of nature, unless they lapsed into it by some extraordinary occurrence; a paradox that is most difficult to defend and altogether impossible to prove.

Let us therefore begin by setting aside all the facts, for they do not touch on the problem.20 One must not take the inquiries into which one can enter on this subject as historical truths, but merely as hypothetical and conditional reasoning. These are better suited to elucidate the nature of things than to show their true origin, and are comparable to the hypotheses that our natural scientists make every day on the formation of the world. Religion commands us to believe that God Himself drew men out of the state of nature immediately after the Creation, and that men are unequal because he willed them to be so. But religion does not forbid us to form conjectures drawn exclusively from the nature of man and the creatures surrounding him, or to conjecture what might have happened to mankind had it been left to itself. This is what I am asked, and this is what I intend to examine in this discourse. Since my subject concerns man in general, I will strive to adopt a language suited to all nations, or, rather, forgetting times and places in order

to think only about the men to whom I am speaking, I shall imagine myself in the Lyceum of Athens, repeating the lessons of my masters, having as my judges Platos and Xenocrateses, and mankind as my auditors.21

Listen, O man, from whatever country you may be, whatever your opinions! Here is your history such as I believe to read it, not in books written by your fellow men, who are liars, but in nature, which never lies. Everything that comes from nature will be true. Nothing will be false, except what I might unintentionally have included of my own. The times of which I shall speak are very distant. How much you have changed from what you once were! It is, so to speak, the life of your species I will describe to you according to the qualities that you have received, and that your education and your habits have been able to corrupt but not destroy. There is, I believe, an age at which an individual might want to stop growing older; you will look for the age at which you wish your species to have gone no further. Discontented with your present state for reasons that herald even greater discontent for your unfortunate posterity, you might perhaps wish to be able to go back in time. And this sentiment must lead to the praise of your first ancestors, the criticism of your contemporaries, and dread for those who will have the misfortune of living after you.

PART ONE

As important as it might be to consider man from his origins in order to judge his natural state, and examine him, so to speak, in the original embryonic state of his species, I will not follow his development through its successive stages. I will not pause to search in his biology for what he might have been at the beginning in order to eventually become what he is now. I will not examine if, as Aristotle believes, man’s elongated nails might originally have been hooked claws, if he was hairy like a bear, and if, walking on all fours, his eyes directed at the ground and confined to a few paces ahead, whether this did not shape the character and also the limits of his ideas. On this question I could form only vague, almost imaginary, conjectures. Comparative anatomy has still made too little progress, and the observations of natural scientists are still too uncertain, to allow for a solid foundation on such a subject. Thus, without turning to supernatural knowledge on this subject, and without regard to the changes that have taken place in man’s inner and outer form as he gradually began to apply his limbs to new uses and to nourish himself on new foods, I will assume him to have always had the form I see him having today, walking on two feet, making use of his hands as we make use of ours, directing his eyes at all of nature and surveying with them the vast expanse of heaven.

In stripping this being, constituted as he is, of all the supernatural gifts he might have received, and of all the artificial faculties that he could have acquired only by a long progress; in considering this being, in short, such as he must have emerged from the hands of nature, I see an animal that is less strong than some, less agile than others, but, in sum, formed in the most advantageous way of all. I see him satisfying his hunger beneath an oak, quenching his thirst at the first stream, making his bed beneath the same tree that furnished him his meal—thus his needs are satisfied.

Abandoned to its natural fertility and covered by immense forests that the ax had never mutilated, the earth offers at every step food and shelter to

animals of every species. Men, dispersed among them, observe and imitate their industry and thus raise themselves to the instinct of beasts, with the advantage that each species has merely its own instincts, while man, having perhaps none that are his own, appropriates them all, nourishing himself equally on a wide selection of foods that other animals share, consequently finding his sustenance with greater ease than any of the others.

Men have developed a robust and almost unchanging temperament, accustomed as they had been from childhood to the inclemency of the weather and the rigors of the seasons, worked to exhaustion and forced, unarmed and exposed to the elements, to guard their lives and their prey against other wild beasts or to run away from them. The children, coming into the world with the excellent constitution of their fathers, and fortifying this constitution with the same practices that created it, acquired all the vigor of which the human species is capable. Nature treated these children exactly as the law of Sparta treated the children of its citizens: it made those with a good constitution strong and robust and made all the others perish, thus differing from our societies, where the state, rendering children burdensome to their fathers, kills them indiscriminately before they are born.

As the body of the savage man is the only instrument he knows, he puts it to various uses of which our unaccustomed bodies are incapable, and it is our machines that rob us of the strength and dexterity which necessity obliges savage man to acquire. If he had had an ax, could his wrists have smashed such powerful branches? If he had had a sling, could he have thrown a stone with his hand with such might? If he had had a ladder, would he have climbed a tree with such ease? If he had had a horse, could he have run so fast? Give civilized man enough time to gather all his machines about him, and one can be certain that he will overcome savage man with ease. But if you want to see an even more unequal contest, pitch them against one another naked and unarmed, and you will soon see the true advantage of constantly having all your strength at hand, of always being ready for any eventuality, and always being, so to speak, entirely complete within oneself.

Hobbes claims that man is naturally intrepid and seeks only to attack and fight. Another illustrious philosopher, on the contrary, thinks (as both Cumberland and Pufendorf also assert) that there is nothing as timid as man in the state of nature; that he is always trembling and ready to flee at the

slightest noise he hears, the slightest movement he sees.22 That might be true of objects he does not know, and I do not doubt that he is frightened by every new thing he sees whenever he cannot distinguish the physical good or evil he is to expect, or compare his strength to the dangers he is facing—rare circumstances in the state of nature, where everything progresses in such a uniform fashion, and where the face of the earth is not subject to abrupt and continuing changes triggered by the passions and impulses of men living in society. But savage man, living dispersed among animals and finding himself compelled to measure himself against them, is quick to make the comparison, and feeling that he surpasses them, in skill more than strength, learns not to fear them anymore. Set a bear or a wolf against a savage who is strong, agile, and courageous, as all savage men are, arm him with stones and a good club, and you will see that the danger is at most mutual, and that after several encounters of the kind, ferocious beasts that avoid attacking one another will also avoid attacking man, whom they will have found just as ferocious as they are themselves. As for animals that really have more strength than he has skill, man finds himself in the same situation as other weaker species that nevertheless continue to survive. He has the advantage of being as ready to flee as they are, and finding almost certain refuge in the trees, he always has the choice of taking on or avoiding an encounter and of choosing to fight or flee. Let us add that it does not appear that any animal naturally wages war against man except in a case of self-defense or extreme hunger, or bears him any violent antipathies that seem to announce that one species is destined by nature to serve as fodder for another.

(No doubt this is why negroes and savages worry so little about ferocious beasts that they might encounter in the forests. The Caribs of Venezuela, among others, in this respect live in great security without the least trouble. Though almost naked, they boldly face danger armed only with bow and arrow, François Corréal says, but one has never heard that any of them have ever been devoured by beasts.)23

More formidable enemies, against which man does not have the same means to defend himself, are the natural infirmities: infancy, old age, and illnesses of every kind—sad signs of our weakness, of which the first two are common to all animals, while illnesses mainly assail man living in society. I also note, on the subject of infancy, that a mother, carrying her child with her

everywhere, can feed it with much greater ease than the females of many other species that are forced to exhaust themselves going back and forth, on one side to find food, on the other to suckle or feed their young. It is true that if the woman perishes the child is at great risk of perishing with her, but this danger is common to countless other species where the young are not capable of foraging for food on their own. And if the duration of childhood is longer among us, our lives being longer, then everything is more or less equal in this respect, although there are other rules concerning the duration of dependence and the number of young that are not relevant to my subject. With old people who are less active and perspire little, the need for food diminishes along with the ability to provide for it. And as the way of life of savages keeps gout and rheumatism at bay—and old age, among all the ills, is the one ill that human aid can least alleviate—they end up expiring without anyone discerning that they have ceased to exist, and almost without realizing it themselves.

As for illnesses, I will not repeat the futile and false declarations against medicine that most healthy people make, but will ask if there is any reliable evidence from which one can conclude that in those countries where the art of medicine is most neglected, the average life of man is shorter than in countries where it is pursued with greater zeal; and how could this be, if we unleash in ourselves more illnesses than those for which medicine can provide remedies! There is the extreme inequality in men’s way of life, an excess of idleness in some and work in others; there is the ease with which our appetites and senses are aroused and satisfied; there is the food of the rich that is too sumptuous, and that inflames humors and triggers indigestion; the bad food of the poor, who often have no food at all, the lack of which leads them to voraciously overburden their stomachs when they have the chance; nights of revelry, excesses of every kind, the immodest raptures of the passions, the exhaustion of the mind, and the vexation and countless sorrows that man experiences in all stations of life and which perpetually gnaw at the soul; all this is dire proof that most of our illnesses are of our own doing, and that we could have avoided almost all of them had we conserved a way of life that is simple, constant, and retiring, as nature has prescribed. If nature destined us to be healthy, I almost dare to assume that a contemplative state is one contrary to nature, and that a man who reflects is a depraved animal.24

When one thinks of the good condition that savages are in, at least those we have not ruined with our strong liquor, when one discerns that they barely know any illnesses other than injury and old age, one is very much led to believe that one could map the history of human illness by following the diseases of civil societies. This, at least, is the opinion of Plato, who evaluates certain remedies used or esteemed by Podalirius and Machaon at the siege of Troy that were not yet known among men. [And Celsus reports that dieting, which today is so necessary, was first invented by Hippocrates.]25

Having such few sources of illness, men in the state of nature consequently have little need for medicine, and even less for doctors; in this respect the human species is not in worse condition than all the other species, and it is easy to inquire from hunters whether they come across many ailing animals. They encounter a number of animals that have suffered severe injuries that had healed, animals that have had bones and even limbs broken that became whole again, with time as their only surgeon, everyday life their only therapy; animals that were no less perfectly healed for not having been tormented with incisions, poisoned with drugs, or wasted by fasting. Finally, regardless of how useful well-administered medicine might be among us, it is always certain that if a sick savage, abandoned, has only nature to rely on, he has, on the other hand, nothing to fear but his illness, which frequently renders his situation preferable to ours.

Let us therefore beware of confusing savage men with the men around us. Nature treats all animals abandoned to her care with a predilection that seems to show how jealously she guards her right. The horse, the cat, the bull, even the donkey, are for the most part better formed, have a constitution that is more robust, have more vigor, strength, and courage in the forests than they do in our barns and stables. They lose half these advantages when they become domesticated, and one would say that all our efforts to feed and treat them well lead only to their being bastardized. The same is true of man: in becoming socialized and a slave he ends up weak, timid, and mean-spirited, his soft, effeminate way of life finally draining both his strength and his courage. Let us also add that between the savage state and the domestic state, the difference between one man and another must be even greater than that between one beast and another. Since nature has treated man and beast equally, all the conveniences that man gives himself beyond those he gives

the animals he tames are among the many causes that lead him to degenerate more visibly.

It is consequently not such a great misfortune for these first men, nor indeed such an obstacle to their survival, to be naked and to lack shelter and all the useless things we deem so necessary. Though their skin is not covered by fur, in warm countries they have no need of it, and in cold countries they quickly learn to appropriate the skins of the beasts they have slain. If they have only two feet with which to run, they have two arms with which to provide for their defense and their needs; their children perhaps walk late and with difficulty, but the mothers carry them with ease, an advantage lacking in other species where a mother, if she is pursued, sees herself compelled to abandon her young or limit her speed to theirs. Finally, unless one considers the singular and fortuitous concurrence of the circumstances of which I will speak subsequently, a concurrence that might very well not happen, it is clear that, all things considered, the first man who made himself clothes or built himself a lodging provided himself with things that he did not particularly need, since until then he had done without them, and it is hard to see why he could not as a grown man endure the kind of life he had endured since childhood.

Alone, unconstrained by labor, and never far from danger, savage man must like to sleep as do animals that think little and so, one could say, sleep all the time that they are not thinking. Self-preservation being savage man’s practically sole concern, his most developed faculties must be those that have as their object attack and defense, either to overcome his prey or to keep himself from becoming the prey of another animal. In contrast, the organs that are only perfected by a soft and sensual way of life must remain in a rough state that prevents in him any kind of delicacy; his senses end up divided, the savage man having an extremely coarse sense of touch and taste while his senses of sight, hearing, and smell are of the greatest subtlety. Such is the animal state in general, and also, according to the reports of travelers, the state of most savage peoples. It is therefore not surprising that the Hottentots of the Cape of Good Hope can with their naked eye spot ships far out at sea, for which the Dutch need a telescope, or that the savages of the Americas can scent the trail of a Spaniard as well as the best dogs might, or that all the barbarous nations can bear their nudity with ease, sharpen their taste with hot peppers, and drink European liquor like water.

So far I have considered only physical man. Let us now try to look at him from a metaphysical and moral side.

I see in every animal simply an ingenious machine that nature has endowed with senses so that it can by itself refurbish, and to a certain extent shield itself, from all that seeks to destroy or disrupt it. I see precisely the same in the human machine, with the only difference that nature alone directs everything in the life of a beast, while man in his role as free agent partakes in the process. A beast chooses or rejects by instinct, while man does so through free acts, with the result that a beast cannot distance itself from the rules prescribed for it, even when it would be to its advantage, and with the result that man often distances himself to his disadvantage. A pigeon will die of hunger beside a bowl filled with choice meat, as will a cat on a pile of fruit or grain, though each could very well have nourished itself from the food it disdains had it known to try it. It is thus that dissolute men abandon themselves to excesses that cause fever and death, because the mind depraves the senses, and the will continues to speak when nature falls silent.

Since every animal has senses it has ideas, even connecting them to a certain degree. Man differs from beasts in this respect only insofar as larger quantities differ from lesser. Some philosophers have even proposed that there is a greater difference between one man and another than between a man and a beast. Accordingly, it is not so much man’s capacity to understand that specifically distinguishes him from animals, as it is his being a free agent. Nature commands every animal, and the beast obeys. Man experiences the same command but recognizes that he is free to yield to it or reject it. And it is above all in the consciousness of this freedom that the spirituality of his soul manifests itself, for physics to some extent explains the mechanism of the senses and the formation of ideas, but in the power of wanting or, rather, choosing, and in the awareness of this power, one finds purely spiritual acts in which nothing can be explained by the laws of mechanics.

But even if the difficulties surrounding all these questions would leave some room for disagreement about this difference between man and animal, there is another very specific quality that distinguishes them and about which there can be no argument, and that is the faculty of improving oneself. With the aid of circumstances, this faculty successively develops all the others, and resides within us both as a species and as individuals, while an animal, on the other hand, becomes within several months what it will be for the rest of its

life, while its whole species will in a thousand years still be what it was in the very first year of that millennium. Why is man alone subject to becoming imbecilic? Is it not that in this way he is returning to his primitive state, while the beast, which has not acquired anything, has nothing to lose, always remaining with its instinct? Does not man, losing through old age or some mishap everything that his faculty of self-improvement has led him to acquire, fall lower even than the beast? It would be sad if we were forced to agree that this distinctive and almost boundless human faculty is the source of all man’s miseries, that it is this faculty that draws him, by the action of time, from the original condition in which he would spend tranquil and innocent days; that it is this faculty, engendering over the centuries his intellect, his errors, his virtues, and his vices, which in the end makes him his own and nature’s tyrant. It would be terrible to be led to praise as benefactor the man who first suggested to the people of the Orinoco the use of the boards they apply to the temples of their children’s heads, which assures them of at least some of their imbecility and original happiness.

Nature leaves savage man entirely to his instincts, or, rather, compensates him for the instincts he perhaps lacks, by giving him faculties capable of initially supplementing these instincts and then raising him well above them. But savage man begins with purely animal functions: perceiving and feeling will be his initial state, a state he shares with all animals. Wanting and not wanting, desiring and fearing, will be the first and almost only function of man’s soul until new circumstances bring about new developments in it.

Whatever moralists may say, human understanding owes much to the passions, which, as is commonly admitted, also owe much to human understanding. It is through the activity of the passions that our reason improves itself; we seek knowledge only because we desire pleasure, and it is impossible to conceive why he who has neither desires nor fears might go to the trouble of reasoning. Passions, on the other hand, owe their origin to our needs and their progress to our knowledge, as one cannot desire or fear things except by way of ideas that one might have of them, or by way of the simple impulse of nature. Savage man, deprived of any sort of intellect, experiences only passions of this last kind; his desires do not exceed his physical needs. The only good he recognizes in the universe is food, a female, and sleep; the only evils he fears are pain and hunger; I say pain and not death, since an animal does not ever know what it is to die, while the knowledge of death

and its terrors is one of man’s first acquisitions as he distances himself from the animal condition.

It would be easy, were it necessary, for me to support these impressions with facts, and to prove that in all the nations of the world the progress of the mind is exactly proportional to the needs that peoples received from nature or to which circumstances had subjected them, and consequently proportional to the passions that drove them to satisfy those needs. I would show the arts emerging in Egypt and spreading with the floodings of the Nile; I would follow their development among the Greeks, where the arts sprouted, grew, and rose to the heavens from among the sands and rocks of Attica, without being able to strike root on the fertile banks of the Eurotas. I would point out that in general the people of the north are more industrious than those of the south because they can less afford not to be, as if nature were striving in this way to balance things by giving minds the fertility it denies the soil.

Even without resorting to the uncertain testimonies of history, is it not clear that everything appears to quell savage man’s impulse and means to cease being savage? His imagination depicts nothing, his heart asks nothing. His modest needs are so readily at hand, and he is so far from the degree of knowledge necessary to want to acquire more, that he can have neither foresight nor curiosity. He is indifferent to the spectacle of nature because he is so familiar with it; it is always the same order, the same pattern. He does not have the intellect to be surprised by these great wonders, and it is not to him that one turns to seek the philosophy man needs if he is to notice what he has seen every day. His soul, which nothing perturbs, gives itself solely to the feeling of his present existence without any idea of the future, regardless of how close that future might be, and his ventures, limited like his horizon, barely extend to the end of the day. Such is even today the Carib’s extent of foresight: he sells his cotton mat in the morning and then comes crying in the evening to buy it back, having failed to foresee that he would need it for the coming night.

The more one reflects on the subject, the more the distance between pure sensations and the simplest knowledge grows before our eyes, and it is impossible to conceive how man could have crossed such a great divide with nothing but his own strength, without the help of communication, and without being driven by necessity. How many centuries must have passed before man was capable of seeing another fire than that of the heavens? How

many different accidents and coincidences were necessary for him to learn the simplest uses of this element? How many times must he have let the fire go out before acquiring the art of reproducing it? And how many times did these secrets perhaps die along with him who had discovered them? What can we say about agriculture, a craft that demands so much toil and foresight, is so dependent on other skills, which is obviously practicable only where a society has at least begun to exist, and which serves not so much to draw from the earth food it would readily yield, but to compel it to cater to the preferences of our taste? But let us suppose that men had multiplied to the extent that natural produce was no longer adequate to feed them, a supposition, it should be said, which would affirm the great advantage of that way of life for the human species. Let us suppose that tools for farming had fallen straight from Heaven into the hands of savages without there ever having been forges or workshops. Let us suppose that these savages had overcome mankind’s abhorrence of unrelenting labor, and that they had learned to foresee their needs far enough in advance to figure out how to cultivate the soil, sow seeds, and plant trees. Let us suppose that they would have discovered the arts of grinding wheat and fermenting grapes, all of which the gods would have had to teach them, as one cannot conceive their learning these skills on their own. What man in such a condition would be senseless enough to torment himself by cultivating a field that would be plundered by the first man or beast to take a liking to its crop? And how could any man resolve to spend his life engaged in arduous labor, of which the more he needs its rewards the more certain he can be that he will not reap them? In short, how could such a situation lead men to cultivate land that has not been divided among them, that is to say, if the state of nature has not been abolished?

Even if we were to suppose savage man as adroit in the art of reasoning as our philosophers would have him be, or if we followed the example of the philosophers and made the savage an actual philosopher himself, one who independently discovers the most sublime truths and who, by a sequence of abstract reasoning, reaches principles of justice and reason derived from an innate love of order or from his knowledge of his creator’s will; in short, even if we suppose that a savage man’s mind has as much intelligence and intellect as it would need to have, and we then find it to be dull and stupid, what benefit would the species draw from all this metaphysics, from a philosophy

that could not be communicated and that would be lost with the individual who had invented it? What progress could mankind make, scattered in the forests among the animals? And to what extent could men improve and instruct each other if they had no fixed abode or need for one another, encountering each other once or twice in their lives without knowing or speaking to the other?

Consider how many ideas we owe to the use of language, and the extent to which grammar trains and facilitates the operations of the mind; and consider the infinite effort and time that the initial invention of language must have taken. If one adds these considerations to those I have just presented, one can judge how many thousands of centuries were necessary for the progressive development in the human mind of the operations of which it was capable.

Permit me now to consider the difficulties of determining the origin of languages. I could content myself by citing or repeating the studies that the Abbé de Condillac has made in this field, which entirely confirm my views, and perhaps even gave me my initial ideas in this matter.26 But the manner in which this philosopher resolves the difficulties he puts in his own path in the question of the origin of established signs indicates that he takes for granted what I myself call into question, namely, that among the inventors of language a kind of society had already been established. Consequently, I believe that in alluding to his ideas I must add my own in order to present the same difficulties in the light most appropriate to my subject. The first difficulty is to conceive how languages might become necessary: since men did not interact with one another or have any need for interaction, one cannot imagine the need for the invention of language or its possibility, language not being indispensable. I might claim, as many do, that languages arose from the domestic dealings among fathers, mothers, and children, but that would both fail to resolve the objections and also lead me to commit the error of those who, in reasoning about the state of nature, apply to it ideas taken from society, always seeing the family gathered in the same dwelling and its members fostering a connection among themselves as close and permanent as our connections are, united by many common familial interests. But when mankind was in a primitive state, in which there were neither houses, huts, nor belongings of any kind, everyone slept where they happened to be, often for only one night. Males and females united haphazardly, depending on

chance encounters and desire, without speech being a necessary intermediary for what they had to say to one another, and they parted just as haphazardly. The mother at first nursed her children for her own needs, after which, habit having made them dear to her, she nourished them for their needs. But as soon as they were strong enough to seek their own food they did not hesitate to abandon her, and as there was scarcely any way of ever finding one another again except by remaining in one another’s sight, there soon came a time when they could not even recognize one another. Observe, furthermore, that as it is the child who must express all his needs, and consequently has more things to say to the mother than she does to the child, it is the child who must have made the greatest effort in the invention of speech, and that the language the child used must, to a large extent, have been his own invention. This raises the number of languages to the number of individuals who speak them, a situation further encouraged by a life of roving and wandering that does not allow a language time to attain consistency; for to say that a mother dictates to her child the words it will use to ask her for this or that can only clarify the way that languages which have already formed are taught, but it does not explain how languages are actually formed.

Let us suppose this first difficulty overcome. Let us for a moment cross the immense gap that must have existed between the pure state of nature and the need for languages, and inquire, by assuming languages to be necessary, how they might have begun to establish themselves. This new question is even more formidable than the previous one, for if men needed language in order to learn to think, then knowing how to think was even more vital in order to discover the art of speech. And even if we understood how the sounds of the voice were first perceived to be common interpreters of ideas, it would still leave unexplained what might have been the common interpreters for ideas that were not linked to perceptible objects and could not be indicated by gesture or voice. Consequently, it is scarcely possible to form sustainable conjectures on how this skill of communicating thoughts and establishing an exchange between minds was born: a sublime skill that is already far removed from its origin, but which philosophers still consider to be at such a prodigious distance from perfection that no man is bold enough to warrant that this perfection will ever be reached, even if the inevitable revolutions of time were suspended in its favor and the prejudices of the academies

vanished or fell silent so that thinkers could devote themselves to this thorny problem for centuries without interruption.

The first language of man—the most universal, the most energetic, the only language he needed before he was compelled to persuade men assembled—was the cry of nature. Since this cry was wrenched from him only by instinct during moments of great urgency, in order to seek help when in danger or relief when in intense pain, this cry was not often needed in everyday life, where more moderate emotions prevail. When men’s ideas began to expand and multiply and closer communication was established, men strove for more numerous signs and a more extensive language. They multiplied the inflections of voice and linked them to gestures that are by nature more expressive and whose meaning depends less on prior agreement. Thus they expressed visible and moving objects through gesture, and objects that can be heard through imitative sounds. But gestures can almost always only indicate objects that are present or easy to describe and actions that are visible; they cannot be of comprehensive use, since darkness or the interposition of a body would render them useless—not to mention that gestures require attention rather than excite it. Mankind consequently contrived to substitute articulations of the voice for gestures, which, without having the same relationship to specific ideas, are better suited to represent all ideas as accepted signs. But such a substitution could have been made only by common consent, and was quite difficult to apply in the case of men whose rough vocal cords were not used to such articulations, not to mention harder to imagine possible, since such a unanimous agreement would have had to have been debated, with the result that speech would have been vital in establishing the use of speech.

One must conclude that the first words men used had a much wider meaning in their minds than words have in languages that have already formed, and as men were unaware of the division of speech into constitutive parts, they initially gave every word the meaning of an entire statement. When they began distinguishing the subject from the predicate and the verb from the noun—which was a not mean feat of genius—nouns were initially no more than proper nouns, the present infinitive was the only verb tense, and, as for adjectives, the very notion must have developed with great difficulty, since all adjectives are abstract words, and abstractions are difficult processes that are far from being natural.

Each object was first given an individual name without regard to genus and species, something that these first initiators of language were not in a position to distinguish: every individual object presented itself to their minds as isolated, as they are seen in nature’s tableau. If one oak was called A, another oak was called B, so that the more limited man’s knowledge was, the larger his vocabulary. The jumbled nomenclature could not easily be untangled, for one had to know the properties of and differences among entities in order to arrange them into common and generic denominations. Observations and definitions were necessary, in other words, more knowledge of natural history and metaphysics than men of that era could have possessed.

Furthermore, universal ideas can be introduced into the mind only with the help of words, and the understanding can grasp these ideas only through statements. This is one of the reasons why animals cannot form such ideas, or ever acquire the capacity to improve themselves, a capacity that depends on ideas. When a monkey goes directly from one nut to another, is one to think that he has a universal concept of the type of fruit nuts are, or that he compares the two individual nuts to their archetype? Definitely not. But the sight of one of the nuts will make him recall the sensation he received from the other, and his vision, stimulated in a particular manner, will signal to his sense of taste the stimulus it is about to receive. All universal ideas are purely intellectual; the moment imagination is in any way involved, the idea immediately becomes particular. Try to picture a tree in a universal manner and you will never succeed: despite yourself you will have to picture the tree as being small or large, leafy or bare, light or dark, and if it depended on you to see in it only what is found in every tree, the image would no longer resemble a tree. Purely abstract entities are imagined in the same way, or can be conceptualized by way of speech. Only the definition of a triangle gives you a true idea of what it is: as soon as you picture a triangle in your mind it becomes a specific triangle, and you cannot avoid making its lines visible or its plane colored. It is therefore necessary to use statements: it is necessary to speak in order to have universal ideas, for as soon as the imagination stops the mind can continue only with the aid of speech. Consequently, if the first inventors of language could give names only to ideas they already had, it follows that the first nouns could only have been proper nouns.

But when, by means that I cannot conceive, our first grammarians began to expand their ideas and generalize their words, the ignorance of these

inventors must have confined this method to very narrow limits, and as they initially had gone too far in multiplying the names of individual entities through their lack of knowledge of species and genera, they subsequently made too few species and genera by dint of their not having considered entities in all their differences. Expanding the divisions broadly enough would have required more experience and knowledge than they could have had, but also more research and work than they were prepared to undertake. When even today we constantly discover new species that had escaped our notice, think how many must have eluded men who always tended to judge things at first glance. As for the basic categories and most general notions, it is unnecessary to add that even these must also have escaped the notice of early man. How could they, for instance, have imagined or understood the words matter, mind, substance, mode, figure, or movement, when our philosophers, who have been using these words for such a long time, have considerable trouble understanding them themselves? The ideas attached to these words being purely metaphysical, the early inventors of language would not have found models for them in nature.

I shall stop here at these first steps, and beg my critics to interrupt their reading to consider on the basis of the invention of physical substantives alone—that is to say, the part of language that is easiest to ascertain—how far language would still have to go in order to express all the thoughts of man, to assume a constant form, and to be suitable for speaking in public and influencing society. I ask the reader to give thought to how much time and knowledge were necessary to discover numbers, abstract words, the aorist mood, and all the tenses of the verbs, particles, syntax, connecting clauses, and arguments, and to form the whole logic of discourse. As for myself, intimidated by the difficulties that multiply, and convinced of the almost demonstrated impossibility that languages could have been created and established by purely human means, I leave to whoever might wish to undertake such a task the discussion of the difficult problem of what was more necessary: a society that is already formed for languages to be established, or languages already invented for a society to be established.

Whatever the origins were, one can at least see from the little care that nature took in bringing men together through their mutual needs and to facilitate the use of speech, how negligent nature was in forming their sociability, and how limited nature’s contribution was to whatever men have

done to establish bonds. Indeed it is impossible to imagine why a man in this primitive state would have more need of another man than a monkey or a wolf might need another of its kind; nor, if we were to suppose such a need, what motive could induce another man to acquiesce in it, or, if he should, how the two men would agree on the conditions. I know that we are constantly being told that there was nothing as miserable as man in a state of nature; and if, as I believe I have proven, it is the case that it would have taken many centuries for man to have either the desire or the opportunity to leave that state, then this would have been a charge to be leveled against nature and not against man, whom nature has constituted that way. But if I correctly understand the term miserable, it is a word that has no meaning at all, or a word that merely signifies a painful hardship and the suffering of the body or the soul. Hence I would be grateful if someone could explain to me what kind of misery there can be for a free being whose heart is at peace and whose body is healthy. I ask which of the two, the natural life or the civilized life, is more prone to becoming unbearable to those who live it. Around us we see mostly people who complain about their existence, some even depriving themselves of it if they are able, the combination of divine and human law barely sufficing to stop this disorder. I ask whether anyone has ever heard of a savage living in liberty ever thinking of complaining about his life and putting an end to it? Let it be judged with less pride on which side real misery lies. Nothing, on the other hand, could be as miserable as a savage who is dazzled by enlightenment, tormented by passions, and who ventures to reason about a state that is different from his. It was through a most wise providence that the faculties he potentially had could develop only with the opportunities of exercising them so that they proved neither superfluous nor burdensome before their time, nor belated and useless when the need arose. Man had in instinct alone all he needed to live in the state of nature, while with cultivated reason he has only what is necessary to live in society.

It would at first seem that men in the state of nature, having no kind of moral relations among themselves or settled duties, were not capable of being good or bad, and had neither vices nor virtues, unless we take those terms in a physical sense and call vices the qualities that can impair the conservation of an individual, and virtues the qualities that can contribute to it; in which case one would have to call the man who least resists the simple impulses of

nature the most virtuous. But without straying from the ordinary meaning of the words vice and virtue, it would behoove us to suspend any judgment we might pass on such a situation and to be wary of our prejudices, until it has been established, scales in hand, whether among civilized men there are more virtues than vices, or if their virtues are more advantageous than their vices are detrimental. One must ask if the progress of civilized men’s knowledge is sufficient compensation for the harm they do one another in proportion as they learn of the good they ought to be doing to one another; or if they would not on the whole be in a happier state if they had neither evil to fear nor good to anticipate from anyone rather than subject themselves to a universal dependence, obliging themselves to receive everything from those who are not obliged to give them anything.

Above all, let us not conclude with Hobbes that man is naturally evil because he has no idea of goodness, that he is depraved because he does not know virtue, that he always refuses his fellow men services he does not believe he owes them, or that by the right he reasonably claims to things he needs, he foolishly imagines himself the sole proprietor of the universe. Hobbes saw very clearly the flaw of all modern definitions of natural right; but the conclusions he drew from his own definition demonstrate that his perception of natural right was no less false. By reasoning on principles he established, Hobbes should have said that the state of nature, being the state in which the care for our own preservation is least prejudicial to the preservation of others, was consequently the most suitable state for peace and the most appropriate for mankind. The reason that he says precisely the opposite is because he included in savage man’s striving for his preservation the need to satisfy a multitude of passions that are the product of society and which have made laws necessary. A wicked man, he says, is a child with the strength of a man. It remains to be seen whether savage man is also such a child; even if we agreed with Hobbes, what would he conclude? That if this man when he is big and strong were as dependent on other men as when he is small and weak, he would stop at nothing: beating his mother if she were slow at breastfeeding him, strangling his younger brother if he regarded him as a nuisance, biting another man’s leg if it tripped him or got in his way; but in the state of nature being strong or being dependent are two contradictory suppositions. Man is weak when he is dependent, and emancipated before he becomes strong. Hobbes did not see that the same cause that prevents savages

from using their reason, as our jurists claim to do, also keeps them from abusing their faculties, as he claims. Hence one could say that savages are not in fact wicked, because they do not know what it is to be good. For it is neither the development of their intellect nor the restraint of the law that stops them from doing evil, but the serenity of passion and ignorance of vice. Tanto plus in illis proficit vitiorum ignoratio, quam in his cognitio virtutis.27 There is, furthermore, another principle that Hobbes did not discern, which, having been bestowed on man to soften in certain instances the ferocity of his amour propre or, before the onset of this amour propre, the desire for self- preservation, tempers his ardor for well-being through an innate repugnance at seeing a fellow creature suffer. I do not believe I need fear contradiction in granting to man the only natural virtue that the most extreme detractor of human virtues has been compelled to recognize. I speak of pity,28 a disposition suited to beings as weak as we are and subject to so many ills, a virtue all the more universal and the more useful to man in that it precedes all reflection, and is so natural that even beasts at times give clear signs of it. Without speaking of the tenderness of mothers for their children and the dangers they brave in order to protect them, one commonly sees the aversion that horses have of trampling a live body. An animal never passes a dead animal of its own species without concern; some even give their kind a burial of sorts. And the sad lowing of cattle entering a slaughterhouse reveals their impression of the terrible spectacle that confronts them. One sees with pleasure how the author of Fable of the Bees,29 forced to acknowledge man as a being capable of feeling and compassion, discards his cold and refined style to offer us the poignant image of an imprisoned man who sees a ferocious beast outside his prison tearing a child from the bosom of its mother, crushing its weak limbs with murderous fangs, its claws tearing out the child’s throbbing entrails. The dreadful agitation that this witness to an event in which he has no personal involvement must feel! What anguish he must suffer at this sight, unable as he is to help the distraught mother or the dying child!

This is the pure movement of nature prior to all reflection, the force of natural pity that even the most depraved morals are hard put to destroy, as every day in our theaters we see men moved to tears when confronted with the miseries of some unfortunate person, men who, if they were in a tyrant’s

place, would not hesitate to torment an enemy. Mandeville realized that for all their morality, men would never have been anything but monsters, had nature not given them pity in support of reason. But Mandeville did not see that all the social virtues that he seeks to deny in men flow from this single quality. Indeed, what are generosity, mercy, and humaneness if not pity accorded to the weak, the guilty, or mankind in general? Even benevolence and friendship are, if correctly understood, the products of a steadfast pity centered on a particular person, for what else is wishing that someone should not suffer than wishing that he be happy? Even if it were true that commiseration is nothing but a feeling that puts us in the position of the one who suffers—a feeling obscure but powerful in a savage, and developed but weak in civilized man—what difference would this idea make to the truth of what I am saying except to give it more force? In fact, pity becomes all the more intense as the perceiving animal identifies with the suffering animal. It is clear enough that this empathy had to be infinitely closer in the state of nature than in the state of reason. It is reason that engenders amour propre, and reflection that fortifies it; it is reason that renders man introspective, and reason that separates him from all that troubles and afflicts him, while it is philosophy that isolates him. It is through philosophy that he says to himself at the sight of a man suffering, “Perish if you will—I am safe.” It is only the dangers of society as a whole that disturb the tranquil sleep of the philosopher and make him start up from his bed. A fellow man could be murdered beneath his window with impunity—he need only cover his ears and reason a little with himself to prevent nature, which is rebelling within him, from his identifying with the man being assassinated. The savage man does not have this admirable talent, and one sees him, for lack of wisdom and reason, always delivering himself impetuously to the first feeling of humanity. During upheavals and street brawls the populace gathers, while the prudent man withdraws. It is the rabble and the market women who intervene, separating combatants and stopping honest men from slaughtering one another.

It is therefore certain that pity is a natural feeling that in every individual moderates the activity of love for himself, and consequently contributes to the preservation of the entire species. It is pity that moves us to aid without reflection those we see suffering; it is pity that in the state of nature takes the place of laws, morals, and virtue, with the advantage that no one is tempted to

disobey its gentle voice. It is pity that deters the strong savage from robbing helpless children, or depriving feeble old men of their hard-earned sustenance, if he has the prospect of finding sustenance elsewhere. It is pity and not the sublime maxim of reasoned justice—Do unto others as you would have them do unto you—that inspires all men with the other maxim of natural goodness, which is less perfect, but perhaps more useful: Do what is good for you with the least possible harm to others. It is, in short, within this natural sentiment and not in subtle argument that one must seek the cause for the repugnance that every man would feel doing evil, even independently of the maxims of education. While Socrates and minds of his kind may be able to acquire virtue through reason, mankind would have long ceased to exist if its preservation had depended on men’s reasoning.

With passions that were so little active, and with such a beneficial restraint,30 men were more wary than evil, and more resolved to protect themselves from harm they might suffer than they were tempted to harm others, and so were not prone to particularly dangerous quarrels. Provided that there were no issues more crucial than nourishment, their disputes rarely had bloody consequences. As savage men did not interact at all with one another, they knew no vanity, consideration, esteem, or contempt; they did not have the least concept of yours and mine, or any true idea of justice, and considered any violence they might suffer as an evil that could easily be set right rather than an affront that had to be punished. They never thought of vengeance, except perhaps instinctively and impulsively, as a dog might bite the stone that is thrown at it. Yet I see a more dangerous issue, of which it remains for me to speak.

Among the passions that agitate men’s hearts there is an ardent and impetuous one that renders the sexes necessary to one another, a terrible passion that braves every danger and knocks down every obstacle, and which in its frenzy seems capable of destroying the species it is destined to preserve. What must become of men who without shame or restraint fall prey to this brutal and unbridled rage, constantly fighting over their loves at the cost of their lives?

It must first of all be agreed that the more violent the passions, the more necessary the laws needed to contain them. But while the upheavals and crimes that these passions cause among us demonstrate every day the

inadequacy of the laws in this regard, it would still be worth examining whether these disorders did not arise along with the laws themselves; for in that case, if the laws were capable of repressing these disorders, then surely the least one could expect of them is that they put a stop to an evil that would not exist without them.

Let us begin by distinguishing, in the feeling of love, what is moral from what is physical. The physical is the general desire that drives one sex to unite with the other; the moral is what determines this desire and fixes it exclusively on a single person, or at least that which gives the desire a greater degree of interest for the preferred person. It is easy to see that the moral aspect of love is an artificial feeling; it is born of social custom, and exalted by women with much aptitude and care with a view to establishing their power, thus rendering dominant the sex that ought to obey. In savage man this feeling must be almost nonexistent, founded as it is on certain notions of merit or beauty that he is not in a position to have, and based on comparisons that he is not capable of making. For as his mind has not managed to form abstract ideas of regularity and proportion, his heart is not susceptible to the feelings of admiration and love that arise from the application of these concepts without one even being aware of it. Savage man obeys only the temperament he has received from nature, and not the taste he might acquire; any woman is good for him.

Limited to the physicality of love, and happy enough not to know those preferences that inflame the feeling and augment the difficulties, men must feel less frequently and less intensely the ardors of temperament, and, consequently, have fewer and less cruel disputes among themselves. Imagination, which leads to so much turmoil among us, does not touch the heart of savage man at all. Everyone calmly awaits the impetus of nature, and yields to it without choice, with more pleasure than furor, and once the need is satisfied, all desire is extinguished.

It is therefore an indisputable matter that love, just like all the other passions, has acquired the impetuous ardor that renders it so often harmful to man only in society, and it is all the more ridiculous to portray savages as ceaselessly slaughtering one another in order to satisfy their brutality, since this idea directly contradicts experience; the Caribs, who of all existing peoples have until now departed least from the state of nature, are the most peaceful among all peoples in their loves and the least subject to jealousy,

despite living in a scorching climate that invariably seems to give such passions a greater fervor.

As for the conclusions one could reach regarding many species of animals, the clashes between males that bloody our barnyards throughout the year, or that in springtime fill our forests with cries as they battle over females, one must begin by excluding all the species in which nature has, in the relative power of the sexes, manifestly established other relations than those among people. Thus the skirmishes of the cockerels do not offer us an explanation for the species of man. In the species where the proportion of the sexes is more uniform, such skirmishes can have as a cause only the scarcity of females in relation to the number of males, or the intervals during which the female refuses the approach of the male, which brings us back to the first cause; for if every female will suffer a male for only two months in a year, it is as if the number of females were reduced by five-sixths. Now neither of these two cases is applicable to the human species, where the number of females generally surpasses that of males, and where, even among savages, females have never been known to have periods of heat or periods in which they reject males. Furthermore, among several of the world’s species, where the entire group is in heat at the same time, there is a terrible moment of common frenzy, turmoil, and fighting, a moment that does not occur in the human species, where love is never seasonal. Consequently, one cannot conclude from the fights of some animals for the possession of females that the same thing would happen to mankind in the state of nature; and even if one were to draw such a conclusion, one must assume, since these conflicts do not destroy other species, that they would at least not be more harmful to our own. It is also quite apparent that these conflicts would still cause less turmoil in the state of nature than they do in society, particularly in countries where morals still count for something and the jealousy of lovers and the vengeance of husbands lead to duels, murders, and even worse, and where the duty of eternal fidelity leads only to adultery, and the laws of continence and honor inevitably spread debauchery and multiply abortions.

Let us conclude that savage man, roaming the forests without occupation, speech, or an abode, without war and without ties, without any need of his fellow creatures, and without a desire to harm them—perhaps even without ever recognizing any of them—this savage man, self-sufficient and subject to few passions, had only the feelings and intellect suited to such a state. This

savage man felt only his actual needs, looked only at what he thought it was necessary to see, his intelligence not making more progress than his vanity. If by chance he did make some discovery, he was the less capable of communicating it, as he did not recognize even his children. Anything that was invented perished with the inventor. There was neither education nor progress; the generations multiplied uselessly, and since each generation always began from the same point, the centuries unfolded in all the crudeness of the first ages; the species was already old, but man still remained a child.

If I have dwelt so extensively on the assumption of this primitive condition, it is because I have old misconceptions and ingrained prejudices to root out, and consequently have felt that I need to dig down to the root and show in the portrayal of the genuine state of nature how much inequality, even natural inequality, is far from being as real and influential a factor of this natural state as our writers claim.

Indeed, it is clear enough that there are among the differences that distinguish men a number that are considered natural, but that are in fact exclusively the result of habit and the different kinds of life that men adopt in society. Thus a hardy or delicate temperament, and the strength or weakness that depend on it, are often more a result of the hard or yielding manner in which one was raised than of the original constitution of the body. The same is true of the power of intellect; not only does education create a difference between minds that are cultivated and those that are not, but it also increases the difference between cultivated minds as they relate to the culture; for when a giant and a dwarf walk along the same road, every step that both take gives the giant an added advantage. Hence, if one compares the prodigious variety of education and ways of life that reign in the various orders of the civil state with the simplicity and uniformity of animal and savage life, where all feed on the same foods, live in the same manner, and do exactly the same things, one will understand how much less difference there is from one man to another in the state of nature than there is among men in society, and how much natural inequality must increase in the human species as a result of the inequality of institutions. But even if nature displayed as much preference as is claimed in its distribution of gifts, what advantage would those preferred draw from this at the expense of others in a kind of living that allowed for almost no form of relationship between them? What use is beauty where there is no love? What use is wit to people who do not speak, or astuteness to

those who have no dealings with one another? I always hear that the stronger will oppress the weaker, but I would like an explanation as to what is meant by the term oppression. The stronger will dominate with violence and the weaker, subjected to all their whims, will suffer. That is precisely what I see happening among us, but I cannot comprehend how the same could be said of savage men, to whom one would have a hard enough time explaining what servitude and domination are. A man might seize the fruit another has gathered, or the prey he has killed, the den he has used for refuge—but how will he ever succeed in making the other obey him, and what would be the fetters of dependence among men who possess nothing? If I am chased away from one tree, I am free to look for another; if I am tormented in one place, who will stop me from going elsewhere? Can there be such a thing as a man whose strength is much superior to mine, and who is also depraved, lazy, and ferocious enough to force me to provide for his subsistence while he remains idle? He will have to resolve not to lose sight of me for a single moment, to keep me securely tied up when he is asleep for fear that I might escape or kill him: in other words, he would be obliged to subject himself voluntarily to far more effort than that which he is trying to avoid and is imposing on me. After all that, what if his vigilance relaxes for just an instant? What if an unexpected noise makes him turn to look? I will already have run twenty paces into the forest, my fetters broken, and he will never again set eyes on me.

Without needlessly protracting the matter, it must be clear to all that since the bonds of servitude are formed only through men’s mutual dependence and the reciprocal needs that unite them, it is impossible to subjugate a man without having first put him in a situation in which he is not able to get along on his own. As such a situation does not exist in nature, it leaves everyone free of the yoke of servitude, and renders futile the law of the strongest.

Having proven that inequality and its influence are barely manifest in the state of nature, it remains for me to present the origin and progress of inequality within the sequential development of the human mind. Having demonstrated that the faculty of self-improvement, the social virtues, and the other faculties bestowed on original man could never have developed of themselves, that they needed the fortuitous convergence of various external causes that might never have come about, and without which man would forever have existed in his primitive condition, it now remains for me to

consider and connect the different coincidences that might have improved human reason while impairing the species, rendering a being wicked while rendering him sociable, and ultimately in the distant future to lead man and the world to the point we have now reached.

I admit that as the occurrence I will describe could have come about in several ways, I can only proceed by conjecture. But beyond these conjectures turning into reasons when they are the most probable inferences that can be derived from the nature of things, and the only means of discovering the truth, the consequences that I will deduce from my conjecture will not be speculative. By the principles I have just established, one could not form any other system that does not provide the same results, and from which one could not draw the same conclusions.

This will excuse me from expanding my reflections on the manner in which the lapse of time compensates for the slight likelihood of events, or from expanding on the surprising power of slight causes when they act persistently; it will excuse me from the issue of expanding on the impossibility of destroying certain hypotheses on the one hand, if on the other hand one finds oneself unable to give them the certainty of facts; it will exempt me from reflecting on how, when two facts are presented as real and are to be linked by a sequence of intermediate facts that are unknown or thought to be unknown, it is for history (when history is available) to provide the facts that connect them, and for philosophy (when history is lacking) to determine the plausible facts that could link the facts in question; and finally this will exempt me from reflecting that in regard to outcomes, similarity reduces facts to a much smaller number of classes than one would imagine. It is enough for me to offer these issues for the consideration of my judges; it is enough to have made certain that common readers need not consider them.

PART TWO

The first man who fenced in a plot of land and dared to say, “This is mine,” and found people who were sufficiently simple to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, how much misery and horror, could have been spared the human race if someone would have pulled out the stakes or filled in the ditch and called out to his fellow men: “Beware! Do not listen to this imposter! You will be lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all, and that the land belongs to no one.” But it seems most likely that by this time things had already reached a point of not being able to continue as they were, for the idea of property, depending as it does on many prior ideas that could only have arisen successively, could not have suddenly taken shape in the minds of men. Much progress had to be made, much industry and intellect acquired and transmitted from one era to the next, before that final stage of the state of nature was reached. Let us thus look further back in time and try to gather under a single point of view the slow succession of events and knowledge in their most natural order.

The first feeling of man was that of his existence, his first concern his preservation. The fruits of the earth provided him with all the help he needed; instinct drove him to make use of them. Hunger, as well as other appetites, drove him to experience, one after the other, various ways of existence, one of which compelled him to perpetuate his species. And this blind impulse, devoid of all feeling, gave rise to a purely animal act. This need satisfied, the two sexes no longer recognized one another, and even the child meant nothing to the mother as soon as it could do without her.

Such was the condition of nascent man; such was the life of an animal limited at first to pure sensations and barely profiting from the fruits that nature offered him, let alone thinking of seizing these fruits. But soon difficulties arose, and man had to learn to overcome them. The height of the trees that prevented him from reaching their fruit, the competition from animals seeking to nourish themselves from them, and the ferocity of the

animals that imperiled his life, all compelled him to exercise his body. He had to become agile, a fast runner, and vigorous in battle. Soon he had in hand natural weapons, such as branches and stones. He learned to surmount the obstacles of nature, to combat, if need be, other animals, and even to fight for his subsistence with other men, or recompense himself for what he had been forced to yield to those stronger than he.

The more the human species spread, the more the hardships multiplied along with the number of people. The differences of terrain, climate, and season will have forced men to differ in their ways. Barren years, long and harsh winters, scorching summers that consumed everything, demanded new enterprise. Along seacoasts and riverbanks, men invented fishing lines and hooks and became fishermen and fish eaters; in the forests, men made bows and arrows and became hunters and warriors. In cold countries they covered themselves with the skins of animals they had killed. Lightning, volcanoes, or some lucky chance introduced men to fire, a new resource against the rigors of winter. They learned to conserve this element, and then to reproduce it, and finally to cook with it the meats that in the past they had eaten raw.

Man’s repeated contact with creatures that were different from him, as well as contact with other men, must have naturally prompted in his mind perceptions of certain relations. The relations we express with the words large, small, strong, weak, fast, slow, timorous, bold, and similar concepts, compared to one another when necessary, and almost offhand, ultimately produced in him some kind of reflection, or rather an instinctive prudence that suggested the precautions most necessary for his safety.

The new understanding that resulted from this development increased his superiority over other animals by making him aware of this superiority. He learned to set traps for them, tricking them in a thousand ways, and though a number of animals surpassed him in speed or strength of combat, he became in time the master of those that might serve him, and the scourge of those that might do him harm. This is how the first look that man directed at himself sparked the first stirring of pride; this is how, when he was still barely able to distinguish between hierarchies, he came to consider his species in the foremost rank, and so took the first step toward claiming that rank as an individual.

Though his fellow men were not to him what our fellow men are to us, and though he hardly interacted more with them than he did with other animals,

he did not neglect to observe them. The resemblances that with time he learned to perceive among them, his female, and himself, led him to sense resemblances that he could not actually perceive, and, seeing that his fellow men all behaved as he would have done in similar circumstances, he concluded that their manner of thinking and feeling fully tallied with his own. This important truth, once well established in his mind, made him follow through an intuition that was as certain as, though faster than, a dialectic process, which were the best rules of conduct to observe for his advantage and safety.

Taught by experience that the love of one’s own well-being is the only impetus for human action, man found himself in a position to distinguish between the rare occasions when a mutual interest ought to lead him to rely on the help of his fellow men, and the even rarer occasions when competition ought to make him mistrust them. In the first case, he united with his fellow men in a herd, or at the very most a sort of temporary association that obligated no one and lasted only as long as the passing need that led to the group’s formation; in the second case, every man sought to seize his own advantage, either through force if he thought he could, or through skill and cunning if he felt himself to be the weaker.

This is how men gradually managed to acquire a rough idea of mutual endeavors and of the advantage of fulfilling them; but only to the extent that immediate and clear interest might require, since they had no concept of foresight, and, far from concerning themselves with the distant future, did not even give any thought to the next day. If a deer was to be caught, everyone knew that they had to remain faithfully at their posts, but if a hare happened to pass within the reach of one of them, it is certain he would have chased after it without scruple, and, having attained his prey, would have cared little about having caused his companions to lose theirs.

It is easy to understand that such interaction did not require a language more refined than that of crows or monkeys, who gather in more or less the same fashion. Inarticulate cries, a multitude of gestures, and a few imitative noises must for a long time have made up the universal language of man. When a few conventional articulated sounds used in particular regions were added to this, sounds whose provenance, as I have already said, it is not easy to explain, this gave rise to languages that were distinctive, but crude and flawed, such as various savage nations still have today. I am passing over

many centuries in a flash, pressed by time and the abundance of what I have to say, as well as by the almost imperceptible progress of the initial stage, since the more slowly events succeed one another, the more quickly they can be described.

These initial advancements finally enabled man to progress more rapidly. The more his mind became enlightened, the more his ventures developed. Soon he stopped sleeping under the first tree he came to, or by withdrawing into a cave, and discovered that certain kinds of hard, sharp stone axes could be used to cut wood, dig the earth, and build huts out of branches, which later man thought of smearing with mud and clay. This era was a first revolution that brought about the establishment of and differentiation between families, and introduced a notion of property that perhaps also led to the first quarrels and fights. Nevertheless, as the hardiest among them will probably have been the first to build dwellings that they felt strong enough to defend, one might conjecture that the weaker found it quicker and safer to imitate them than to attempt to oust them. As for those who already had a hut, they will hardly have sought to appropriate that of their neighbor, not so much because it belonged to another, but because it was of no use to them and they could not seize it without running the risk of a confrontation with the family occupying it.

The first developments of tender sentiment were the result of a new situation that united husbands and wives, fathers and children, in a common dwelling. The practice of living together gave rise to the sweetest feelings known to man: conjugal love and paternal love. Every family became a small society, all the more united as its only bonds were mutual affection and freedom. It was then that the first differences in the way of life of the two sexes came to be, which until then had been the same. Women became more sedentary, and grew accustomed to looking after the hut and the children, while men went out to obtain their common subsistence. As their way of life grew gentler, the two sexes also began to lose something of their ferocity and strength. But if each of them separately became less able to fight savage beasts, they could now gather together with more ease in order to resist them as a group.

In this new condition, with a simple and self-contained life, with needs that were quite limited, and the instruments they had invented to provide for these needs, men enjoyed much leisure and used it to secure conveniences

unknown to their fathers. But without their realizing it, this was the first yoke they imposed on themselves and the first source of misfortune they prepared for their descendants; for not only did they continue to weaken their bodies and minds, but the conveniences they had invented soon became habitual, losing their appeal almost entirely, while at the same time deteriorating into commodities men could no longer do without. Being deprived of them became crueler than possessing them had been pleasant, and men were unhappy at losing them without ever having been happy to possess them.

One can see here somewhat more clearly how the use of speech gradually became established, or developed within each family, and one can also conjecture how various specific causes could have spread language and accelerated its progress by making it more necessary. Great floods or earthquakes surrounded inhabited areas with water or canyons, and revolutions of the globe broke off pieces of the continent as islands. One can imagine that a common language would have formed more quickly among people who were brought together in this way and forced to live together, than it would have among those who roamed the forests and continents. Hence it is quite possible that islanders, once they had learned to navigate, would have brought us the use of speech. It is quite probable that society and languages were born on islands and developed there before being introduced to the continent.

Everything now began to change. Men who had previously roamed the forests became more sedentary and gradually drew closer to one another, uniting in different groups and finally creating separate nations in every region. Here men were united by custom and character, and not by rules and laws; they were united by the same way of life and the same kind of food, and by the common influence of the climate on everyone. An enduring proximity cannot fail to ultimately create connections between separate families. Young people of different sexes lived in neighboring huts, and the transient interaction that nature demands soon led to interactions that were no less sweet and more permanent. People became accustomed to scrutinizing different individuals and making comparisons, gradually acquiring ideas of merit and beauty that created a feeling of preference. As a result of seeing one another, one cannot do without seeing more of one another. A sweet and tender feeling creeps into the soul, and through the least resistance becomes

an impetuous frenzy: jealousy awakens with love, discord triumphs, and the gentlest of passions leads to sacrifices of human blood.

As ideas and feelings succeeded one another, and the heart and mind were exercised, the human species continued to become more sociable. Relationships expanded and bonds grew stronger. People became accustomed to gathering in front of huts or around a big tree. Singing and dancing, the true off-spring of love and leisure, became the amusement, or rather the occupation, of idle men and women who gathered together. Everyone began looking at other people and wishing to be looked at, and public esteem came to be prized. The person who sang or danced the best, the one who was best looking, strongest, most skillful, or most eloquent, was now the most highly regarded. This was the first step toward inequality, and also toward vice. From these first preferences arose vanity and scorn on the one hand, and shame and envy on the other;31 and the fermentation caused by these new leavenings ended up producing compounds fatal to innocence and happiness.

As soon as men began to value one another, and the concept of esteem had formed in their minds, everyone claimed a right to it, and it was no longer possible to deprive anyone of it with impunity. This gave rise, even among savages, to the first duties of civility, and with that every intentional wrong became an insult because the offended individual saw in the harm that resulted from the insult contempt for his person, a contempt that was often harder for him to bear than the harm itself. In this fashion, with each offended individual punishing the contempt shown him in a manner proportional to the regard in which he held himself, the acts of vengeance became terrible, and men bloodthirsty and cruel. This is the stage that most savage peoples we know of had reached. Many of our writers and thinkers, for lack of having sufficiently distinguished among different ideas, and not noting how far these people had already moved from the first stage of nature, have hastened to conclude that man is naturally cruel and needs regulation to make his temperament equable, although there is no temperament more equable than that of man in his primitive state, placed as he is by nature at an equal distance between the stupidity of brutes and the fatal knowledge of civilized man. Constrained by both instinct and reason to protect himself against the harm that threatens him, he is restrained by natural pity from doing harm to others unless he is compelled to do so, even if he has been harmed; for

according to Locke’s wise axiom, “Where there is no property there is no injury.”32

But it must be noted that once society had come into being and relations were established among men, these relations required them to have qualities different from those of their primitive constitution. Once morality began to enter human actions, and as before laws were established everyone had been the sole judge and avenger of offenses he had suffered, the quality of goodness that had been valid in the pure state of nature no longer suited nascent society. It must be furthermore noted that it was necessary for punishments to become more severe as the opportunities for transgression became more frequent, and in nascent society the dread of vengeance had to take the place of the restraint of the laws. Thus although men had become less hardy, and natural pity had already undergone change, this period in the development of human faculties, which maintained a golden mean between the indolence of the primitive state and the spirited activity of our amour propre, must have been the happiest and most lasting era of man. The more one reflects on it, the more one finds that this state was the least subject to revolution, the best state for man to be in, and that he can have left it only because of some dire turn of fate, which for the common good ought never to have occurred. The example of savage peoples, most of whom have been found at the nascent stage of development, seems to confirm that the human species was made to remain in that state, the true springtime of mankind. All subsequent progress has merely been a supposed progression toward the development of the individual, but in fact has been a progression toward the decline of the species.

As long as men were content with their rough and simple dwellings, limiting themselves to sewing their clothes out of animal skins with thorns or fish bones, and adorning themselves with feathers and shells, painting their bodies in different colors, improving or embellishing their bows and arrows, and using sharpened stones to make a few fishing canoes or some rudimentary musical instruments; in short, as long as men applied themselves only to the kind of labor that a single person could accomplish on his own, and to crafts that did not require the collaboration of several hands, they lived as free, healthy, good, and happy people to the extent their nature allowed, and continued to enjoy the gentleness of independent interaction among

themselves. But from the moment one man needed the help of another, as soon as men realized that it was useful for an individual to have provisions for two, equality disappeared, property was introduced, work became necessary, and the vast forests turned into sunny fields that had to be watered with men’s sweat, and in which one soon saw slavery and poverty sprouting and growing along with the harvest.

Metallurgy and agriculture were the two skills whose invention led to this great revolution. Poets say it was gold and silver that civilized man and ruined mankind, but philosophy will counter that it was iron and wheat. Both metallurgy and agriculture were unknown to the savages of the Americas, who for this reason have ever remained such. Other peoples seemed to have remained barbarian through practicing one of these skills without the other. The fact that Europe is the place most abundant in iron resources and the most fertile in wheat is one of the best reasons why it was, if not the earliest place to receive civil institutions, then at least the place where the institutions were more sound and constant than anywhere else in the world.

It is difficult to surmise how men might have come to know and use iron, since it is not credible that, before they knew what the outcome would be, they would on their own have come upon the idea of extracting ore from a mine and carrying out the necessary preparations for smelting it. Then again, it is even harder to attribute this discovery to some accidental conflagration, as mines are found only in arid places that are bare of plants and trees, so one might say that nature had taken precautions to keep this fateful secret from us. Consequently, there remains only the exceptional circumstance of a volcano spewing out molten metals and giving onlookers the idea of imitating this natural process. We would of course have to assume that these onlookers had to have much courage and foresight to undertake such an arduous task and to envisage from such a distance in time the advantages they might draw from it, something that is hard to imagine as possible, even if their minds had been more developed.

As for agriculture, its principle was known long before its practice was established, and it is difficult to conceive that men who were engaged in a constant struggle to gain their subsistence from trees and plants would not have fathomed fairly quickly the means that nature uses to propagate them. But they probably did not apply their skills to agriculture until quite late. This could have been because the trees that, along with hunting and fishing,

provided men with nourishment did not require cultivation. It might also perhaps have been because they were not aware of the methods for cultivating wheat, or did not have the implements for doing so or the foresight to think about their future needs; or perhaps because they simply did not have the means to prevent others from appropriating the fruits of their labor. Once men began to develop skills, one can believe that they will have cultivated a few vegetables or roots around their huts using sharp stones and pointed sticks, long before they understood the process of growing wheat or had the implements necessary for more extensive cultivation. This does not take into account that in order to distance themselves from this domestic occupation, and set about sowing whole fields, they would have had to resign themselves to an initial loss in the hope of a great subsequent gain. This long view is very far from the turn of mind of savage man, who, as I have already said, has trouble foretelling in the morning the needs he might have in the evening.

Therefore, the invention of other skills was necessary in order to induce mankind to apply itself to agriculture. As soon as some men were needed to smelt and forge iron, other men were needed to feed them. As the number of workers continued to multiply, the hands devoted to providing the subsistence of the community diminished without there being fewer mouths to feed. And as some men needed food in exchange for the iron they produced, other men finally came upon the secret of using iron in order to multiply the food supply. From this arose labor and agriculture on the one hand, and the craft of working metals and multiplying the uses of these metals on the other.

With the cultivation of the land came inevitably its division, and once property was recognized, the first rules of justice followed, for in order to render to each his own, every individual must be capable of having something. Furthermore, with men beginning to extend their views into the future and envisioning that they all had possessions they could lose, there was no one who did not need to fear reprisals for wrongs he might do to another. This origin is all the more natural as it is impossible to conceive of nascent property originating from anything other than manual labor. What, besides his own labor, can man use in order to acquire things he has not created? Since it is his labor alone that gives the farmer the right to the product of the earth he has tilled, it also by extension gives him a right—at least until the

harvest—to the plot of land, and this goes on from one year to the next. This makes it a continuous occupation of the land, which in this way is easily transformed into property. When the ancients, Grotius says, gave Ceres the title of legislatrix and the festival celebrated in her honor the name of Thesmophoria,33 they indicated by this that the division of the land had produced a new kind of right, that is to say the right to property, which is different from the right that results from natural law.

In this state, equality could have prevailed if men’s talents had been equal, and if, for example, the use of iron and the consumption of food had always been in precise balance. But this balance, not being supported by anything, was soon disrupted; the strongest did the greatest amount of work, those who were most skilled worked to best effect, and the most resourceful found ways of reducing their work. The plowman had more need of iron and the smith more need of wheat, though despite their both laboring equally, one earned much while the other could barely survive. That is how natural inequality spread imperceptibly with the inequality of function, and the differences among men resulting from the differences in circumstance became more marked, more permanent in their effects, and began to exercise a corresponding influence on the fate of individuals.

Things having reached this point, it is easy to imagine the rest. I will not pause in order to describe with all the resulting details that anyone can easily provide the successive invention of other crafts, the development of languages, the testing and implementation of talents, the inequality of fortune, or the use or abuse of riches. I will merely limit myself to casting a quick glance at the position of the human species in this new order of things.

We are now at a stage where all man’s faculties are formed, memory and imagination developed, amour propre awakened, reason activated, and man’s mind has reached almost the full extent of its possible development. All the natural qualities have been put to work, and the rank and fate of every man is established, not only in relation to the number of his possessions and his capacity to help or harm, but also in relation to mind, beauty, power or skill, and merit or talent. Since these qualities were the only ones that could attract esteem, it soon became necessary either to have them or to pretend to have them. It was indispensable for one’s own interest to present oneself as being different from what one in fact was. Being and appearing became two

entirely different things, and from that difference arose insolent ostentation, deceitful cunning, and all the vices in their train.34 Then again, man, who previously had been free and independent, was now, through a multitude of new needs, in fact subjugated to the whole of nature, and above all to his fellow men, whose slave one could say he became in a sense even as he became their master. If he was rich, he needed their services, and if he was poor he needed their help; even if he was of average means he could not do without them. Thus he constantly had to seek to interest others in his fate and make them perceive the real or apparent profit they would gain if they worked for his profit. This made him cunning and deceitful with some of his fellow men, imperious and hard with others, and compelled him to mislead all those whom he needed if he could not make them fear him and had no interest in being of service to them. Finally, an all-consuming ambition— man’s quest to raise his relative stature, less because of an actual need than in order to place himself above others—inspired in all men a dark predilection for harming one another, a secret jealousy that is all the more dangerous in that it often assumes the mask of benevolence in order to strike its blows more effectively. In short, there was competition and rivalry on the one hand, conflict of interest on the other, and always the hidden desire to make one’s profit at another’s expense. All these evils were the first effect of property and the inescapable consequence of nascent inequality.

Before the invention of symbols representing wealth, wealth could consist only of land and livestock, the only real possessions that men can own. But once inheritances had increased in scope and number to the point of covering the whole land, with properties bordering on one another, one property could grow only at the expense of another, and those whom weakness or indolence had kept from acquiring property became poor without having lost anything, for they alone had not changed while everything around them had, and they were obliged to receive or seize their subsistence from the hands of the rich. From this arose, according to the different characteristics among the rich and the poor, either domination and servitude or violence and robbery. The rich, for their part, had barely known the pleasure of domination before they spurned all other pleasures, and, using their old slaves to gain new ones, their one thought was to subjugate and conquer their neighbors, much like

ravenous wolves that, once they have tasted human flesh, spurn all other food and seek to devour nothing but men.

This is how the most powerful and the most wretched people claimed through their power or their need a kind of right over the property of others, equivalent, according to them, to the right of property. The end of equality was followed by terrible disorder. This is how the usurpations committed by the rich, the robbery committed by the poor, the unbridled passions of everyone that stifled natural pity, and the still weak voice of justice, rendered men greedy, ambitious, and wicked. Between the right of the strongest and the right of the first occupant of land arose a perpetual conflict that inevitably led to fights and murders. Nascent society made way for the most terrible state of war: the human species, debased and ravaged, no longer able to turn back or renounce its miserable acquisitions, and by abuse of the faculties that should do it honor working only toward its shame, brought itself to the brink of ruin.

Attonitus novitate mali divesque miserque effugere optat opes et, quae modo voverat, odit.35

It is not possible for men not to have reflected on such a wretched situation or on the calamities that were overwhelming them. The rich, above all, must have soon felt the disadvantage of a perpetual state of civil war for which they alone had to bear the cost, and in which all parties risked their lives, while they alone risked their property. Furthermore, however they might strive to embellish their usurpations, they knew that these were established only on a precarious and abusive right, and as the usurpations had been carried out by force, force could also deprive them of what they had usurped, without their having any recourse for complaint. Even those who had become wealthy through their own industriousness could hardly base their claim to their property on better titles. In vain would they say: “I am the one who built this wall—I have earned the right to this land through my labor.” To this one might reply: “Who furnished you the boundaries for that land, and on what do you base your claim to be paid at our expense for labor we did not impose upon you? Do you not know that a countless number of your brethren are suffering or perishing from lack of what you have in excess, and that you would need the unanimous consent of the entire human species for you to be

allowed to appropriate from the common property anything that extends beyond your own?” The wealthy man, lacking valid reasons to justify himself and sufficient power to defend himself, might easily crush an individual, but would himself be crushed by groups of bandits. Thus, alone against all and unable because of mutual jealousies to unite with his equals against enemies united by the common hope of plunder, the rich man finally by necessity concocted the most well-thought-out scheme that ever entered man’s mind: he used the power of his attackers to his advantage by turning them into his defenders, goading them on with new maxims and institutions that were as favorable to him as natural right was contrary.

To this end, he portrayed to his fellow men the horrors of a situation that was pitching them all against one another, and making their possessions as burdensome to them as their privations, and in which no one found safety— not in poverty nor in wealth—and he easily invented fallacious reasons that enticed them into furthering his designs. “Let us unite,” he told them, “so that we can protect the weak from oppression, keep the ambitious in check, and secure for each man the possessions that belong to him. Let us institute rules for justice to which all will be obliged to conform, rules that will not make exceptions for anyone and that will strive to make up for the caprices of fortune by subjecting the powerful and the weak equally to mutual duties. In short, instead of turning our power against one another, let us gather it into a supreme power, which will rule us according to wise laws that will protect and defend all the members of our association, repelling common enemies, and keeping us in eternal peace and harmony.”

Much less than the equivalent of such an argument was needed to fire up rough and primitive men, who were easy to seduce and had too many disputes to settle among themselves to be able to prevail without arbiters, and too much greed and ambition to endure for long without masters. They all hastened toward their chains in the belief that they were securing their freedom, for although they had enough reason to sense the advantages of a political establishment, they did not have enough experience to predict its dangers. The individuals most capable of foreseeing the abuses were those who counted on profiting from them, and even the wise saw that they had to resolve to sacrifice one part of their freedom in order to preserve the other, much in the way an injured man will have his arm cut off in order to save the rest of his body.

Such was or must have been the origin of society and of laws, the weak gaining new fetters and the wealthy new power. Natural liberty was irreversibly destroyed, and the law of property and of inequality established forevermore. Cunning usurpation now became an irrevocable right; for the profit of a few ambitious men the entire human race was subjected to labor, slavery, and poverty. One can easily see how the establishment of a simple society rendered indispensable the establishment of all other societies, and how people, in order to prevail against a united force, had no other recourse except to unite. Societies multiplied and expanded rapidly, before long covering the whole surface of the earth; soon it was no longer possible to find a single corner of the world where one might free oneself of the yoke and withdraw one’s head from beneath the sword, often waved precariously, that every man saw perpetually hanging over his head. Civil right had thus become the common rule of citizens, and the law of nature no longer played a role except in the relations among different societies. There, under the name of the right of man, the law of nature was tempered by a few tacit agreements to render commerce possible and replace natural compassion, which between interacting societies had lost almost all the power it had had between interacting men; it is now to be found only in a few great enlightened souls that cross the imaginary barriers separating different peoples and embrace all mankind in their benevolence, following the example of the Sovereign Being that created them.

The bodies politic, remaining in their interactions among themselves in a state of nature, soon encountered the same disadvantages that had forced individuals to leave the state of nature, a state that became even more of a problem to these large bodies than it had previously been for the individuals who formed them. This gave rise to national wars, battles, murders, and reprisals that outrage nature and reason, and to all those terrible prejudices that rank the honor of shedding blood among the virtues. The most honest men learned to regard the slaughtering of their kind as one of their duties, and before long they were seen to massacre one another by the thousands without knowing why. More murders were committed in a single day of battle, more horrors in the sacking of a single town, than had been committed in the state of nature in all the world throughout entire centuries. Such are the first discernible effects of the division of mankind into separate societies. Let us return to the institution of these societies.

I know that some have proposed other origins for political societies, such as conquest by the most powerful or the uniting of the weak, but the choices between these causes is of no importance for what I want to establish. Nevertheless, the origin I have put forward seems to me the most natural for the following reasons:

1. That in the first case, the right of conquest is not a right, and consequently cannot serve as a foundation for other rights. The conqueror and the conquered people always remain in a state of war with one another, unless the conquered nation has its freedom fully restored and voluntarily chooses its conqueror as its ruler. Whatever capitulations may have been made up to that point were instigated by violence, and are accordingly void by that very fact. Under this hypothesis, there can be neither genuine society, nor body politic, nor any law other than that of the strongest.

2. That the words strong and weak are equivocal in the second case, and that in the interval that exists between the establishment of the right of property or first occupant and the establishment of political governments, the meaning of these terms is better rendered by the words rich and poor. This, because before the laws were established, man did not have other means of subjugating his equals than attacking their property or making them part of his own.

3. That the poor, having nothing to lose except their freedom, would have been foolish indeed to voluntarily relinquish the only thing they still possessed without gaining anything in exchange; the rich, on the contrary, were much easier to harm, as one could say that they are vulnerable in every aspect of their possessions, and consequently needed to take more precautions to protect them. Furthermore, it is reasonable to assume that something would be invented by those to whom it would be useful rather than by those whom it would harm.

Nascent government had no constant and regular form. The lack of understanding and experience allowed men to see only present disadvantages, and they sought only to remedy disadvantages when they appeared. In spite of the efforts of the wisest legislators, the political state always remained flawed, as it was almost a product of chance, and because, having begun badly, time revealed its defects. Proposing remedies could never rectify the

flaws of the constitution. It was constantly being patched up, whereas it would have been necessary to start by clearing the ground and removing all the old impediments, as Lycurgus did in Sparta,36 in order to build a good building. Society initially consisted only of a few general conventions that all individuals undertook to observe, and of which the community made itself the guarantor toward each individual. Experience had to show how weak such a constitution was, and how easy it was for transgressors of these conventions to avoid conviction or punishment for offenses for which the public alone ought to be witness and judge.

The laws were evaded in countless ways, and problems kept mounting until it finally occurred to man to entrust individuals with the dangerous task of public authority, and bestow on magistrates the responsibility of ensuring obedience to the deliberations of the people. To say that leaders were chosen before men formed a union, and that ministers of laws existed before laws, is a supposition that does not merit serious consideration.

It is also not reasonable to believe that from the start peoples threw themselves into the arms of an absolute master unconditionally and irrevocably, and that the first means of providing for common safety that proud and wild men envisioned was to rush into slavery. Why, in fact, did they give themselves superiors if not to defend themselves against oppression and protect their possessions, their freedom, and their lives, which were, so to speak, the elements that made up their being? Since, as in the relation between one man and another, the worst thing that can happen to the one is to find himself at the mercy of the other, would it not have gone against good sense to start by relinquishing to a leader the things for which they needed his help to preserve? What equivalent could he have offered them for the concession of such a fine right? And if he had dared demand it on the pretext of defending them, would he not immediately have received the answer given in the fable: “What more can the enemy do to us?” It is therefore incontestable, and the fundamental principle of all political right, that peoples give themselves leaders in order to defend their freedom, and not in order to be enslaved. “If we have a prince,” Pliny said to Trajan, “it is so that he will preserve us from having a master.”37

Politicians pronounce the same sophisms on love of liberty that philosophers have pronounced on the state of nature. Through things they

see, they judge very different things they do not see, and so attribute to men a natural inclination to slavery because of the patience with which the men they have before their eyes bear their slavery, not realizing that we can say of freedom, as we can say of innocence and virtue, that one appreciates their worth only so long as one enjoys them, and that one loses the taste for them as soon as they are lost. “I know the delights of your country,” Brasidas said to a satrap who was comparing the life in Sparta to that in Persepolis, “but you cannot know the pleasures of mine.”38

As an untamed steed will bristle its mane, stamp the ground with its hoof, and impetuously struggle against the very sight of the bit, while a trained horse patiently suffers the whip and the spur, barbarous man does not bow his head to the yoke that civilized man bears without a murmur, and will prefer the most turbulent freedom to tranquil subjection. It is therefore not through the degradation of enslaved peoples that man’s natural disposition for or against slavery should be judged, but through the prodigious extremes to which all peoples have gone in order to protect themselves from oppression. I know that the enslaved do nothing but boast of the peace and tranquility they enjoy in their fetters, and that miserrimam servitutem pacem appellant.39 But when I see free peoples sacrificing pleasure, tranquility, wealth, power, and even life to the preservation of the one good thing that is so disdained by those who have lost it; when I see animals that are born free bang their heads against the bars of their prison in their abhorrence of captivity; when I see countless naked savages despise European pleasures and brave hunger, fire, the sword, and death to preserve their independence, I feel that it is not for slaves to argue about freedom.

As for paternal authority, from which some thinkers have derived absolute government and all society, it is enough to remark, without falling back on the conflicting arguments of Locke and Sidney, that nothing on earth is further from the fierce spirit of despotism than the gentleness of paternal authority. This authority is more to the advantage of the one who obeys than to the benefit of the one who commands, and by the law of nature the father is the child’s master only for as long as his aid is necessary. After this period they become equals, and the son, entirely independent of the father, owes him respect but not obedience; for gratitude is a duty that must be rendered, but not a right that can be exacted. Instead of maintaining that civil society is

derived from paternal power, one should, on the contrary, maintain that paternal power derives its principal force from civil society: an individual was acknowledged as the father of a number of other individuals only for as long as they remained gathered around him. The possessions of the father, of which he is unquestionably the master, are the ties that keep his children dependent on him, and he can choose to leave to his children only as great a share of his inheritance as they deserve through their constant deference to his wishes. The subjects of a despot, however, can have little expectation of being favored in this way, since they and their property belong to him, at least in his view. Consequently, they are reduced to receiving as a favor whatever he might grant them of their own property. He bestows justice when he despoils them; he bestows grace when he permits them to live.

By proceeding thus to examine the facts in terms of right, we would find as little reason as we would find truth in the voluntary establishment of tyranny, and it would be difficult to prove the validity of a contract that binds only one of the parties, a contract in which all the obligations are on one side and there are none on the other, and which can be prejudicial only to the party who binds himself. This odious system is far from being, even in our times, the system of wise and good monarchs, especially the kings of France, as can be seen in various places in their edicts. We see this most clearly in the following passage of a famous writ published in 1667 in the name and by order of Louis XIV: “Let it therefore not be said that the Sovereign is not subject to the laws of his state, since the contrary proposition is a truth of the law of nations that flattery has sometimes assailed, but which good princes have always defended as a tutelary divinity of their states. How much more legitimate is it to join wise Plato in saying that the perfect happiness of a kingdom is that a prince be obeyed by his subjects, that the prince obey the laws, and that the laws be right and always directed to the public good.” I will not pause to examine whether this is not debasing man’s nature, liberty being his noblest faculty; whether it is not placing him on the level of beasts that are slaves to instinct; whether it is not an affront to the Creator of his being when man renounces without reserve the most precious of all His gifts, and gives in to the necessity of committing all the crimes He has forbidden in order to please a cruel or insane master; and if the sublime Creator ought to be more angered at seeing His finest creation destroyed than dishonored. (I will disregard, if one wishes, the authority of Barbeyrac, who, following

Locke, plainly declares that no man can sell his liberty to the extent of submitting himself to an arbitrary power that may treat him as it likes. “For,” he adds, ”this would be to sell his own life, of which he is not master.”)40 I will ask only what right those, who were not afraid of debasing themselves to this extent, have to subject their posterity to the same ignominy, and to renounce for their posterity possessions that it did not inherit from their liberality, and without which life itself must be a burden to all who are worthy of life.

Pufendorf maintains that just as one man can transfer his property to another through agreements and contracts, he can also divest himself of his liberty in favor of another. But this seems to me a very bad argument. For in the first place, the property I transfer to another becomes a thing that is entirely foreign to me, nor would I care if it is abused; yet it is important to me that my freedom not be abused, and I cannot expose myself to becoming an instrument of crime without incurring the guilt of the evil I would be forced to commit. Furthermore, as the right of property is a right only by convention and human institution, any man may dispose of what he possesses as he pleases. But this is not the case with the essential gifts of nature such as life and freedom, which everyone is permitted to enjoy, and about which it is at the very least doubtful that one has the right to divest oneself of them. By giving up freedom, man debases his being; by giving up life, he attempts to destroy it to the extent that he is able; and as no temporal property can indemnify man for the loss of either freedom or life, it would be an offense against both nature and reason to give them up at any price whatever. But even if one could transfer one’s liberty to another as one can transfer one’s property, the difference would be very great for the offspring, who enjoy the father’s property only by the transmission to them of his right; whereas freedom being a gift they receive from nature as men, their parents have no right to deprive them of it. Consequently, just as violence had to be done to nature in order to establish slavery, nature had to be altered in order to perpetuate the right of slavery, and jurists who have solemnly pronounced that the child of a slave is born a slave have decided, in other words, that a man is not born a man.

It seems to me, therefore, certain that governments did not originate in arbitrary power, which is only the corruption of government and the

extremity that takes a government back to the sole law of the strongest, which governments were originally designed to remedy. It also seems certain that even if these governments had originated in this way, such power, being by nature illegitimate, could not have served as a basis for the laws of society, nor, consequently, for instituted inequality.

Without entering here into inquiries that still remain to be made into the nature of the fundamental pact of all government, I limit myself to following the common opinion, and so will consider here the establishment of the body politic as a true contract between a people and the leaders it has chosen, a contract by which both parties bind themselves to observe the laws stipulated in it and that forms the bonds of their union. The people having, in regard to social relations, united all its wills into a single will, all the articles on which this will pronounces become so many fundamental laws that bind all members of the state without exception, one of which regulates the selection and power of the magistrates who are charged with watching over the execution of the rest of the laws. This power extends to everything that can maintain the constitution, without going so far as to alter it. Honors are linked to it that render the laws and their ministers respected, and also grant the ministers personal prerogatives that recompense them for the arduous labor that good administration involves. The magistrate, for his part, binds himself to use the power with which he is entrusted solely according to the intention of his constituents, to maintain each individual in the peaceful enjoyment of what belongs to him, and to prefer on every occasion the public interest above his own.

Before experience had shown the inevitable abuses of such a system, or knowledge of the human heart had allowed men to anticipate them, such a system must have appeared all the better, since those who were charged with preserving it had themselves the greatest interest in its preservation; for since magistracy and its rights were based solely on fundamental laws, the magistrates would cease to be legitimate the instant these laws were destroyed. Then the people would no longer owe the magistrates obedience, and as it would have been the laws and not the magistrates that would have constituted the essence of a state, everyone would regain the right to his natural freedom.

If one pauses even briefly to reflect on this, it will be confirmed through further reasons, and by the very nature of the contract one would see that it

could not be irrevocable, for if there were no superior power to guarantee the fidelity of the contracting parties, or to compel them to fulfill their reciprocal engagements, each party would be the sole judge in its own cause, and would always have the right to reject the contract as soon as it felt that the other party had violated its terms, or felt that the terms no longer suited it. It is upon this principle that the right of abdication might possibly be founded. Yet if we consider only the institutions set up by men, as we are doing here, and the magistrate, who holds all the power and appropriates for himself all the advantages of the contract (but nevertheless has the right to renounce his authority), there is all the more reason that the people, who must pay for all the errors of their leader, should have the right to end their subordination to him. But the terrible dissensions and the infinite disorders that this dangerous power of ending one’s subordination would necessarily bring with it, would demonstrate more than anything else how much human government was in need of a foundation more solid than reason alone, and how necessary it was for the public tranquility that the divine will should intervene to give the sovereign authority a sacred and inviolable character that would deprive subjects of the fatal right of disposing of it. If religion had granted mankind this one benefit alone, it would have sufficed for men to cherish and adopt it despite its abuses, since it saves more blood than fanaticism spills. But let us follow the thread of our hypothesis.

The various forms of government derive their origins from the greater or lesser differences among individuals at the moment the governments are instituted. If a man was eminent in power, virtue, wealth, or prestige, he was elected as sole magistrate, and the state became monarchical; if several men of more or less equal standing prevailed over the rest, they were jointly elected, and the result was an aristocracy. Those whose fortunes or talents were less disparate, and who distanced themselves least from the state of nature, retained in common the supreme administration, and formed a democracy. Time proved which of these forms was most advantageous. Some men remained solely answerable to the laws; others soon obeyed masters. The citizens wanted to preserve their liberty, while the subjects of a despot thought of nothing but relieving their neighbors of theirs, unable to bear the thought that others might enjoy a good that they themselves no longer possessed. In short, riches and conquest were on one side, happiness and virtue on the other.

In these various governments all the magistracies were initially elective, and when riches did not prevail, preference was given to merit. Merit gives a natural advantage to age, which assures experience in dealings and a cool composure in deliberation: the elders of the Israelites, the Gerontes of Sparta,41 the Senate of Rome, and even the etymology of our French word seigneur show the extent to which age was respected in the past. The more frequently elections chose men of advanced years, the more frequent the elections became, and the greater the problem grew. Intrigues and factions arose, parties became embittered, civil wars broke out, and the blood of citizens was sacrificed to the sham happiness of the state, which was on the brink of falling back into the anarchy of former times. In their ambition, the foremost men took advantage of these circumstances to perpetuate their offices within their families. The people were already accustomed to dependence, to ease and the comforts of life, and were no longer capable of breaking their fetters, and so they consented to their slavery being increased in order to increase their tranquility. This is how leaders, having become hereditary, grew accustomed to regarding their magistracies as a family possession and themselves as proprietors of the state, of which they had initially been mere officers. This is how they became accustomed to calling their fellow citizens their slaves and to count them like livestock along with their other possessions, viewing themselves as kings of kings, and equals of the gods.

If we follow the progress of inequality through these different revolutions, we will find that the establishment of laws and of the right of property was its first stage, the institution of magistracies the second, and its third and last stage was the changing of legitimate power into arbitrary power. Consequently, the condition of rich and poor was rendered possible by the first epoch, that of the powerful and weak by the second, and that of master and slave by the third, a condition that led to the last degree of inequality and to which all the rest ultimately lead until new revolutions either dissolve the government entirely, or draw it closer to its legitimate founding principle.