Work · Empiricism, Enlightenment & Liberalism
Discourse on Inequality
The first man who enclosed a piece of ground was the true founder of civil society.
Introduction
Rousseau wrote the discourse for a prize competition of the Academy of Dijon, which asked in 1753 about the origin of inequality among men and whether it is authorised by natural law; he did not win. It was printed in Amsterdam in 1755 with a dedication to the Republic of Geneva. The first part reconstructs a state of nature in which humans live alone, guided by self-preservation and pity and distinguished by “perfectibility”; the second shows how property, agriculture and metallurgy, and the desire for others’ esteem (amour-propre) lead to dependence and inequality. Voltaire thanked him for the copy with the remark that reading it made one want to walk on all fours.
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Connections
Criticizes
- Leviathan1651 · Thomas Hobbes
Taken up in
- Tristes Tropiques1955 · Claude Lévi-Strauss
Criticized in
- Treatise on the Origin of Language1772 · Johann Gottfried Herder
- Of Grammatology1967 · Jacques Derrida
More works by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- 1782Confessions
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