Rousseau’s Critique of Inequality

"This is a recent book: it came out in 2015. It’s an attempt to reconstruct the argument of the second discourse, The Discourse on Inequality . Yes, a very radical book for its time. Like the Discourse on the Science and the Arts , it too was an attempt to respond to a prize. The Academy of Dijon set a competition, and Rousseau entered again. This time, he didn’t win. This, the greater work, the more original work, only got second place. I’m sure that Rousseau was disappointed by that. It’s a much more interesting work, although it is quite hard to understand. It gives us a conjectural history of humanity from its earliest time, supposedly, to modernity. It ends with us caught in a nightmare of trying to live in the opinion of other people, a nightmare of competition, vanity, pride, public spectacle, all the things with which we are familiar from modern life. Rousseau asks how we got here. One of the interesting things about Neuhouser’s book is that he takes seriously Rousseau’s claim that he’s not really trying to reconstruct human history as such. Rather, he’s investigating the presuppositions of ideas of inequality and hierarchy, and of what makes an inequality possible. He’s using the idea of a hypothetical history to try and make some of those ideas vivid, to try to make distinctions between what’s natural to the human race and what’s artificial. He’s not reading Rousseau as an amateur historian. For Neuhouser, Rousseau is trying to produce a genealogy in a similar manner to Nietzsche, much later, does with his Genealogy of Morals . Rousseau actually says, right at the beginning of the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality , that it would be impossible to find out the truth of what this history is. All we can do is read this history in the nature of present day humans and ask how we got there. But the original human nature that lies in our distant past is obscured. He has this idea, this picture of a statue: the statue might depict our original human nature, but it’s been eroded by the sea, by the wind. Its features are no longer legible. That’s true, but we have access to archaeological tools today that Rousseau didn’t have access to. So we can do quite a lot of comparative anthropology. We know about the theory of evolution by natural selection, we can look into similarities between us and other primate species and ask what kind of characteristics our nearest common ancestors might have. We can do all of those things, Rousseau couldn’t. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Yes, I think that’s right. He’s trying to make it accessible and relevant to people who are familiar with its descendants, the contemporary egalitarian liberal philosophy, particularly the philosophy of people like John Rawls and Elizabeth Anderson, with her notions of relational inequality. They have a relationship to Rousseau’s work. Neuhouser is trying to explain, to people who are more familiar with the modern literature of political philosophy, how Rousseau’s writing fits in to it. Both, in a sense. I think it’s true that John Rawls’s work could not have been produced without Rousseau as an antecedent. If you read the Theory of Justice , if you read The Social Contract , if you read what Rawls himself had to say about moral psychology, you see all kinds of parallels with Rousseau’s work. The causal relationship is certainly there. What Neuhouser does is make it possible for modern political philosophers to read Rousseau in relation to the modern tradition in political philosophy and also alongside non-philosophical writing on equality, such as Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality would be a good place to start. It’s not too long, and that’s often a plus for the modern reader. It also has such a cornucopia of different ideas: it’s got many passages that capture the imagination. As well as the orang utans, it’s got the contrast between the life of a Carib—an inhabitant of the Caribbean—and a modern minister, a story of incipient inequality and civil war and how the rule of law might actually cement inequality between the wealthy and the poor, it’s got passages about the relationship between technology and progress that presage work by people like Marx and his ideas about historical materialism. It’s got all that in a very short span. So, though it’s, in many ways, a confusing work—and sometimes it’s hard to see what the arguments are supposed to be—it’s the kind of work that can set you off thinking in all kinds of different directions as you read it. It’s very rich. Rousseau transformed our understanding of many aspects of life. Three or four year ago the French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur produced a special edition on Rousseau and on the front cover it made the following claims for Rousseau: he invented the child, nature, equality, democracy, and the cult of the self. Those are big claims for Rousseau, but they’re not entirely crazy. He made a difference to how we think about all of those things: about our own subjectivity, about politics, about equality. For the range of contribution and impact on Western intellectual culture, Rousseau is a big figure. He’s still a big figure, more than 300 years after his birth."