INEQUALITY

Inequality



Inequality

This infamous work is on the discourse on the origin and basis of inequality of men.Rousseau discusses two types of inequality, natural or physical and ethical or political. Once man has entered into civil society through the invention of property, inequality becomes apparent and freedom is lost. Natural inequality involves differences between one man's physical strength and that of another - it is a product of nature. Rousseau is not concerned with this type of inequality and wishes to investigate moral inequality. He argues moral inequality is endemic to a civil society and relates and causes differences in power and wealth. This type of inequality is established by convention. Rousseau appears to take a cynical view of civil society, and refers to times before the current state of civil society, when man was closer to his natural state, as happier times for man.

The central concept in Rousseau's thought is "liberty," and most of his works deal with the mechanisms through which humans are forced to give up their liberty. At the foundation of his thought on government and authority is the idea of the "social contract," in which government and authority are a mutual contract between the authorities and the governed; this contract implies that the governed agree to be ruled only so that their rights, property and happiness be protected by their rulers(Burke, 2007, 125 ).

Once rulers cease to protect the ruled, the social contract is broken and the governed are free to choose another set of governors or magistrates. This idea would become the primary animating force in the Declaration of Independence , which is more or less a legal document outlining a breach of contract suit. In fact, all modern liberation discourse at some level or another owes its origin to The Social Contract and Rousseau's earlier treatise, The Discourse on Inequality(Rousseau, 2005).

In reality, the difference is, that the savage lives within himself while social man lives outside himself and can only live in the opinion of others, so that he seems to receive the feeling of his own existence only from the judgement of others concerning him(Addison, 2009, 85 ). It is not to my present purpose to insist on the indifference to good and evil which arises from this disposition, in spite of our many fine works on morality, or to show how, everything being reduced to appearances, there is but art and mummery in even honour, friendship, virtue, and often vice itself, of which we at length learn the secret of boasting; to show, in short, how abject we are, and never daring to ask ourselves in the midst of so much philosophy, benevolence, politeness, and of such sublime codes of morality, we have nothing to show for ourselves but a frivolous and deceitful appearance, honour without virtue, reason without wisdom, and pleasure without happiness.

It would be incorrect, though, to think of Rousseau as a thorough-going individualist. In fact, Rousseau believed that the social contract, if it were followed on all sides, bound every ...