Rousseau’s Discourses: A Short Critique

In the introduction to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality Among Mankind (The 2nd Discourse), Rousseau clarifies the nature of his premise. In particular, he states that it is not factually based. Rather, it is hypothetically based, in a manner which is meant to make the nature of the origin of humanities’ inequality clear. What this indicates about Rousseau’s method in the 2nd discourse is that it is based on a premise that is a hasty generalization on the nature of homo sapiens, which is that we are naturally good. Indeed, the overarching narrative of both of the discourses is that humans are naturally good and institutions make them bad; the latter, -which is highly questionable- is wholly where Rousseau is deriving the former, which is not at all sufficient evidence to suppose the former. Regardless of the empirical validity of the claims which Rousseau makes about early human nature and the inherent corrupting of it by civil society, Rousseau’s method is quasi-axiomatic & his view on humanity his highly comparable to that of social-constructionist theory.

The account of human nature that Rousseau delineated in the introduction to the 2nd discourse starts with describing the natural state of inequality in humans:

“Religion commands us to believe that since God Himself took men out of the state of nature immediately after the creation, they are unequal because He wanted them to be so; but it does not forbid us to form conjectures, drawn solely from the nature of man and the beings surrounding him, about what the human race might have become if it had remained abandoned to itself.”

The natural state of human inequality -which no doubt exists- is derived in the mind of Rousseau by a questionable source. Nonetheless, if we grant this questionable source, it allows for further investigation, which Rousseau obliges to undergo. However, Rousseau’s investigations are admitted to “put aside the facts”. Thus, the entire edifice of Rousseau’s examination of humankind is hypothetical and thus should be taken with a grain of salt -or for the staunch empiricist/historian, not at all.