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Given only the barest of knowledge about how Rousseau began life, one would never expect him to become one of the greatest Enlightenment thinkers. His mother died nine days after he was born; his father abandoned him when he was ten, and the sister of the pastor who took him in beat him mercilessly. One would expect an illiterate, disoriented man; rather, we get a refined and original philosopher.

One reason is that at sixteen Rousseau became the lover of a French Baroness, Francoise-Louise de Warens. Rousseau converted to Catholicism to please her and to get an education. Under her sponsorship, he rapidly proved himself an extraordinary talent. In 1750 he read an advertisement for an essay contest, asking entrants to explain if the arts and sciences had benefited humanity. Upon reading the advertisement, Rousseau had a moment of deep insight into the natural goodness of humanity -- an insight that served as a foundation to all his subsequent philosophizing. He wrote Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, showing that humanity had suffered from the creation of the arts and sciences, won the contest, and became famous. He later published a novel, in 1761, that became a best seller, as well as several philosophical tracts criticizing the institution of private property and claiming that true friendship was impossible within a legalistic society. All of his ideas were widely read and discussed.

Rousseau's ideas got him into trouble with the authorities in Switzerland and France, and he lived for a while under the protection of David Hume in England. He had something of a paranoid mental breakdown, which he unfortunately committed to writing, causing a scandal in same communities where his philosophical works had been so widely respected. His autobiography Confessions was suppressed by the authorities, and he died, in 1772, four years before it was published.

Considered a fundamental inspiration for the French Revolution and for socialist philosophers like Karl Marx, Rousseau's contribution to the Enlightenment was a robust and philosophically sound critique of civilization itself. He had an inclination of what Eastern philosophers call Tao, the original state of human consciousness, and he felt that most human contrivances distanced us from our natural elan.

A Discourse on Inequality (Penguin Classics)

Published: 1754

What is the origin of inequality among men, and is it authorized by natural law?

Rousseau asked this question in 1745, and set about answering it in his A Discourse on Inequality (Penguin Classics):

Leaving aside...all the scientific books which teach us only to see men as they have made themselves, and pondering the first and simplest operations of the human soul, I believe I perceive in it two principles that are prior to reason, of which one makes us ardently interested in our well-being and our self-preservation, and the other inspires in us a natural repugnance to seeing any sentient being, and principally our fellow men, perish or suffer. It appears to me that the ability of our mind to coordinate and combine these two principles, without the need for introducing that of sociability here, gives rise to all the rules of natural right, rules that reason is then forced to reestablish on other foundations, when, by its successive developments, it has succeeded in smothering nature.

Rousseau believed that humans in their natural state -- whatever state they were in before the advent of civilization -- was certainly more "true" and "just" than is our current situation, mired as we are in the opinions of others and the laws of society.

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Introduction:

This psycologically penetrating passage gets at the root of it all: this need we all seem to have, which makes us want to better our neighbors, leads to all sorts of personal and social ruination. Explaining how this affects history and the environment, he begins an argument that Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize winning Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies completes in ways Rousseau could never have imagined.

"Supernuminaries" are extra and unwanted people.

Passage:

Behold, then, all our faculties developed, memory and imagination in play, self-love aroused, reason made active, and the mind having almost reached the limit of the perfection to which it is susceptible. Behold all the natural qualities put into action, the rank and fate of each man established, not only upon the amount of his property and his power to serve or to harm, but also upon mind, beauty, strength, or skill, upon merit or talents, and since these qualities were the only ones capable of attracting consideration, it soon became necessary to possess them or to affect them; it was necessarily to one's advantage to seem to be other than what one was in fact.

To be and to appear became two completely different things, and from this distinction sprang imposing ostentation, deceptive cunning, and all the vices which follow in their train. From yet another perspective, behold man as free and independent as he formerly was, subjugated, so to speak, by a multitude of new needs to all of nature, and especially to his fellowmen, whose slave he becomes, in a sense, even in becoming their master; rich, he needs their services; poor, he needs their help, and even being of average wealth does not enable him to do without them. He must, therefore, constantly seek to interest them in his fate, and make them find it profitable, either actually or apparently, to work for it. This makes him deceitful and crafty with some, imperious and harsh with the others, and makes it necessary for him to abuse all those whom he needs, when he cannot make himself feared by them, and when he does not find it in his interest to serve them in a useful way.

Finally, consuming ambition, the zeal to elevate their relative fortune, less out of true need than to set themselves above others, inspires in all men a base inclination to harm each other, a secret jealousy, all the more dangerous as it often assumes the mask of benevolence in order to strike its blow in greater safety; in a word, competition and rivalry on the one hand, conflicts of interest on the other, and always the hidden desire to profit at the expense of others -- all these evils are the first effects of property and the inseparable consequences of nascent inequality.

Before signs to represent wealth had been invented, it could scarcely consist of anything but land and livestock, the only real goods men can possess. Now, when inheritances had increased in number and extent to the point that they covered the entire earth and were all contiguous to one another, none could be enlarged any longer except at the expense of others, and the supernumeraries, whom weakness or indolence had prevented from acquiring anything in their turn, became poor without having lost anything, because, although everything was changing around them, they alone had not changed and were obliged to receive or to steal their subsistence from the hand of the rich, and from that point domination and servitude, or violence and pillage, according to the different characters of the rich and the poor, began to arise.

The rich, for their part, had scarcely become acquainted with the pleasure of domination, before they began to disdain all others, and, using their former slaves to subdue new ones, they thought of nothing but subjugating and enslaving their neighbors, like those hungry wolves which, having once tasted human flesh, reject all other food, and no longer want anything but men to devour.

In this way, since the most powerful or the most miserable made of their strength or their needs a kind of right to the possessions of others, equivalent, in their opinion, to the right of property, equality was destroyed and followed by the most frightful disorder. In this way, the usurpations of the rich, the brigandage of the poor, the unbridled passions of all, stifling natural compassion and the still feeble voice of justice, made men avaricious, ambitious, and wicked. Between the right of the strongest and the right of the first occupant arose a perpetual conflict which came to an end only in fights and murders. Nascent society made way for the most horrible state of war; the human race, wretched and debased, no longer able to retrace its steps or to renounce its unfortunate acquisitions, and working only toward its shame by abusing the faculties that honor it, brought itself to the brink of ruin.

Shocked by the newness of the ill, rich and yet wreched,
He seeks to run away from his wealth and hates what he once prayed for.

End Note:

dhammza

The quote is from Ovid's Metamorphoses (Penguin Classics), about Midas' extreme suffering after Bacchus grants his wish to have everything he touches turn to gold. It is at this point in the essay that Rousseau really fleshes out his radical ideas -- ideas that would influence the American Civil War and the French Revolution and that remain current today, as people still struggle to obtain and to preserve liberty -- and to understand what liberty really is.