Jean Jacques Rousseau. The Social Contract and Discourses. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1973.
Jean Jacques Rousseau has been one of the most influential philosophers of the modern era. His ideas played an important role in bringing about the Romantic movement, and many of his ideas are still very much with us. Modern popular attitudes toward Native American Indians, for example, as exemplified in movies like "Dances with Wolves," owe as much to Rousseau's "noble savage" as they do to the actual Native American people. The ferment triggered by Rousseau's thought also played a role in setting the intellectual stage for the French Revolution.
Yet his thought was by his own admission based upon very few facts, but almost entirely on what we would now call anthropological speculations. "Let us begin by laying all facts aside," he wrote (Origin of Inequality, 45), "as they do not affect the question." He continues:
The investigations we may enter into, in treating this
subject, must not be considered as historical truths,
but only as mere conditional and hypothetical reasonings,
rather calculated to explain the nature of things, than
to ascertain their actual origin; just like the hypo
theses which our physicists daily form respecting the
In Rousseau's view, what we would call primitive man was devoid of inequality; which began with the invention of the concept of property (Origin of Inequality, 76ff). Only in settled communities did the concepts of property and then of government arise, and with them emerged inequality.
There may well be some truth to this. Certainly sharp social stratifications seem to have emerged only with the coming of large settled communities, or "civilization" in the conventional sense. Yet even hunter gatherer societies have their chiefs, elevated above the rest to some degree, and not infrequently captives or slaves who ran...