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…