_____________________________________________________________
JEAN JACQUES
ROUSSEAU
DISCOURSE ON
THE ORIGIN AND THE FOUNDATIONS
OF INEQUALITY AMONG MEN
[Second Discourse]
_____________________________________________________________
[This translation, which has been
prepared by Ian Johnston of Vancouver Island University, is available for
general use but has some copyright restrictions. For details, see Copyright.
This text (2013) is a revised and corrected version of a translation first
published on the internet in 2006. This translation is available free of charge
in the form of a Word booklet for those who would like to print copies for
their students. For comments, questions, suggestions for improvements, and so
on, please contact Ian Johnston]
_____________________________________________________________
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
To the Republic of Geneva
Preface
Notice on the Notes
Question Posed by the Academy
of Dijon
Discourse on Inequality
First Part
Second Part
Rousseau’s Notes
Translator’s Endnotes
TRANSLATOR’S
NOTE
In the
following text there are two sorts of endnotes, those provided by Rousseau and those
provided by the translator. Where Rousseau refers to one of his own notes, the
phrase (Note 1), (Note 2), and so on appears in the
text, and the bracketed phrase is hyperlinked to the appropriate note at the
end of the text. Rousseau himself recommends that the reader ignore his notes
until after completing the entire text.
The notes
provided by the translator are indicated by a superscript number hyperlink
(e.g., 22). Where Rousseau offers a quotation in a foreign language, the
quotation has been translated into English in the text itself. Rousseau’s
original words appear in an endnote.
Jean-Jacques
Rousseau (1712-1778) prepared his Discourse on Inequality (also
called the Second Discourse) as an entry in a competition organized
by the Academy of Dijon in 1754. He had won first prize in a previous
competition (in 1750) with his Discourse on the Sciences and the
Arts (the First Discourse), a victory which had helped to
make him famous. The Second Discourse did not fare so well in
the contest.
When the Second
Discourse was published again in 1782, Rousseau inserted a few short
minor additions into the text. These are included here but are not indicated.
DISCOURSE ON THE ORIGIN AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF
INEQUALITY AMONG MEN
by
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Citizen of Geneva
We ought to think about what is natural
not in things which are corrupt but in things which are well ordered by nature.
Aristotle, Politics, I, 51
MAGNIFICENT,
MOST HONOURED, AND SOVEREIGN LORDS
Convinced that only the virtuous citizen
may give his native land honours which it can acknowledge, I have been working
for thirty years to become worthy of offering you public homage, and since this
happy occasion makes up in part for what my efforts have not been able to accomplish,
I believed that I would be permitted here to follow the zeal which inspires me
rather than the right which ought to act as my authorization. Having had the
good fortune to be born among you, how could I reflect on the equality which nature
has established among men and on the inequality which they have instituted,
without thinking about the profound wisdom with which both of these, happily combined
in this state, work together in a manner most closely approaching natural law
and most favourable to society for maintaining public order and the happiness
of individuals? As I was investigating the best principles which good sense
could set down concerning the constitution of a government, I was so struck by
seeing them all at work in yours that, even if I had not been born within your
walls, I do not think I would have been able to forego offering this picture of
human society to those who, among all peoples, seem to me to possess its
greatest advantages and to have best avoided its abuses.
If I had had to choose the place where
I was born, I would have selected a society whose size was limited by the extent
of human capabilities, that is to say, by the possibility of being well governed,
and where each man was competent in his job, so that no one would be compelled
to delegate to others the functions to which he was assigned, a state where,
because all the individuals knew each other, neither the obscure manoeuvres of
vice nor the modesty of virtue would be able to escape the view and judgment of
the public, and where this sweet habit of seeing and knowing each other made
the love of one’s native land the love of the citizens rather than the love of
the land.
I would have wanted to be born in a
country where the sovereign and the people could have only one and the same interest,
so that all the movements of the machine would never tend to do anything except
for the common happiness. Since that would not be possible unless the people
and the sovereign were the same person, it follows that I would have wished to
be born under a democratic government, wisely tempered.
I would have wanted to live and die
free, that is to say, sufficiently subject to laws so that neither I nor anyone
else would be able to shake off their honorable yoke, that beneficial and mild
yoke which the proudest heads carry all the more obediently because they are
created to carry no other.
Thus, I would have wished that no one
in the state could assert that he was above the law and that no one outside
would be able to impose any law that the state was obligated to recognize. For
no matter what the constitution of a government may be, if there is a single
man who is not subject to the law, all the others are necessarily at his discretion (Note 1).
And if there is a national leader and another foreign leader, no matter how
they may divide up the authority, it is impossible for both of them to be
properly obeyed and for the state to be well governed.
I would not have wanted to live in a
newly established republic, however good the laws it might have, for fear that,
since the government might perhaps be set up in a way different from what would
be necessary at the time and so would not be suitable for the new citizens or
the citizens for the new government, the state might be subject to being undermined
and destroyed almost from the moment of its birth. For with liberty it is like
those solid and delicious foods or those rich wines that are appropriate for
nourishing and strengthening robust temperaments accustomed to them but that
overwhelm, ruin, and intoxicate the weak and delicate ones not made for them.
Once people have grown accustomed to masters, they are no longer capable of doing
without them. If they attempt to shake off the yoke, they distance themselves
even further from liberty, because they confuse it with an unrestricted license,
which is its opposite, and so their revolutions almost always deliver them over
to seducers, who merely make their chains worse. Even the Roman populace, that
model of all free peoples, was not in a condition to govern itself when it came
out from under the oppression of the Tarquins.2 Debased
by the slavery and the ignominious work which had been imposed on it, at first
it was only a stupid population, which had to be managed and governed with the
greatest wisdom, so that, as it gradually grew accustomed to breathe the
healthy air of liberty, these souls, enervated or rather brutalized under
tyranny, by degrees acquired that strictness of morality and that courageous
pride which finally made them the most respected of all peoples. Hence, I would
have sought out for my native land a happy and peaceful republic whose antiquity
was in a way lost in the night of time, which had gone through only those
troubles suitable for demonstrating and reinforcing among its inhabitants a
courage and a love of homeland and in which the citizens, accustomed for a long
time to a wise independence, were not only free but worthy of being free.
I would have wanted to choose for
myself a native land whose fortunate lack of power made it turn away from a ferocious
love of conquests and which was protected by a location even more fortunate
from the fear of itself becoming the conquest of another state, a free city
situated among several peoples, none of whom had an interest in invading it and
each of whom had an interest in preventing others from doing so themselves, a
republic, in short, which did not tempt the ambition of its neighbours and
which could reasonably count on their assistance in times of need. In such a
happy situation it follows that it would have had nothing to fear except itself
and that, if its citizens were trained in using weapons, this would be to maintain
among them that warrior spirit and that courageous pride which are so well
suited to liberty and which nourish the taste for it, rather than from the need
to provide their own defense.
I would have searched for a country
where the legislative right was common to all the citizens. For who can understand
better than they the conditions under which it is appropriate for them to live
together in the same society? But I would not have approved of plebiscites like
those among the Romans, where the leaders of the state and those most
interested in its preservation were excluded from the deliberations on which
its security frequently depended and where, by an absurd discrepancy, the
magistrates were deprived of rights which simple citizens enjoyed.
On the contrary, in order to stop
self-interested and badly conceived projects and the dangerous innovations that
finally ruined the Athenians, I would have desired that no single man had the
power to propose new laws according to his fancy, but that this right belonged
only to the magistrates and that even they used it with such circumspection
that the populace, for its part, was reluctant to give its consent to these
laws, and that their promulgation could be carried out only with so much
solemnity, that before the constitution was undermined the citizens would have
had the time to realize that it was above all the great antiquity of the laws
which made them sacred and venerable, that the populace soon grows contemptuous
of laws which it sees changing every day, and that, by growing used to
neglecting ancient customs under the pretext of making things better, people
often introduce great evils in order to correct lesser ones.
Above all, on the ground that it must
be badly governed, I would have run away from a republic where the people believed
they could dispense with their magistrates or leave them with only a precarious
authority and so would have imprudently kept control of the administration of
civil matters and the execution of their own laws. Something like that must
have been the rudimentary constitution of the first governments which emerged immediately
from the state of nature and something like that was also one of the vices
which ruined the republic of Athens.
But I would have chosen a country
where the individuals were content with giving their sanction to the laws and deciding
as a collective body and on the basis of a report from their leaders the most important
public issues. The people would establish respected tribunals, distinguish with
care their various departments, and elect year by year the most capable and
most honest of their fellow citizens to administer justice and govern the
state. The virtue of the magistrates in this way would bear witness to the
wisdom of the people, so that they both mutually honoured each other. Thus, if
ever some fatal misunderstandings happened to trouble public harmony, even
these times of blindness and errors would be characterized by evidence of
moderation, reciprocal esteem, and a common respect for the laws, harbingers
and guarantees of a sincere and permanent reconciliation.
Such are the advantages, MAGNIFICENT,
MOST HONOURED, AND SOVEREIGN LORDS, I would have
looked for in the native land I would have chosen for myself. And if providence
had added to these a charming location, a temperate climate, a fertile
countryside, and the most delightful appearance under heaven, then to complete
my happiness, I would have desired only to enjoy all these benefits in the
bosom of this happy native land, living peacefully in a sweet society with my
fellow citizens, practising towards them, following their example, humanity,
friendship, and all the virtues, and leaving after me the honourable memory of
a good man and an honest and virtuous patriot.
If, less happy or wise too late, I had
seen myself reduced to end an uncertain and languishing career in other
climates, vainly regretting the peace and quiet which my imprudent youth had
taken away from me, I would at least have nourished in my soul these same
feelings which I could not have put to use in my own country, and, filled with
a tender and disinterested affection for my distant fellow citizens, I would
have delivered to them from the depths of my heart something close to the
following address.
“My dear fellow citizens, or rather my
brothers, since the ties of blood as well as the laws unite almost all of us,
it is pleasant for me to be unable to think of you without at the same time
thinking of all the benefits which you enjoy, whose value none of you perhaps
feels better than I, who have lost them. The more I reflect on your political
and civil situation, the less I can imagine that the nature of human affairs
could include a better one. In all other governments, when it is a question of
securing the greatest benefit for the state, everything is always limited to
imaginary projects, at most to mere possibilities. For you, your happiness is
complete. All you have to do is enjoy it. You have no further need to become
perfectly happy other than to know how to content yourselves with being so.
Your sovereignty, acquired or recovered by the point of a sword and preserved
for two centuries by dint of your merit and wisdom, is finally recognized fully
and universally. Honourable treaties determine your boundaries, assure your
rights, and strengthen your repose. Your constitution is excellent, set down by
most sublime reason and protected by friendly and respected powers. Your state
is tranquil: you have neither wars nor conquerors to fear. You have no masters,
other than the wise laws you have made, administered by magistrates with
integrity, whom you have chosen. You are neither rich enough to be enervated by
soft living and with vain delights to lose the taste for genuine happiness and
solid virtues, nor so poor that you need more help from foreigners than your
industry procures for you. And this precious liberty, which in great nations is
maintained only with exorbitant taxation, costs you almost nothing to preserve.
May a republic so wisely and so happily
constituted last eternally for the happiness of its citizens and as an example
to other peoples! This is the only wish which remains for you to make and the
only task left for you to carry out. From now on it is up to you alone, not to
create your happiness, for your ancestors have spared you the trouble of that,
but to make it endure by the wisdom of using it well. Your preservation depends
upon your perpetual union, your obedience to the laws, and your respect for
their ministers. If there remains among you the least germ of acrimony or
mistrust, hurry to destroy it as a deadly leavening agent which sooner or later
would bring you misfortune and the ruin of the state. I entreat you all to go
back deep into your hearts and to consult the secret voice of your conscience.
Does anyone among you recognize in the universe a body more honest, more
enlightened, and more respectable than your body of magistrates? Do not all its
members offer you examples of moderation, simplicity of morals, respect for the
laws, and the most sincere spirit of reconciliation? So without any reservations
render to such wise leaders that healthy confidence which reason owes to virtue. Consider the fact that they are your choice,
that they justify that choice, and that the honours due to those whom you have
dignified necessarily reflect back on you yourselves. None of you is so little
enlightened that he does not know that where the vigour of the laws and the
authority of their defenders cease there can be neither security nor liberty
for anyone. Then what is of concern among you other than to carry out with a
good heart and a just confidence what you would always be obliged to do by
genuine interest and duty and for the sake of reason? Do not let a culpable and
fatal indifference to the maintenance of the constitution ever make you neglect,
in time of need, the wise counsels of the most enlightened and the most zealous
among you. But may equity, moderation, and
the most respectful firmness continue to regulate every step you take and to
manifest in you to the entire universe the example of a proud and modest
people, as jealous of its glory as of its liberty. Take care above all—and this
will be my last piece of advice—never to listen to sinister interpretations and
poisonous speeches, whose secret motives are often more dangerous than the actions
they are proposing. An entire house wakes up and responds with alarm to the
first cries of a good and faithful guardian who never barks except at the approach
of thieves, but we hate the importunity of those animals whose barking never
ceases to disturb the public peace and whose constant and inappropriate
warnings are not listened to, even at a time when they are needed.”
And you, MAGNIFICENT AND MOST HONOURED LORDS, you worthy and
respectable magistrates of a free people, permit me to offer my homage and my
respects to you in particular. If there is in the world a rank suited to ennobling
those who hold it, it is undoubtedly the one which talents and virtue confer,
the one of which you have made yourselves worthy and to which your fellow
citizens have raised you. Their own merit adds to your own still a new lustre.
Selected by men capable of governing others, so that they are governed themselves,
I find you as superior to other magistrates as a free people, above all the one
you have the honour of leading, is superior to the population of other states,
thanks to its knowledge and its reason.
Allow me to cite an example for which
better records should remain and which will always be present in my heart. I cannot
recall without the sweetest emotion the memory of that virtuous citizen to whom
I owe my life and who in my childhood often spoke of the respect which was due
to you. I see him still, living from the work of his hands and feeding his soul
with the most sublime truths. In front of him I see Tacitus, Plutarch, and
Grotius, mixed in with the instruments of his trade.3 I see
at his side a beloved son receiving with too little profit the gentle instruction
of the best of fathers. But if the errors of a foolish youth made me forget for
a while such wise lessons, I have the happiness of feeling at last that, no
matter what tendency one has towards vice, it is difficult for an education in
which the heart is involved to remain lost forever.
Such are, MAGNIFICENT AND MOST HONOURABLE LORDS, the citizens and even
the ordinary inhabitants born in the state you govern. Such are those educated
and sensible men, about whom, under the name of workers and the people, those
in other nations have such low and false ideas. My father, I affirm with joy,
was not distinguished among his fellow citizens. He was only what they all are,
and given the kind of man he was, there is no country where his society would
not have been sought out and cultivated among the most respectable people, even
for their own benefit. It is not appropriate for me and, thanks to heaven, it
is not necessary to speak to you about the esteem which can be expected from
you for men of that quality, your equals in education as well as by the rights
of nature and of birth, your inferiors by their own will, by the preference
which they owe and have accorded to your merit, something for which you, in
your turn, owe them some sort of acknowledgement. I learn with a lively satisfaction
how much your gentleness and condescension temper for them the solemnity which
befits ministers of the laws, how much you repay them with your regard and
attention for what they owe you in obedience and respect, behaviour full of
justice and wisdom, appropriate for distancing more and more the memory of the
unfortunate events which it is necessary to forget in order that they are never
seen again, conduct all the more judicious since this equitable and generous
people makes a pleasure of its duty and naturally loves to honour you and since
those keenest to maintain their rights are the ones most inclined to respect
yours.4
It should not be astonishing that the
leaders of a civil society love its glory and its happiness. But it is too much
for the peace of men to expect that those who think of themselves as
magistrates, or rather as masters, of a holier and more sublime homeland
manifest some love for the earthly homeland which nourishes them. How sweet it
is for me to be able to make such a rare exception in our favour and to place
in the rank of our best citizens these zealous men, trustees of sacred
doctrines authorized by the laws, those venerable ministers to the soul, whose
lively and sweet eloquence carries the Gospel maxims into the heart all the
better because they always start by practising them themselves! The whole world
knows how successfully the great art of the pulpit is cultivated in Geneva.
But, too accustomed to perceiving things said one way and done another, few
people know how far the spirit of Christianity, the sanctity of morals, the
strictness toward themselves, and the kindness for others prevail in the body
of our ministers. Perhaps it is up to the city of Geneva alone to demonstrate
the edifying example of such a perfect union between a society of theologians
and men of letters. I base my hope for the permanent tranquillity of the state
in large part on their wisdom, their acknowledged moderation, and their zeal
for its prosperity, and I observe with a pleasure mingled with astonishment and
respect how much they are horrified by the dreadful maxims of those holy and barbarous
men, of whom history provides more than one example, who, to maintain the
so-called rights of God, that is to say, their own interests, were all the less
averse to shedding human blood because they flattered themselves that theirs
would always be respected.
Could I forget that precious half of
the republic which creates the happiness of the other half and whose sweetness
and wisdom maintain peace and good morals within it? Amiable and virtuous
female citizens, the lot of your sex will always be to govern ours. What
happiness when your chaste power, exercised solely within the conjugal union,
makes itself felt only for the glory of the state and public well being. That
is how women used to command in Sparta, and that is how you deserve to command
in Geneva. What barbarous man could resist the voice of honour and of reason in
the mouth of a tender wife? Who would not scorn vain luxury at the sight of
your simple and modest dress which, through the brilliance it acquires from
you, seems to be most favourable to beauty? It is up to you always to maintain
by your amiable and innocent influence and your captivating spirit the love of
the laws in the state and harmony among the citizens, to reunite divided
families with happy marriages, and, above all, to correct by the persuasive
sweetness of your lessons and by the modest graces of your conversation the
excesses which our young people happen to pick up in other countries, from
where, in place of so many useful things from which they could profit, they
bring back, with a puerile tone and ridiculous airs acquired among lost women,
nothing but an admiration for who knows what kind of would-be grandeur,
frivolous compensations for their servitude, which will never have the value of
noble liberty. So always be what you are, the chaste guardians of morals and
the mild restraints of peace, and continue to put to good use on every occasion
the rights of the heart and of nature for the benefit of duty and virtue.
I flatter myself that, in basing my
hope for the general happiness of the citizens and for the glory of the republic
on such guarantees, I will not be proved wrong by events. I confess that with
all these advantages it will not shine with that brilliance which dazzles most
eyes and for which the childish and fatal taste is the most deadly enemy of
happiness and liberty. Let the dissolute young go elsewhere to seek easy
pleasures and long repentance. Let the so-called people of taste admire in
other places the grandeur of palaces, the beauty of carriages, the superb
furnishings, the pomp of spectacles, and all the refinements of soft living and
luxury. In Geneva, one will find nothing but men, but such a sight nevertheless
has a real value of its own, and those who search it out are well worth the
admirers of the rest.
MAGNIFICENT,
MOST HONOURED, AND SOVEREIGN LORDS,
may you all deign to receive with the same kindness the respectful testimonies
of the interest which I take in your communal prosperity. If in this lively
outpouring of my heart I have been so unfortunate as to be guilty of some indiscreet
outbursts, I beg you to pardon that as the tender affection of a true patriot
and the ardent and legitimate zeal of a man who considers that there is no
greater happiness for him than that of seeing you all happy.
I am, with the most profound respect,
MAGNIFICENT, MOST HONOURED
AND SOVEREIGN LORDS,
Your very humble and very obedient servant and
fellow citizen
JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU
Chambery, 12 June 1754.
The most useful and the least advanced
of all areas of human knowledge seems to me to be the knowledge of man (Note 2), and
I venture to say that the inscription on the temple at Delphi by itself
contained a precept more important and more difficult than all the bulky
volumes of the moralists.5 Thus, I consider the subject of this Discourse one
of the most interesting questions philosophy could propose, and, unfortunately
for us, one of the thorniest that philosophers can have to resolve. For how are
we know the source of inequality among men, if we do not begin by understanding
men themselves? And how will man succeed in seeing himself the way nature made
him, through all the changes which the succession of time and things must have
produced in his original constitution, and in disentangling what he retains of
his own fundamental nature from the things which circumstances and his progress
have added to or changed in his primitive condition? Just like the statue
of Glaucus, which time, the sea, and storms have
so disfigured that it looks less like a god than a ferocious beast, so the
human soul, altered in the bosom of society by a thousand causes constantly renewed,
by the huge amount of knowledge it has acquired, by its countless mistakes, by
the changes which have taken place in the constitution of the body, and by the
constant shock of the passions, has, so to speak, changed its appearance to the
point where it is almost impossible to recognize. And in the place of a being always
acting according to certain and invariable principles, in the place of that
divine and majestic simplicity which its Author impressed upon it, we no longer
find anything there but the warped contrast between passion which believes it
is reasoning and an understanding which has become delirious.
What is even crueller is that all the
progress in the human species constantly takes it further away from its
primitive state. The more we accumulate new knowledge, the more we deprive ourselves
of the means of acquiring the most important knowledge of all, and, in a sense,
it is thanks to the study of man that we are now beyond the stage where we can
know him.
It is easy to see that it is in these
successive changes in the human constitution that we must look for the first
origin of the differences which separate men, who, by general opinion, are
naturally as equal among themselves as were the animals of each species before
various physical causes introduced into some of them the varieties we notice
there. In fact, it is inconceivable that these first changes, however they came
about, altered all at once and in the same way all the individuals of the
species. But while some of them were improved or weakened and acquired various
good or bad qualities not inherent in their nature, others remained for a
longer period in their original state. And something like that was the first
source of inequality among men, a fact which is more easily demonstrated in
general this way than precisely assigned its real causes.
Let my readers not imagine, therefore,
that I dare flatter myself for having seen something which appears to me so
difficult to see. I have started some rational lines of enquiry and hazarded
some assumptions, less in the hope of resolving the question than with the intention
of illuminating it and reducing it to its true condition. Other people will
readily be able to go further on along the same route, although it will not be
easy for anyone to reach the end. For it is no slight undertaking to disentangle
what is original from what is artificial in the real nature of man and to understand
well a condition which no longer exists, which perhaps did not exist, which
probably never will exist, and concerning which it is nevertheless necessary to
have some accurate notions in order to assess properly our present state. Someone
who would endeavour to determine exactly what precautions he should take in order
to make some reliable observations on this subject would require even more
philosophy than one might imagine, and a good solution to the following problem
would seem to me not unworthy of the Aristotles and Plinys of our age: What experiments would be
necessary to reach an understanding of natural man, and what are the ways of
making these experiments in the bosom of society? Far from attempting
to resolve this problem, I believe I have meditated sufficiently on the subject
to venture to respond in advance that the greatest philosophers will not
be too good to direct these experiments nor the most powerful sovereigns too
powerful to make them. It is hardly reasonable to expect such cooperation,
above all with the perseverance or rather the continuing collaboration of
knowledge and goodwill necessary on both sides to attain success.
This research is so difficult to carry
out, and we have thought about it so little up to this point, but it is nonetheless
the only means left to us of removing a multitude of difficulties which hide
from us the knowledge of the real foundations of human society. It is this
ignorance of the nature of man that throws so much uncertainty and obscurity
onto the true definition of natural right. For the idea of right, says Mr. Burlaqami, and even more the idea of natural right are
manifestly ideas related to the nature of man.6 Hence,
it is this very nature of man, he continues, his constitution and his condition,
from which it is necessary to deduce the principles of this science.
It is not without surprise and a sense
of scandal that one observes how little agreement prevails on this important
matter among the various authors that have dealt with it. Among the most
serious writers we find hardly two who agree about it. Without mentioning the
ancient philosophers, who seem to have gone to great trouble to contradict each
other on the most basic principles, the Roman jurists subject man and all the
other animals indiscriminately to the same natural law, because under this name
they considered the law nature imposes on herself rather than the one she prescribes,
or rather, because these jurists understood the word law in a particular sense, on
this occasion they seem to have accepted it only as the expression of
general relationships established by nature among all animated beings for their
common preservation. The moderns, understanding under the term law only a rule prescribed to
a moral being, that is to say, to one that is intelligent, free, and deliberate
in its relationships with other beings, consequently limit the jurisdiction of
natural law to the single animal endowed with reason, that is, to man. However,
each of them defines this law in his own way, and they all establish it on such
metaphysical principles that there are, even among us, very few people in a
position to understand these principles, let alone capable of finding them by
themselves. As a result, all the definitions of these scholarly men, in other
respects constantly contradicting each other, agree only on one point, that it
is impossible to understand the law of nature, and hence to obey it, without being
a very great reasoner and a profound
metaphysician. And that indicates precisely this: for the establishment of society
men must have employed a knowledge which develops only with a great deal of
effort and in very few people, even within the bosom of society.
Since we have such a small understanding
of nature and there is such poor agreement about the meaning of the word law,
it would be very difficult to agree on a good definition of natural law. All those we find in
books, apart from the problem that they are not the same, have an
additional fault of being derived from several kinds of knowledge which men do
not possess naturally and from advantages of which they could have no idea
until after they had left the state of nature. These writers begin by investigating
the rules about which, for the sake of general utility, it would be appropriate
for men to agree on amongst themselves, and then they assign the
name natural law to
the collection of these rules, without any other proof apart from the benefit
which they find would result from their universal practice. That is surely a
very convenient way to make up definitions and to explain the nature of things
with almost arbitrary reasons.
But so long as we do not know natural
man, it is useless for us to want to determine the law he has received or the
one which best fits his constitution. All we can see very clearly on the
subject of this law is that, in order for it to be a law, it is necessary not
only that the will of the man with an obligation to it is capable of submitting
to it knowingly, but also that, for the law to be natural, it must speak
directly with nature’s voice.
So setting aside all those scientific
books, which teach us only to see men the way they have made themselves, and
thinking about the first and simplest operations of the human soul, I believe I
discern there two principles prior to reason: one makes us passionately interested
in our well being and in our own preservation, and the other inspires in us a
natural repugnance at seeing any sensitive being perish or suffer, in particular,
beings like ourselves. From the cooperation and combination our mind is able to
create of these two principles, without it being necessary to bring in the
principle of sociability, follow, it seems to me, all the rules of natural
right, rules which reason is later forced to re-establish on other foundations,
when, through its successive developments, it has ended up effectively
suffocating nature.
In this way, we are not obliged to make
man a philosopher before we make him a man. His obligations towards others are
not dictated to him exclusively by later lessons in wisdom, and so long as he
does not resist the internal impulse of compassion, he will never do harm to another
man, or even to any other sentient being, except in the legitimate case where,
since his preservation is at stake, he is obliged to give preference to himself.
In this way we also end the ancient disputes concerning the participation of animals
in natural law. For it is clear that, lacking knowledge and liberty, they
cannot recognize this law. But because in some things they share our nature
through the sensibility with which they are endowed, we judge that they should
also share in natural right and that man is subject to some kind of duties
towards them. It seems, in fact, that if I am obliged not to do any harm to my
fellow man, that is not so much because he is a reasonable being as because he
is a sentient being, a quality which, being common to animals and man, should
at least confer on the former the right not be mistreated for no purpose by the
latter.
This same study of original man, of his
true needs, and of the fundamental principles of his duties, is also the only
good method we can use to remove those crowds of difficulties which present themselves
concerning the origin of moral inequality, the genuine grounding of the body
politic, the reciprocal rights of its members, and a thousand other similar questions,
as important as the explanations for them are inadequate.
When we think about human society with
calm and disinterested eyes, at first it seems to reveal nothing but the
violence of powerful men and the oppression of the weak. The mind is revolted
by the harshness of the former, and we tend to deplore the blindness of the
latter. And since nothing is less stable among men than these external relationships,
which chance produces more often than wisdom and which we call power or
weakness, wealth or poverty, human institutions appear at first glance to be
founded on piles of shifting sand. It is not until we look at them closely,
only after we have removed the dust and sand which surround the structure, that
we perceive the unshakeable base on which it has been raised and learn to
respect its foundations. Now, without the serious study of man, of his natural
faculties, and of their sequential developments, we will never succeed in
making these distinctions and in separating in the actual constitution of
things what Divine Will has created from the alleged actions of human art.
Political and moral enquiries which have arisen from the important question I
am examining are thus useful in all sorts of ways, and the hypothetical history
of governments is for man an instructive lesson in every respect. By considering
what we might have become, if we had been left to ourselves, we should learn to
bless Him whose beneficent hand has corrected our institutions and given them
an immoveable base and thus has prevented the disorders they would have otherwise
produced and made our happiness emerge from methods which seemed as if they
should make us completely miserable.
Learn the
person God has commanded you to be,
And in which
part of human affairs you have been placed.7
I have added some notes to this work
in accordance with my lazy habit of working on this and that. These notes
wander sometimes so far from the subject that it is not good to read them with
the text. So I have shifted them to the end of the Discourse, in which I have
tried to follow as best I can the most direct route. Those who have the courage
to start again will be able to entertain themselves a second time by beating
the bushes and striving to move through the notes. If other people do not read
them at all, there will be little harm done.
QUESTION
PROPOSED BY THE ACADEMY OF DIJON
What is the origin of inequality among
men, and is it authorized
by natural law?
DISCOURSE ON THE ORIGIN AND THE FOUNDATIONS
OF INEQUALITY AMONG MEN
I am to speak about man, and the question
I am examining informs me that I am going to be speaking to men, for one does
not propose questions like these when one is afraid of honouring the truth.
Therefore, I will defend with confidence the cause of humanity in front of the
wise men who invite me to do that, and I will not be unhappy with myself if I
prove worthy of my subject and my judges.
In the human species I see two forms of
inequality: one I call natural or physical, because it is established by nature
and consists of the differences in age, health, bodily strength, and qualities
of the mind or soul; the other we can call moral or political inequality,
because it depends on some kind of convention and because it is established or
at least authorized by the consent of men. This latter inequality consists of
the different privileges which some men enjoy to the detriment of others, like
being wealthier, more honoured, or more powerful than they are, or even making
other men obey them.
We cannot ask what the source of
natural inequality is, because the answer is announced in the simple definition
of the word. Even less can we seek whether there might be some essential link between
the two inequalities, for that would be asking, in other terms, if those who
command are necessarily worth more than those who obey and if the powers of the
body or the mind, wisdom, or virtue are always found in the same individuals in
proportion to power or wealth, a good question perhaps to discuss among slaves
while their masters are listening, but not one suitable for reasonable and free
men seeking the truth.
So what precisely is the issue here in
this Discourse? It is to mark in the progress of things the moment where, once
right had taken over from violence, nature was subjected to law and to explain
by what sequence of astonishing events the strong could resolve to serve the
weak and the people to purchase imaginary repose at the expense of genuine
happiness.
Philosophers who have examined the
foundations of society have all sensed the need to go back to the state of nature,
but none of them has arrived there. Some have not hesitated to attribute to man
in this state the idea of just and unjust, without taking the trouble
to demonstrate that he had to have this idea or even that it was useful to him.
Others have talked about the natural right which each man has to keep what
belongs to him, without explaining what they mean by belong. Others have started by assigning
to the strongest the authority over the weakest and have immediately had governments
arise, without thinking of the time which must have elapsed before the meaning
of the words authority and government could have existed
among men. Finally, all of them, talking endlessly about need, greed,
oppression, desires, and pride, have brought into the state of nature ideas
they have derived from society. They have spoken about savage man and given a
portrait of civil man. It has not even entered the mind of most of our writers
to doubt whether the state of nature existed, although it is evident from a
reading of the Sacred Books that the first man, once he had received his
understanding and precepts directly from God, was not himself in this state and
that, when we accord the writing of Moses the faith which every Christian philosopher
owes them, we must deny that, even before the Flood, men ever found themselves
in the pure state of nature, unless they fell back into it by some extraordinary
event. This paradox is very difficult to defend and completely impossible to
prove.
So let us begin by dispensing with all
the facts, for they are not relevant to the question. We must not take the
investigations which one could enter into concerning this subject for historical
truths, but only for hypothetical and conditional arguments, more suitable for
illuminating the nature of things than for showing the true origin, similar to
those our physicists make every day concerning the formation of the earth. Religion
orders us to believe that God Himself took men out of the state of nature immediately
after the Creation and that they are unequal because He wanted them to be. But
religion does not prohibit us from forming conjectures drawn only from the
nature of man and of the beings surrounding him concerning what the human race
could have become if it had been left abandoned on its own. That is what I am
being asked and what I propose to examine in this Discourse. Since my subject
deals with man in general, I will try to use a language suitable to all
nations; or rather, forgetting times and places, so that I think only about the
men to whom I am speaking, I will assume that I am in the school of Athens, repeating
the lessons of my masters, with Platos and Xenocrateses for judges, and the human race as my
audience.8
O man, no matter
what country you are from, no matter what your opinions may be, listen.
Here is your history the way I have thought to read it, not in the books by
your fellow men, who are liars, but in nature, which never lies. Everything
that is from her will be true. There will be nothing false except what I have
mixed in of my own without wishing to do so. The times of which I am going to
speak are far distant. How much you have changed from what you were! It is, so
to speak, the life of your species that I am going to describe with reference
to the qualities you have received, which your education and your habits may
have corrupted, but which they have not been able to destroy. There is, I
sense, an age at which the individual man would like to have stopped; you will
be seeking the age at which you would wish your species had stopped. Unhappy
with your present condition, for reasons which announce to your unfortunate
descendants even greater discontent, perhaps you might wish you could go back,
and this feeling should be a eulogy in praise of your first ancestors, a
critique of your contemporaries, and a terror to those who will have the
misfortune to live after you.
FIRST PART
However important it may be in order to
form a proper judgment of the natural state of man to consider
him from the time of his origin and to examine him, so to speak, in the first embryo
of the species, I shall not follow his organic structure through its successive
developments. I will not stop to investigate what he could have been at the start
within the animal system in order to become what he finally is. I will not examine
whether, as Aristotle thinks, his long nails were at first hooked claws,
whether he was as hairy as a bear, and whether moving on four feet (Note 3) with his
gaze directed at the earth and limited to a horizon of a few paces did not at
once demonstrate the nature and extent of his ideas. On this subject I would be
able to form nothing but vague and almost imaginary conjectures. Comparative
anatomy has up to now made too little progress, and the observations of
naturalists are still too uncertain for us to be able to establish on such
foundations the grounds for a solid argument. Thus, without having recourse to
the supernatural knowledge we have in this matter or taking into account the
changes which must have occurred in the human structure, both internally and
externally, as man applied his limbs to new uses and nourished himself on new
foods, I will assume that he was formed at all times as I see him today,
walking on two feet, using his hands as we use ours, looking around at all of
nature, and measuring with his eyes the vast expanse of the heavens.
By stripping from the being formed in
this way all supernatural gifts he could have received and all the artificial
faculties he could have acquired only by long progress, by considering him, in
a word, as he must have come from the hands of nature, I see an animal less
strong than some, less agile than others, but, taking everything into account, with
the most advantageous organic structure of all. I see him eating his fill under
an oak tree, quenching his thirst at the first stream, discovering his bed at
the foot of the same tree which provided his meal, and with that his needs are
taken care of.
The earth, left to its natural
fertility (Note
4) and covered with immense forests never mutilated by an axe, offers
at every step storehouses and shelters for animals of every species. The men
scattered among these species observe them, imitate their industry, and thus
raise themselves to the level of animal instinct, with this advantage: each
species has only its own appropriate instinct, while man perhaps has no instinct
which belongs to him and so appropriates them all, feeds himself just as well
with most of the various foods (Note 5) the other animals share, and
as a result finds his subsistence more easily than any of them can.
Accustomed from infancy to intemperate
weather and the rigour of the seasons, inured to fatigue, and forced, naked and
without weapons, to defend their lives and their prey against other ferocious
beasts or to escape them by running off, men develop in themselves a robust and
almost unchangeable temperament. The children bring into the world the excellent
constitution of their fathers, strengthen it through the same exercises which
created it, and in this manner acquire all the vigour of which the human species
is capable. Nature deals with them exactly as the law of Sparta did with the
citizens’ children: it makes those who are well formed strong and robust and
kills off all the others, differing in this respect from our societies, where
the state, by making children burdensome to their fathers, kills them indiscriminately
before they are born.
Since the savage man’s body is the only
instrument he knows, he employs it for various uses which, through lack of
practice, our bodies are incapable of. Our industry has taken away from us the
strength and agility which necessity obliges him to acquire. If he had had an
axe, would his wrist have broken off such strong branches? If he had had a
sling, would his hand have thrown a stone so hard? If he had had a ladder,
would he have climbed so nimbly up a tree? If he had had a horse, would he have
run so quickly? Leave civilized man the time to collect all his machines around
him, and there is no doubt he would easily overcome savage man. But if you want
to see an even more unequal combat, set them naked and unarmed one against the
other. You will soon recognize the advantage of constantly having all one’s
strength at one’s disposal, of always being ready for any event, and of always
carrying with oneself, so to speak, a completely integrated totality (Note 6).
Hobbes maintains that man is naturally
bold and seeks only to attack and fight. An illustrious philosopher thinks the
opposite, and Cumberland and Pufendorf also
affirm that nothing is as timid as man in a state of nature; he is always trembling,
ready to run off at the slightest noise which strikes him, at the least
movement he perceives.9 That may be the case
for objects he does not recognize, and I have no doubt that he is frightened by
all new sights which present themselves to him every time he cannot sort out
the physical good and bad he should expect from them or compare his strength
with the dangers he must encounter, rare circumstances in the state of nature,
where everything proceeds in such a uniform manner and where the face of the
earth is not subject to sudden and constant changes caused by the passions and
by the fickleness of people in groups. But savage man, living dispersed among
the animals and finding himself early on in a position to measure himself against them, soon makes a comparison, and,
sensing that he surpasses them in dexterity more than they surpass him in
strength, he learns not to fear them anymore. Set a bear or a wolf to go
against a robust savage, agile and courageous, as they all are, armed with
stones and a good stick, and you will observe that the danger will at least be
reciprocal, and that after several experiences like that, the wild beasts,
which do not like to attack each other, will have little desire to attack man,
whom they have discovered is just as ferocious as they are. As for animals
which really do have more strength than he has dexterity, where they are concerned
he is in the position of other weaker species, which nonetheless continue to
survive. But man does have an advantage: being no less able than they are to
run off and finding an almost guaranteed refuge up in the trees, it is in every
case up to him whether he accepts or leaves the encounter—he has the choice of
flight or combat. Let us add that it does not seem that any animal naturally
wars against man, except in cases of its own defence or extreme hunger, nor
does it manifest against him those violent antipathies which appear to announce
that one species is destined by nature to serve as food for another.
These are undoubtedly the reasons why
Negroes and savages are so little concerned about the fierce beasts they may
come across in the forest. In this respect the Caribbean savages of Venezuela, among
others, live in the most absolute security and without the slightest inconvenience.
Although they are almost naked, says Francisco Coreal,
they are not afraid of exposing themselves in the forest armed only with bows
and arrows, but nobody has ever heard of any of them being eaten by animals.10
Other more formidable enemies against
which man does not have the same means of defending himself are the natural
infirmities—infancy, old age, and all kinds of illnesses—sad indications of our
frailty, of which the first two are common to all the animals and the last belongs
principally to man living in society. On the subject of infancy, I even notice
that the mother carries her child everywhere with her and so finds feeding him
a great deal easier than do the females of several animals who are forced to
come and go continuously and grow very weary moving in one direction to seek
out their food and in another to suckle or feed their young. It is true that if
the female happens to die, the child runs a great risk of perishing with her.
But this danger is common to a hundred other species whose young are for a long
time not in any condition to go and look for their food themselves. And if infancy
is longer among us, so is life as well. Everything is still roughly equal in
this matter (Note 7), although concerning the duration of the early years and the number
of the young there are other rules (Note 8) which are not part of my subject. With
the old, who do not move around much and perspire little, the need for food
diminishes with the ability to provide it, and since the life of savages spares
them gout and rheumatism and since old age is of all the evils the one which
human help can least relieve, they eventually die without people noticing that
they no longer exist and almost without noticing it themselves.
As far as sicknesses are concerned, I
will not repeat the empty and false rants which the majority of people in good
health deliver against medicine. But I will ask if there is some reliable
observation on the basis of which one could conclude that in the countries
where this art is most neglected the average life of man is shorter than in
those where it is cultivated with the greatest care. How could that be the case
if we give ourselves more illnesses than medicine can provide us remedies? The
extreme inequality in our manner of living, the excessive idleness among some
people, the excessive labour of others, the ease with which we stimulate and
satisfy our appetites and our sensuality, rich people’s overly sophisticated
food, which nourishes them with hot sauces and brings them down with
indigestion, poor people’s bad food, which most of the time they even go
without, a lack that leads them to overstuff their stomachs greedily when they
have an opportunity, staying up all night, every sort of excess, immoderate
transports of all the passions, fatigue, mental exhaustion, distress, and the
numberless sorrows which people feel in all levels of society and which constantly
wear away their souls—there you have the
fatal proofs that most of our troubles are our own work and that we might have
avoided almost all of them if we had kept to the simple, uniform, and solitary
way of life nature had prescribed for us. If she intended for us to be healthy,
I almost venture to affirm that the state of reflection is a condition contrary
to nature and that the man who meditates is a depraved animal. When we think
about the good constitution of savages, at least of those whom we have not ruined
with our strong liquors, when we realize that they are familiar with hardly any
sicknesses other than wounds and old age, we are very much led to believe that
we could easily produce the history of human illnesses by following the history
of civil societies. That, at least, is the opinion of Plato, who concludes, on
the basis of certain remedies used or approved by Podaleirus and Machaon at the siege of Troy, that various illnesses
which these remedies should have made flare up were not at that time known
among men. And Celsus states that diet,
something essential nowadays, was first invented by Hippocrates.11
With so few sources of illness, man in
a state of nature thus has hardly any need for remedies, even less for doctors.
In this respect, the human species is in a condition no worse than all the
others. It is easy to find out from hunters whether, during their hunting, they
find many sick animals. They do come across several that have received major
wounds which have healed very well or that have had bones, even limbs, broken
and reset without any surgeon other than time or any treatment except their
ordinary life, and that are no less perfectly cured for not having been tormented
with incisions, poisoned by drugs, or worn out with fasting. Finally, however
useful well-administered medicine may be among us, it is still true that if the
sick savage left on his own has nothing to hope for except from nature, he has,
on the other hand, nothing to fear except his sickness, a fact which often
renders his situation preferable to ours.
So let us be careful about confusing
savage man with the men we have before our eyes. Nature treats all the animals
left in her care with a partiality which appears to demonstrate how jealous she
is of this right. In the forests the horse, cat, bull, and even the donkey for
the most part have a greater height and all of them have a more robust
constitution, more energy, strength, and courage than in our homes. They lose
half of these advantages by becoming domesticated, and we could say that all
our care in treating these animals well and feeding them ends up merely degrading
them. The same is true of man himself. By becoming sociable and enslaved, he becomes
weak, fearful, and servile, and his soft and effeminate way of life finishes up
enervating his strength and his courage, both at the same time. Let us add that
between the conditions of savage and domesticated, the difference between man
and man must be even greater than the one between beast and beast, for if animal
and man have been treated equally by nature, all the things man gives himself
for his own convenience—more than he does to the animals he tames—are so many
particular causes which make him degenerate more appreciably.
Thus, nudity, lack of habitation, and going
without all of those useless things we believe are so necessary are not such a
great misfortune for these first men or, above all, such a great obstacle to
their preservation. If they do not have hairy skins, they have no need of them
in hot countries, and in cold countries they soon learn to appropriate for
their own use the skins of beasts they have overcome. If they have only two
feet for running, they have two arms to look after their defence and their
needs. Their children perhaps walk at a late age and with difficulty, but their
mothers carry them easily, an advantage missing in other species, where the
mother, if she is chased, finds herself forced to abandon her young or to
regulate her pace to theirs. There could be a few exceptions to this, for
instance, the animal from the province of Nicaragua which looks like a fox and
has feet like a man’s hand, and which, according Coreal,
has a pouch under its belly, in which the mother puts her young when she is
forced to flee. This is undoubtedly the same animal as the one called tlaquatzin in Mexico. Laet says
the female of this species has a similar pouch for the same purpose.12 Finally, unless we assume those unusual and
fortuitous combinations of circumstances which I will mention in what follows
and which could very well never have happened, it is in any event clear that
the first man who made clothing or a lodging for himself in doing so was
providing himself some things for which he had little need, because he had gone
without them up to that point and because one does not see why, as a grown man,
he could not have put up with a way of life he had endured since he was an infant.
Solitary, idle, and always close to danger,
savage man must like to sleep and have a light sleep, like the animals, which
do not think very much and sleep, so to speak, all the time they are not
thinking. Since his own preservation is almost his only concern, the faculties
he exercises most must be those whose main purpose is attack and defence,
whether to overcome his prey or to save himself from being the prey of another
animal. By contrast, the organs which do not improve except by softness and
sensuality must remain in a crude state, which prevents any kind of refined
sensitivity in him. In this respect his senses will be divided: he will have an
extremely rudimentary sense of touch and taste, but the greatest subtlety in
his senses of sight, hearing, and smell. Such is the condition of animals generally,
and, according to what travellers report, it is the same with the majority of
savage people. So we should not be astonished that the Hottentots of the Cape
of Good Hope discern with their naked eyes ships on the high seas at the same
distance the Dutch see them with telescopes, or that the savages of America
smell the Spaniards on the trail, just as the best dogs would have been able to
do, or that all these barbaric nations tolerate their nakedness without
difficulty, spice up their taste with hot peppers, and drink European liquor
like water.
Up to this point I have considered only
physical man. Let us now attempt to see him from the metaphysical and moral
side.
In every animal I see only an ingenious
machine to which nature has given senses so that it can re-energize and protect
itself, up to a certain point, from everything which tends to destroy or to
disturb it. I see precisely the same things in the human machine, with this
difference: nature alone causes all the operations in the beast; whereas, man
in his capacity as a free agent helps to brings his about. One chooses or refuses
by instinct, and the other by a free act.
This means that the beast cannot deviate from the rule prescribed for it, even
when it would be advantageous to do so, and that man does deviate from the
rule, often to his disadvantage. That is why a pigeon would die of hunger next
to a bowl filled with the finest meats, as would a cat on piles of fruit or
grain, although both of them could feed themselves very well on the food they reject,
if they were of a mind to try it. For this reason, dissolute men abandon
themselves to excesses which bring them fever and death, because the mind
corrupts the sense and because the will
still speaks when nature is silent.
Every animal has ideas, because it has
senses. It even combines its ideas up to a certain point. And man is no
different from a beast in this respect, except in degree. Some philosophers
have even proposed that there is a greater difference between one man and
another than there is between some men and certain animals. Hence, it is not so
much the understanding which creates the specific distinction between animals
and man as [it is] his quality of being a free agent. Nature commands every
animal, and the beast obeys. Man experiences the same sensation, but he
recognizes that he is free to agree or to resist, and it is above all in the consciousness
of this freedom that the spirituality of his soul reveals itself. For physics explains
in some manner the mechanical working of the senses and the formation of ideas,
but in the power to will, or rather to choose, and in the feeling of this power
we find only purely spiritual acts, about which nothing is explained by the
laws of mechanics.
But if the difficulties which surround
all these questions leave some room for contesting this difference between man
and animal, there is another very particular quality which distinguishes them
and about which there can be no dispute—that is the faculty of
self-improvement, a faculty which, with the help of circumstances, develops all
the others in succession and which resides among us, as much in the species as
in the individual; whereas, an animal is, at the end of a few months, what it
will be all its life, and its species at the end of a thousand years is what it
was during the first year of this millennium. Why is man the only one subject
to becoming an imbecile? Is it not because that is when he returns to his
primitive condition and because the beast, which has acquired nothing and also
has nothing to lose, always retains his instinct, whereas man, once he loses by
old age or other accidents everything which his perfectibility has led him to acquire,
falls back in this way even lower than a beast? It would be sad for us to be
forced to concur that this distinctive and almost limitless faculty of
self-improvement is the source of all the misfortunes of man, that this is what
pulls him by the power of time out of this original condition, in which he
would live through peaceful and innocent days, that it is what gives birth with
the passage of centuries to his knowledge and his errors, his vices and his
virtues, and eventually makes him a tyrant over himself and nature (Note 9). It would be dreadful to be obliged to praise as a beneficial being
the man who was the first to suggest to the inhabitant on the banks of the
Orinoco the practice of tying onto the temples of his children those boards
which assure them at least a portion of their imbecility and their original
happiness.
Savage man, left by nature merely to
his instinct or rather compensated for the instinct he perhaps lacks by
faculties capable of replacing it at first and later raising him far above it,
will thus begin with purely animal functions (Note 10): perceiving and
feeling will be his first condition, which will be common to him and all the animals. Willing and not willing, desiring and fearing—these will be the
first and almost the only operations of his soul, until new circumstances
produce new developments in it.
Whatever moralists may say about the
subject, the human understanding owes a great deal to the passions, which, by
common agreement, also owe a great deal to it. It is through their activity
that our reason is improved. We seek to understand only because we desire pleasure,
and it is not possible to conceive why someone who has neither desires nor
fears would take the trouble to reason. The passions, in their turn, originate
from our needs and their progress from our knowledge. For we cannot desire or
fear things except through the ideas we can have about them or by simple
natural impulse. And savage man, deprived of every kind of knowledge,
experiences only the passions of the latter sort: his desires do not go beyond
his physical needs (Note
11). The only good things he knows in the
universe are food, a female, and rest. The only bad things he fears are pain
and hunger. I say pain and not death. For an animal will never know what it is
to die, and the knowledge of death and its terrors is one of the first
acquisitions man made in moving away from his animal condition.
It would be easy for me, if that were
necessary, to support this opinion with facts and to demonstrate that with all
the nations of the world the progress of the mind has been exactly proportional
to the needs people have received from nature or to those which they have been
subjected to by circumstances, and as a result to the passions which encouraged
them to supply those needs. I would show the arts being born in Egypt and expanding
with the flooding of the Nile; I would follow their progress among the Greeks,
where they were seen to germinate, grow, and raise themselves up to the heavens
among the sands and rocks of Attica, without being able to take root on the
fertile banks of the Eurotas.13 I would observe that in general
the people of the north are more industrious than those of the south, because
they can less afford not to be, as if nature wanted in this way to equal things
out by giving their minds the fertility she denies their soil.
But without relying on the uncertain testimonies
of history, who does not see that everything seems to remove from savage man
the temptation and the means to cease to be a savage? His imagination does not
picture anything to him; his heart demands nothing of him. His modest needs are
so easily found nearby, and he is so far from the degree of knowledge necessary
for him to desire to get greater knowledge, that he cannot have either
foresight or curiosity. The spectacle of nature becomes indifferent to him by
becoming familiar. There is always the same order, always the same changes. He
does not have the mind to be astonished at the greatest marvels, and it is not
in him that we must look for the philosophy man needs in order to know how to
observe once what he has been looking at every day. His soul, which nothing
excites, surrenders itself to the single feeling of his present existence,
without any idea of the future, no matter how close it may be, and his
projects, as limited as his views, hardly reach to the end of the day. Even now
the degree of foresight in a native of the Caribbean is like that: in the
morning he sells his cotton bed, and in the evening he comes crying to buy it
back again, for lack of anticipating that he would need it for the next night.
The more one thinks about this subject,
the greater the distance from pure sense experience to the simplest knowledge
grows before our eyes, and it is impossible to conceive how a man could,
through his own power alone, without the aid of communication and without necessity’s
goad, have passed through such a great time span. How many centuries perhaps
went by before men were in a position to see some fire other than the one in
the sky? How many different risks did they have to face in order to learn the
most common uses of that element? How many times did they let it go out, before
acquiring the art of reproducing it? And how many times perhaps did each of
these secrets die with the man who had discovered it? What will we say about agriculture,
an art which requires so much work and foresight, which depends on other arts,
which is obviously practical only in a society that has at least been started,
and which serves us, not so much to get from the earth foodstuffs that it would
provide well enough without agriculture, as to force from it those preferences
that are most to our taste? But let us suppose that men had multiplied to such
an extent that natural productions were no longer sufficient to feed them, an assumption
which, incidentally, would show that for the human species there was a great
advantage in this way of life. Let us assume that, without forges and without
workshops, tools for farming had fallen from heaven into the hands of savages,
that these men had overcome the mortal hatred they all had for continuous
labour, that they had learned to anticipate their needs so far ahead of time,
that they had guessed how one must cultivate the earth, sow seeds, and plant
trees, that they had discovered the arts of grinding wheat and setting grapes
to ferment—all things they would have had to be made to learn by the gods,
since it is inconceivable how they would have learned them on their own. After
all that, what man would be so insane as to bother cultivating a field which
will be stripped by the first one to arrive, either man or beast, who finds
this harvest agreeable? And how could each man decide to spend his life in
painful work, when the more he needs the reward of that labour, the more
certain he will be of not receiving it? In a word, how could this situation
encourage men to cultivate the earth, so long as it has not been divided up
among them, that is, so long as the state of nature has not been abolished?
If we wished to assume that savage man
is as skilful in the art of thinking as our philosophers make him out to be, if
we turn him, following their example, into a philosopher himself, discovering
on his own the most sublime truths, creating for himself, by sequences of very
abstract argument, maxims of justice and reason derived from love of order in
general or from the known will of his Creator—briefly put, if we were t0 assume
that he has a mind with as much knowledge as he would need to have and was as intelligent
as he is, in fact, dull and stupid, what use would the species derive from all
this metaphysics, which could not be communicated and which would perish with
the individual who had invented it? What progress could the human race have
made scattered through the woods among the animals? And up to what point could
men have improved themselves and have enlightened each other, when they had no
fixed domicile and no need for one another, and so would scarcely meet perhaps
twice in their lives, without knowing or talking to each other?
Let us consider how many ideas we owe
to the use of speech, how much grammar trains and facilitates the operations of
the mind, and let us think of the inconceivable difficulties and of the
infinite time which the first invention of languages must have cost. Let us
link these reflections to the preceding ones, and we will judge how many thousands
of centuries it must have required for the sequential development in the human
mind of the operations it can carry out.
Allow me to consider for a moment the
difficulties concerning the origin of languages. I could content myself with
citing or repeating here the investigations which the Abbé de Condillac has made into this matter, which all fully
confirm my opinion and perhaps gave me the original idea about it.14 But because the way in which this philosopher resolves
the difficulties he makes for himself concerning the origin of established
signs shows that he has assumed what I am putting into question—that is, a sort
of society already established among the inventors of language—I believe that
in referring to his reflections I ought to add my own to them in order to throw
some light on these same difficulties in a manner appropriate to my subject.
The first which presents itself is to imagine how languages could have become
necessary. For since men had no connections with each
other, nor any need for them, one cannot conceive why this invention was
necessary or how it was possible, unless it was indispensable. I
could well say, as do many others, that languages were born in the domestic
interactions among fathers, mothers, and children. But apart from the fact
that this would not resolve the objections, it would be committing the fault of
those who, in reasoning about the state of nature, bring into it ideas taken
from society and always see the family gathered together in the same dwelling
with its members maintaining among themselves a union as intimate and as permanent
as among us, where so many common interests keep them together; whereas, in
this primitive condition, having neither house, nor huts, nor any kind of
property, each man found his own lodging randomly and often only for one night.
The males and females came together fortuitously, according to chance encounters,
opportunity, and desire, without speech being very necessary to interpret
things they had to communicate to each other. They separated with the same ease
(Note 12). At first the mother suckled her children to satisfy her own need;
then, once the habit made them dear to her, she later fed them to meet their needs.
As soon as they had the strength to seek out their 0wn food, they did not
hesitate to leave the mother, and since there was hardly any way of finding
each other again other than not to lose sight of one another, they were soon at
the stage where they did not even recognize each other. Bear in mind, as well,
that since the child has all his needs to explain and consequently more things
to say to the mother than the mother has to say to the child, it is the child
who has to play the most significant role in inventing language and that the
one it uses has to be in large part its own work. That multiplies the number of
languages by as many individuals as there are to speak them. Contributing still
more to this is a wandering and vagabond life which does not give any idiom
time to acquire consistency. For to say that the mother dictates to her child
the words which it has to use to ask her for something or other explains well
enough how one teaches languages that are already formed but does not teach us
how they are formed.
Suppose we have overcome this first
difficulty. Let us for a moment move across the immense space that must have existed
between the pure state of nature and the need for languages, and, assuming they
are necessary (Note 13), let us look for how they could have started to get established.
Here is a new difficulty, even worse than the previous one. For if men needed
speech in order to learn how to think, they had an even greater need to know
how to think in order to discover the art of speech. And even if we understood
how vocal sounds were taken as the conventional interpreters of our ideas, we
would still have to know what in this convention could have been the particular
interpretative sounds for those ideas which have no sensible object and thus
could not be indicated either by a gesture or a voice, so that we can hardly
form tenable conjectures about the origin of this art of communicating thoughts
and establishing an interaction among minds, a sublime art which is already so
distant from its origin, but which the philosopher still sees at such an
enormous distance from its perfection that there is no man sufficiently bold to
affirm that it will ever reach that point, even if the changes which time
necessarily brings on should be suspended in its favour, and if prejudices were
to leave the academies or remain silent before them, and if those academies
could keep themselves working on this thorny issue for entire centuries without
interruption.
Man’s first language, the most universal
language, the most energetic, and the only one he needed before he had to
persuade groups of men, is the cry of nature. Since this cry was dragged out
only by a kind of instinct in urgent situations, to plead for assistance in
great dangers or for relief in times of intense distress, it was not used very
much in the ordinary course of life, where more moderate feelings prevail. When
men’s ideas began to expand and multiply and when closer communication was established
among them, they looked for more numerous signs and a more extensive language.
They multiplied their vocal inflections and added gestures to them, which by
their nature are more expressive and whose sense depends less on a previous
determination. Thus, they expressed visible and moving objects by gestures and
those which strike the ear by imitative sounds. But since a gesture indicates
almost nothing except present objects, or those easy to describe, and visible actions,
since it is not universally applicable, for darkness or the interposition of a
body makes it ineffectual, and since it demands rather than attracts attention,
they finally got the idea of substituting for gestures vocal articulations,
which, without having the same relationship to particular ideas, are more appropriate
to represent them all as established signs, a substitution which could not be
made except with a common agreement and in a manner difficult enough to
practise for men whose rudimentary vocal organs had not yet had any exercise
and still more difficult to conceive in itself, since this common accord must
have had a motive and speech appears to have been extremely necessary for its
use to be established.
We must assume that since the first
words which men made use of had in their minds a much more extensive meaning
than those we use in languages already formed and that since they knew nothing
about the division of speech into its constitutive parts, at first they gave
each word the sense of an entire proposition. Once they began to distinguish
the subject from the attribute and the verb from the noun, something which was
no mean effort of genius, the substantives at first were nothing more than so
many proper nouns, the present infinitive was the only tense of the verbs, and
as far as adjectives are concerned, the idea of them must have developed only
with great difficulty, because every adjective is an abstract word and abstractions
are difficult and not very natural operations.
Every object at first received a particular
name, without regard to genus and species, something which those first
inventors of language were not in a position to distinguish, and all the
individual things presented themselves to their minds as isolated instances, as
they do in the picture of nature. If one oak tree was called A, another oak
tree was called B. For the first idea one derives from two things is that they
are not the same. Often a good deal of time is necessary to observe what they
have in common. Hence, the more limited their knowledge, the more extensive
their dictionary became. The inconvenience of all this nomenclature could not
have been easily removed, for to arrange beings under common and generic denominations,
it was necessary to know their properties and their differences. It required observations
and definitions, that is, natural history and metaphysics, a great deal more
than the men of those times could have had.
In addition, general ideas cannot be introduced
into the mind except with the help of words, and the understanding does not
grasp them except by propositions. That is one of the reasons why animals
cannot form such ideas or ever acquire the ability to improve that depends on
them. When a monkey goes without hesitation from one nut to another, do we
think it has a general idea of this sort of fruit and that it compares its
archetype to these two individual nuts? Undoubtedly not. But
the sight of one of these nuts recalls to its memory sensations which it
received from the other, and its eyes, modified in a certain way, announce to
its taste the modification it is about to receive. Every general idea is purely
intellectual. Once the imagination gets involved in the slightest, the idea
immediately becomes particular. Try to draw for yourself the image of a tree in
general. You will never succeed. In spite of you, it must be seen as small or
large, sparse or leafy, light or dark, and if you were able to see there only
what is found in every tree, that image would no longer resemble a tree. Purely
abstract entities are seen in the same manner or are conceived only through
language. Only the definition of the triangle gives you the true idea of it. As
soon as you draw one in your mind, it is such and such a triangle and not another,
and you cannot avoid giving it perceptible lines or a coloured surface. And so we have to articulate propositions, and thus to speak, in order
to have general ideas. For as soon as the imagination stops, the
mind moves no further except with the help of language. Hence, if the first inventors
could give names only to ideas which they had already, it follows that these
first substantives could never have been anything but proper nouns.
But when, by methods which I do not
understand, our new grammarians began to extend their ideas and to generalize
their words, the ignorance of the inventors must have subjected this method to
very narrow limits, and since they had at the beginning excessively multiplied
the names of individual things because they did not know about genera and
species, they later created too few species and genera, for lack of having
considered beings by all their differences. To push these divisions far enough
would have required more experience and knowledge than they could have had,
along with more research and work than they would have wanted to spend on it.
Now, if, even today, we are discovering every day new species which so far have
escaped all our observations, consider how many must have been hidden from men
who did not judge things except by their first appearance! As for primitive
classes and the most general notions, it is superfluous to add that these must
have escaped them as well. How, for example, would they have imagined or understood
the words matter, mind, substance, mode, figure, and movement, given that our philosophers, who have made use of
them for such a long time, themselves have real difficulty understanding them
and that, since the ideas attached to these words are purely metaphysical, they
did not find any model of them in nature?
I stop with these first steps, and I
beg my judges to suspend their reading here, in order to consider, in this
matter of the invention of physical substantives alone, that is to say, of the
part of language easiest to discover, the road language still has to travel to
express all the thoughts of men, to take on a constant form, to be able to be
spoken in public, and to influence society. I beg them to reflect on the time
and knowledge it must have required to discover numbers (Note 14), abstract words,
aorists, and all the verb tenses, particles, and
syntax, to connect propositions and arguments, and to form all the logic of discourse.
As for me, scared off by the multiplying difficulties and convinced of the
almost proven impossibility that languages could have arisen and established
themselves by purely human means, I leave the discussion of the following
difficult problem to whoever wishes to undertake it: Which was more necessary,
that society be already in place for the institution of languages or that
languages be already invented for the establishment of society?
Whatever these origins may be, at least
we see, from the little care which nature took to bring men together through
their mutual needs and to facilitate the use of speech for them, how little she
prepared them for social interaction and how little she contributed of her own
to everything they have done in order to establish social bonds. In fact, it is
impossible to imagine why, in this primitive state, one man would have more
need of another man than a monkey or a wolf would of a creature like itself,
nor, if we assume this need, what motive could persuade the other man to
provide it, or even, in this last case, how they could agree among themselves
on the conditions. I know that people constantly repeat to us that nothing would
have been so miserable as man in this situation and, if it is true, as I
believe I have proved, that man could not have had the desire and the opportunity
to leave this state until after several centuries, that would be an indictment
against nature and not against the man she had constituted in this way. But if
I understand this term miserable properly, it is a word that has no
meaning or that signifies only a painful lack and a physical or spiritual suffering.
Now, I really would like someone to explain to me what type of misery there
could be for a free being whose heart is at peace and whose body is healthy. I
ask the following: Which is more subject to becoming insupportable for those
who enjoy it, a civil or natural life? Around us we see hardly any people who
do not complain about their existence and several who even take their own
lives, to the extent they are capable of that, and the combination of divine
and human laws is scarcely sufficient to check this disorder. I ask if anyone
has ever heard it said that a savage at liberty has so much as dreamed of
complaining about life and of killing himself. So people should judge with less
pride on which side true misery lies. By contrast, nothing would have been as
miserable as savage man dazzled by knowledge, tormented by passions, and
reasoning about a condition different from his own. It was thanks to a very
wise providence that the untapped faculties he had were to develop only with
opportunities to practise them, so that they were neither superfluous nor a
bother to him before then, nor belated and useless in a time of need. He had in
instinct alone everything he needed to live in a state of nature. With a
cultivated reasoning, he has only what he needs to live in society.
At first it seems that since men in
this state did not have any sort of moral relations among themselves or any
known duties, they could not have been either good or bad or have had either
vices or virtues, unless we take these words in a physical sense and call vices
in the individual the qualities which can injure his own preservation and
virtues those which can contribute to it, in which case we would have to call
the most virtuous men those who least resisted the simple natural impulses. But
without moving away from the ordinary meaning of these words, it is appropriate
to suspend the judgment we could bring to bear on such a situation and to
resist our prejudices until, with balance in hand, we have examined if there
are more virtues than vices among civilized men, or if their virtues are more advantageous
than their vices are fatal, or if the
progress of their knowledge is a sufficient compensation for the evils they
inflict on one another, as they learn about the good they ought to do, or if,
taking everything into account, they would not be in a happier situation if
they did not have anything bad to fear or good to hope for from anyone, rather
than being subjected to universal dependency and obliged to receive everything
from those who are not obligated to give them anything.
Above all, let us not conclude, with
Hobbes, that, since man has not the slightest idea of goodness, he is naturally
wicked, that he is vicious because he does not know virtue, that he always
denies his fellow men services which he does not believe he owes them, and
that, by virtue of the right which he reasonably attributes to himself to
things he needs, he foolishly imagines that he is the sole proprietor of the
entire universe. Hobbes saw very well the defect of all the modern definitions
of natural right, but the conclusions he draws from his own show that he took
it in a sense which is no less erroneous. In reasoning on the basis of the
principles which he sets down, this author should have said that since the
state of nature is the one in which care for our own preservation is the least
prejudicial to the preservation of others, this state was therefore the most
appropriate to peace and the most suitable for the human race. He says
precisely the opposite, because he made the mistake of allowing into savage
man’s care for his own preservation the need to satisfy a multitude of passions
which are the work of society and which have made laws necessary. The bad man,
he says, is a robust child. But whether savage man is a robust child remains to
be ascertained. If we granted him this point, what would he conclude from it?
That if, when he is robust, this man was just as dependent on others as when he
is weak, there is no kind of excess to which he would not be carried: he would
strike his mother when she was too late giving him her breast, he would strangle
one of his young brothers when he annoyed him, and he would bite someone else’s
leg when it bumped or bothered him. But being robust and being dependent in the
state of nature are two contradictory assumptions. Man is weak when he is dependent,
and he is free before he is robust. Hobbes did not see that the same cause
which prevents savages from using their reason, as our jurists assert, prevents
them at the same time from abusing their faculties, as he himself maintains, so
that we could say that savages are not evil precisely because they do not know
what it is to be good. For it is neither the development of knowledge nor the restraint
of law which prevents them from doing evil, but the tranquility of their
passions and their ignorance of vice: That’s how much ignorance of vice
has been more profitable to those men, than a knowledge of
virtue has to these.15
There is, in addition, another principle,
which Hobbes did not notice, and which, having been given to man to soften, in
certain circumstances, the ferocity of his vain self-love or, before the birth
of this love, the desire to preserve himself (Note 15), tempers the ardour
he has for his well being by an innate repugnance to seeing a creature like himself
suffer. I do not think I have to fear any contradiction by ascribing to man the
only natural virtue which the most extravagant detractor of human virtues has
been forced to recognize. I am speaking of compassion, a disposition
appropriate to such weak beings, subject to as many evils as we are, a virtue
all the more universal and all the more useful to man because in him it comes
before he uses any reflection and is so natural that even beasts occasionally
provide some perceptible signs of it. Without talking of the tenderness of
mothers towards their young and the dangers they face to keep them safe, we see
every day the repugnance horses have at stepping on a living body. An animal
does not move past a dead animal of its own species without unease. There are
even some who give them a kind of sepulchre. And the sad lowing of cattle as
they move into a slaughterhouse indicates the impression they get of the horrific
spectacle which strikes them. With pleasure we see the author of the Fable
of the Bees compelled to recognize man as a compassionate and sensitive being
and, in the example he gives of that, moving away from his cold and subtle
style, in order to offer us the pathetic image of a man in prison who notices
outside a ferocious beast ripping a child from its mother’s breast, crushing
its weak limbs in its murderous teeth, and ripping out with its claws this
child’s quivering entrails.16 What
horrific agitation must be felt by this witness to an event in which he has no
personal interest? What agonies does he not suffer from the sight and from his
inability to bring any help to the fainting mother or the dying child?
That is what the pure movement of
nature is like, before all reflection. Such is the force of natural compassion,
which the most depraved morals still have trouble destroying, since we see
every day in our theatrical productions a man being moved and weeping at the
troubles of some unfortunate person, the sort of man who, if he were
in a tyrant’s position, would increase even more his enemy’s torments, like
bloodthirsty Sulla, who was so sensitive to the evils he had not caused, or
like Alexander of Pherae, who did not dare attend
the performance of any tragedy for fear he might be seen weeping with Andromache
and Priam, and who nonetheless listened without
feeling anything to the cries of so many citizens who were butchered on his
orders every day: By giving tears, nature reveals that she gave the
human race the softest hearts.17 Mandeville
well perceived that with all their morality human beings would never have been
anything but monsters, if nature had not given them compassion to assist their
reason. But he did not see that from this quality alone follow all the social
virtues which he wants to deny to men. In fact, what are generosity, clemency,
and humanity, if not compassion applied to the weak, to the culpable, or to the
human species in general? Even benevolence and friendship, properly understood,
are products of a constant compassion fixed on a particular object. For
what is desiring that someone does not
suffer other than desiring that he is happy? Even if it were true that commiseration
was merely a feeling which places us in the position of the person suffering,
an obscure and lively sentiment in savage man and developed but weak in civil
man, how would this idea affect the truth of what I am saying, unless to reinforce
it? In fact, commiseration will be all the more intense as the animal looking
on identifies more intimately with the suffering animal. Now, it is
evident that this identification must have been infinitely closer in the state
of nature than in the state of reason. It is reason which gives rise to vain
self-love, and it is reflection which strengthens it. Reason is what turns man
back onto himself; reason is what separates him from everything which upsets
and afflicts him. It is philosophy which isolates him. Thanks to philosophy he
says in secret at the sight of a man suffering: “Perish if you wish; I am
safe.” Nothing troubles the calm sleep of the philosopher and drags him from
his bed any more, other than dangers to all of society. One can slit the throat
of his fellow man under the philosopher’s window with impunity; he has only to
put his hands over his ears and argue with himself for a little while in order
to prevent nature, which rebels within him, from identifying with the one being
murdered. Savage man does not have this admirable talent and, for lack of
wisdom and reason, is always surrendering to the first feeling of humanity,
without thinking about it. In riots and street quarrels, the populace crowds
together, while the prudent man moves away. It is the riff-raff and the women
of the market who separate the combatants and prevent decent folk from cutting
each other’s throats.
Hence, it is certain that compassion is
a natural feeling which, by moderating in each individual the activities of his
love of himself, contributes to the mutual preservation of the entire species.
It is compassion which prompts us without reflection to help those we see
suffering and which, in the state of nature, takes the place of laws, morality,
and virtue, with this advantage: no one is tempted to disobey its soft voice.
It is compassion which will make every robust savage turn away from robbing a
weak child or an infirm old man of the subsistence they have with difficulty acquired,
if he himself has hopes of being able to find his own elsewhere. It is
compassion which, in the place of this sublime maxim of rational justice—Do
unto others what you wish people do unto you—inspires in all men this other
maxim of natural goodness, much less perfect than the preceding one, but perhaps
more useful: Do what is good for you with the least possible harm to
others. Briefly put, it is in this natural feeling rather than in subtle
arguments that we must seek out the cause of the repugnance which all men would
experience at doing wrong, even independently of the maxims they are taught. Although
it could be appropriate for Socrates and minds of his stamp to acquire virtue
through reason, the human race would have ceased to be a long time ago, if its
preservation had depended solely on the reasoning of those who constitute it.
With passions so little active and such
a healthy restraint, men more wild than evil and more attentive to keeping themselves
from the harm they could receive than tempted to commit harm to others were not
subject to very dangerous quarrels. Since they had no type of interaction with
each other and, as a result, had no knowledge of vanity or respect or esteem or
contempt, since they did not have the least notion of yours and mine or
any genuine idea of justice, since they looked upon the violence which they
could run into as a bad thing easy to fix and not as an injury they had to
punish, and since they did not even dream of vengeance, except perhaps as an
immediate mechanical reflex, like a dog which bites a stone someone throws at
it, their disputes would rarely have had bloody consequences, if they had no
issue more sensitive than food. But I see a more dangerous matter which I still
have to speak about.
Among the passions which disturb man’s
heart, there is one which is ardent and impetuous and which makes one sex necessary
to the other, a terrible passion that defies all dangers, overturns all obstacles,
and in its fury seems likely to destroy the human race which it is destined to
preserve. What would become of men in the grip of this frantic and brutal rage,
without shame, without restraint, and fighting every day about their loves at
the expense of their blood?
First, we must concede that the more violent
the passions are, the more the laws are necessary to contain them. But setting
aside the fact that disorders and crimes which the passions cause every day
among us sufficiently demonstrate the inadequacy of the laws in this matter, it
would still be good to examine if these disorders were not born with the laws
themselves. For then, if they were capable of repressing these disorders, the
least we should demand of the laws would be that they stop an evil which would
not exist without them.
Let us begin by distinguishing the
moral from the physical in the feeling of love. The physical is that general
desire which encourages one sex to unite with the other; the moral is what
determines this desire and fixes it on a single object exclusively or which at
least provides it with a greater degree of energy for this preferred object.
Now, it is easy to see that the moral aspect of love is an artificial feeling,
born from social habit and celebrated by women with a great deal of skill and
care, in order to establish their influence and to make dominant the sex which
should obey. Since this feeling is founded on certain notions of merit or
beauty which a savage is not in a condition to have and on comparisons he is
not capable of making, it must be almost nothing for him. For his mind cannot form abstract ideas of regularity and proportion,
and so his heart is no more susceptible to feelings of admiration and love,
which, even without being noticed, arise from the application of these ideas. He
listens exclusively to the temperament he has received from nature, not to the
taste he has been unable to acquire, and any woman is fine with him.
Limited solely to the physical aspect
of love and happy enough to be ignorant of those preferences which stimulate
the feeling and increase the difficulties it causes, men must feel the passion
of their temperaments less frequently and less vividly, and thus the disputes
with each other must be more rare and less cruel. The imagination, which
creates so much destruction among us, does not speak to savage hearts. Each man
waits peacefully for the natural impulse, surrenders to it without choosing and
with more pleasure than fury, and once the need is satisfied, all desire is extinguished.
It is thus incontestable that love itself,
like all the other passions, only acquires in society that impetuous ardour
which makes it so often fatal to men, and it is all the more ridiculous to
picture savages continually slitting each other’s throats in order to satisfy
their brutality, since this view is directly contrary to experience: of all
existing people those in the Caribbean are the ones who, up to this point, have
strayed the least from the state of nature, and they are precisely the ones who
are the most peaceful in their love and the least subject to jealousy, although
they live in a burning climate, which always seems to generate greater activity
in these passions.
With respect to the conclusions we
could draw in several species of animals from the fighting of the males, who in
every season bloody our poultry yards or make our forests in springtime echo
with their cries, as they quarrel over the female, we must begin by excluding
all species where nature has manifestly established in the relative power of
the sexes relationships different from those among us. Thus, we cannot draw any
conclusion about the human species from fights among roosters. In species where
the proportion is better observed, these fights can be caused only by the
scarcity of females with respect to the number of males or by the exclusive
periods during which the female constantly refuses the male’s approach, a factor
which goes back to the first cause. For if each female accepts the male only
for two months of the year, that is, in this matter, as if the number of
females were reduced by five-sixths. Now, neither of these two cases applies to
the human species, where the number of females generally surpasses the number
of males and where no one has ever observed, even among savages, that females
have times of heat and of exclusion, like those in other species. Moreover,
since with several of these animals the entire species goes into heat at the
same time, there comes a terrible moment of common passion, tumult, disorder,
and combat, a time which has no place among the human species, where love is
never intermittent. Hence, we cannot conclude from the fights among certain
animals for the possession of the females that the same thing would happen to
man in the state of nature. And even if we could draw this conclusion, since
these quarrels do not destroy other species, we must at least grant that they
would not be any more fatal to ours, and it is very apparent that they would
cause even less destruction in that state than they do in society, above all in
the countries where, because morality still counts for something, the jealousy
of lovers and the vengeance of husbands every day cause duels, murders, and
still worse, where the obligation to be eternally faithful serves only to produce
adulterers, and where even the laws dealing with continence and honour necessarily
foster debauchery and multiply abortions.
Let us conclude that wandering in the
forests without industry, without speech, without a home, without war, and
without relationships, with no need for his fellow men, and similarly with no
desire to harm them, perhaps even without ever recognizing any of them
individually, savage man, subject to few passions and self-sufficient, would
have had only the feelings and knowledge appropriate to this condition. He
would have felt nothing but his true needs and looked only at what he thought
he had an interest in seeing. His intelligence would have progressed no further
than his vanity. If by chance he made some discovery, he could no more have
communicated it than he could have recognized even his own children. Art died
with the inventor. There was neither education nor progress. The generations
multiplied aimlessly, and, since each one always set out from the same point,
the centuries flowed past in all the crudity of the first ages. The species was
already old, and man still remained a child.
If I have been dwelling for such a long
time on the hypothesis of this primitive condition, the reason is that, having
ancient errors and inveterate prejudices to destroy, I thought I should dig
down right to the root and, in a picture of the true state of nature, show how
far inequality, even natural inequality, is from being as real and having as
much influence in this condition as our writers maintain.
In fact, it is easy to see that among
the differences which distinguish men, several are considered natural which are
exclusively the work of habit and of the
different ways of life men adopt in society. Thus, a robust or delicate temperament,
along with the strength or weakness which stems from that, often come more from
the hard or effeminate manner in which people have been raised than from the
original constitution of the body. It is the same with the forces of the mind.
Education not only establishes a difference between cultivated minds and those
which are not, but it increases the difference among the former group in proportion
to their knowledge. For if a giant and a dwarf walk along the same route, each
pace the two of them take will give a new advantage to the giant. Now, if we
compare the prodigious diversity in the forms of education and ways of life
which prevail in the different orders of the civil state with the simplicity
and uniformity of animal and savage life, where everyone feeds on the same
foods, lives in the same manner, and does exactly the same things, we will
understand how much the difference between man and man must be less in the
state of nature than in society and how much natural inequality must increase
in the human species as a result of the inequality created by social institutions.
But if nature, in the distribution of
her gifts, were inclined to show as much preference as people claim, what advantage
would the most favoured have derived from that to the detriment of others in a
state of things which does not admit of hardly any sort of relation between
them? Where there is no love, what use will beauty serve? What is the use of intelligence
for people who do not speak, and deception for those who have no dealings with
others? I always hear it repeated that the strongest will oppress the
weak. But let someone explain to me what they mean by this word oppression.
Some will dominate with violence; others will groan, enslaved to all their
whims. That is precisely what I observe among us. But I do not see how that
could be said of savage men, since it would be very difficult even to make them
understand what servitude and domination are.
One man will be readily able seize for himself the fruits which someone else
has gathered, the game he has killed, or the cave which serves him as a refuge.
But how will he ever succeed in making another man obey him, and what could be
the chains of dependency among men who do not possess anything? If someone
chases me away from a tree, I leave it to go to another. If someone annoys me
in one place, who will stop me from moving on somewhere else? Is a man to be
found whose strength is sufficiently superior to mine and who is, in addition,
sufficiently depraved, sufficiently lazy, and sufficiently ferocious to compel
me to provide his subsistence while he remains idle? He would have to resolve
not to let me out of his sight for a single instant and to keep me bound with
very great care while he was asleep, for fear that I would escape or that I
would kill him. In other words, he is obliged to expose himself voluntarily to
a great deal more trouble than he wishes to avoid and more than he gives me. After
all that, does he relax his vigilance momentarily? Does an unexpected noise
make him turn his head? I take twenty paces into the forest, my chains are
broken, and he does not see me again in his lifetime.
Without my prolonging these details to
no purpose, everyone should see that, since the bonds of servitude are not
formed except by the mutual dependency of men and by the reciprocal needs which
unite them, it is impossible to enslave a man without previously putting him in
a situation where he is unable to do without someone else. Since this condition
does not exist in the state of nature, it leaves each man in it free of the
yoke and makes the law of the strongest ineffective.
Now that I have proved that inequality
is hardly perceptible in the state of nature and that its influence there is
almost nothing, it remains for me to show its origin and its progress in the
successive developments of the human mind. Having demonstrated
that perfectibility, the social virtues, and the other faculties which
natural man received in a potential form could never have developed on their
own, that for this to happen they needed the fortuitous combination of several
foreign causes, which might never have arisen and without which he would have
lived forever in his primitive condition, I still have to consider and bring
together the different accidents which could have improved human reason while
degrading the species, made a being wicked while making him sociable, and from
such a distant date finally led man and the world to the point where we see
them.
I confess that since the events I have
to describe could have come about in several ways, I am not able to choose except
by conjecture. But apart from the fact that these conjectures become reasons when
they are the most probable that can be derived from the nature of things and
are the only means we can have for discovering the truth, the conclusions I
wish to deduce from mine will not, for that reason, be speculation, because on
the principles which I have just established, one could not form any other
system which does not furnish me the same results and from which I could not
draw the same conclusions.
This will spare me the trouble of expanding
my reflections about how the lapse of time compensates for the small
probability of the events, about the surprising power of very slight causes
when they are constantly at work, about the impossibility, on the one hand, of
destroying certain hypotheses, although, on the other hand, we cannot give them
the degree of certainty which facts possess, about how, when two facts, given
as true, are to be linked by a sequence of intermediate facts that are unknown
or regarded as such, it is up to history, when one has it, to present the facts
which link them and, when the history is lacking, it is up to philosophy to
determine similar facts which could link them, and finally, about how, where
the events are concerned, similarity reduces the facts to a much smaller number
of different classes than one might imagine. It is sufficient for me to offer
these things to the consideration of my judges; it is enough for me to have
done so in such a way that common readers have no need to consider them.
SECOND PART
The first man who, after enclosing a piece
of land, got the idea of saying This is mine and found people
simple enough to believe him was the true founder of civil society. What
crimes, what wars, what murders, what miseries and horrors would someone have
spared the human race by pulling out the stakes or filling in the ditch and crying
out to his fellows, “Stop listening to this imposter.
You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the land belong to everyone and
the earth belongs to no one.” But it seems very likely that by this time things
had already come to the point where they could no longer continue as they were.
For this idea of property depends on many previous ideas that could only have
arisen in succession; thus, it was not formed in the human mind all at once. A
good deal of progress was necessary: men had to acquire significant industry
and knowledge and transmit and increase them from one age to the next, before
arriving at this last stage in the state of nature. So let us resume these
matters further back in time and try to gather from a single perspective this
slow sequence of events and discoveries in their most natural order.
Man’s first sensation was that of his
own existence; his first care was his own preservation. The productions of the earth
furnished him all the necessary help. Instinct prompted him to make use of
them. Hunger and other appetites made him try in turn various ways of life.
There was one which urged him to perpetuate his species, and this blind impulse,
lacking all heartfelt feeling, produced only a purely animal act. Their needs
satisfied, the two sexes no longer recognized each other, and even the child
was nothing to the mother as soon as it could do without her.
Such was the condition of emerging man;
such was the life of an animal limited at first to pure sensations, profiting
with difficulty from the gifts which nature offered him, and a long way from
dreaming of wresting anything away from her. But difficulties soon presented
themselves that he had to learn to overcome: the heights of trees which
prevented him from reaching their fruits, the competition with animals who were
seeking to eat these fruits, and the ferocity of those who wanted to take his
life over them—all that required him to apply himself to exercising his body.
He had to make himself agile, a fast runner, and vigorous in combat. Natural
weapons—tree branches and stones—were soon found nearby. He learned to overcome
natural obstacles, to combat other animals when necessary, to fight for his
subsistence even with other men, or to make up for what he had to surrender to
the stronger.
As the human race spread out, the difficulties
multiplied with the men. Different terrains, climate, and seasons could force
them to establish differences in their ways of life. Some barren years, long
harsh winters, and burning summers that consume everything demanded from them
new industry. Along the sea and rivers, they invented line and hook and became
fishermen and fish-eaters. In the forests they made bows and arrows and became
hunters and warriors. In cold countries, they covered themselves with the hides
of beasts they had killed. Lightning, a volcano, or some fortunate accident
gave them knowledge of fire, a new resource against the rigours of winter. They
learned to preserve this element, then to reproduce it, and finally to use it
for preparing meat, which before this they had devoured raw.
This repeated use of beings different
from himself and from each other must have naturally engendered in man’s mind
perceptions of certain connections. Those relationships which we express by the
words large, small, strong, weak, fast, slow, fearful, bold, and other
similar ideas, which he compared when necessary and almost without thinking
about it, finally produced in him some sort of reflection or rather a mechanical
prudence which indicated to him the precautions most essential to his safety.
The new knowledge which resulted from
this development increased his superiority over other animals by making him
aware of it. He practised setting traps for them, he fooled them in a thousand
ways, and although several surpassed him in their fighting power or in speed at
running, over time he became the master of those that could serve him and the
scourge of those that could harm him. That is why the first time he glanced at
himself produced in him the initial stirring of pride, and why, when he still
hardly knew how to distinguish different ranks of beings, he looked at himself
as pre-eminent, thanks to his species, and was preparing himself from a great
distance to make that claim about himself as an individual.
Although his fellow men were not for
him what they are for us and he had hardly more interaction with them than with
the other animals, they were not forgotten in his observations. Over time, he
was able to observe conformities among them, his female, and himself. These
made him judge those he did not perceive, and seeing that they all behaved as
he would have done in similar circumstances, he concluded that their way of
thinking and feeling were entirely similar to his own. This important truth,
once firmly established in his mind, made him follow by a premonition as
certain and more rapid than rational logic the best rules of conduct which were
appropriate to use with them for his own advantage and security.
Taught by experience that love of wellbeing
is the only motive for human actions, he found himself in a position to
distinguish the rare occasions when common interest should make him count on
the assistance of his fellow men and the even rarer times when competition
should make him distrust them. In the first case, he joined up with them in a
group or at most in some sort of free association which laid no obligations on
anyone and which lasted only as long as the temporary need which had created
it. In the second case, each man sought to secure his own advantage, whether by
overt force, if he believed he could, or by skill and subtlety, if he felt
himself the weaker.
That is how men were able imperceptibly
to acquire some rough idea of mutual undertakings and of the advantage of
fulfilling them, but only to the extent that present and perceptible interest
could demand it. For looking ahead meant nothing to them, and, far from concerning
themselves with a distant future, they did not think even about the next day.
If it was a matter of catching a deer, each man well understood that to do this
he should keep his position faithfully. But if a hare happened to go past
within reach of one of them, undoubtedly he went after it without a scruple
and, having caught his prey, worried very little about making his companions
lose theirs.
It is easy to understand that this sort
of interaction did not demand a language much more sophisticated than that of
crows or monkeys, who gather in groups in almost the same manner. Some inarticulate
cries, lots of gestures and some imitative noises must have made up the universal
language for a long time. Since in each country some articulated and
agreed-upon signs were added to this, the establishment of which, as I have
already said, is not very easy to explain, there were particular languages, but
crude and imperfect ones, almost like those various savage nations still have
today. Under the pressure of time passing, the abundance of things I have to
say, and the almost imperceptible progress of the beginnings, I am moving like
an arrow through countless centuries, for the more slowly the events came one after
the other, the more quickly they can be described.
Eventually these first advances made
man capable of making more rapid ones. The more his mind was enlightened, the
more his industry improved. Soon he ceased to sleep under the first tree or to
withdraw into caverns. He made hatchets of some kind from hard, sharp stones.
These served to cut wood, dig the earth, and build huts out of branches, and he
later got the idea of coating these with clay and mud. This was the age of a
first revolution which led to the establishment and differentiation of families
and introduced a form of property, from which perhaps even then arose many
quarrels and fights. However, as the strongest were probably the first to make
themselves lodgings they felt capable of defending, it
is plausible that the weak ones found it quicker and safer to imitate them than
to try to dislodge them. And as for those who already had huts, none of them
could have had much inclination to take over his neighbour’s, not so much
because it did not belong to him as because it was useless to him and because
he could not have seized it without exposing himself to a very lively fight
with the family which occupied it.
The first developments of the heart
were the result of a new situation which united husbands and wives, fathers and
children in one common dwelling. The habit of living together gave rise to the tenderest feelings known to men, conjugal and paternal
love. Each family became a small society, all the more unified since mutual
attachment and freedom were its only bonds. And it was then that the first difference
was established in the ways of life of the two sexes, which up to this point
had had only one. The women became more sedentary and grew accustomed to
looking after the hut and the children, while the man went off to search for
their common subsistence. In this way, through a slightly softer life, the two
sexes began to lose something of their ferocity and vigour. But if each one
separately became less suited for fighting savage beasts, on the other hand, it
was easier to gather together to resist them in common.
In this new condition, with a simple
and solitary life, very limited needs, and the tools they had invented to
provide for those needs, men enjoyed a great deal of leisure time and used it
to produce for their own convenience several types of things unknown to their
fathers. And that was the first yoke they unwittingly imposed on themselves and
the first source of the evils they were preparing for their descendants. For,
apart from the fact that in this way they continued to soften their bodies and
minds, these conveniences, through habit, lost almost all their attraction and,
at the same time, degenerated into real needs. It became much more painful to
lack them than sweet to possess them, and people were sad to lose them without
being happy to own them.
Here we glimpse a little better how the
use of speech was established or was imperceptibly improved within the bosom of
each family, and it is possible to surmise once more how various particular
causes could extend language and accelerate its progress by making it more necessary.
Massive floods or earthquakes surrounded some inhabited regions with water or
precipices. Upheavals in the earth broke off portions of the continent and
split them up into islands. We can understand that among men brought together
in this way and forced to live in groups, there must have formed a common idiom,
more so than among those who wandered freely in the forests on the mainland.
Thus, it is very possible that after their first attempts at navigation some
islanders brought among us the use of speech. And it is at least highly
probable that society and languages originated in the islands and were improved
there before being known on the mainland.
Everything begins to change how it
looked. Men who have up to this point wandered in the woods, once they adopt a
more stable settlement, slowly come together, are united in various bands, and
finally form in each region a particular nation, unified in their customary traditions
and characters—not by regulations and laws, but by the same way of life and
diet and by the common influence of climate. A permanent neighbourhood cannot
fail to engender eventually some connections among various families. The young
people of different sexes live in neighbouring huts, and
the casual interaction which nature demands soon leads, through time spent in
each other’s company, to another no less sweet and more permanent companionship.
People grow accustomed to considering different objects and to making comparisons.
They imperceptibly acquire ideas of merit and beauty, which produce feelings of
preference. By seeing one another, they can no longer go without seeing each
other again. A tender and sweet feeling insinuates itself into the heart and at
the least opposition turns into an impetuous rage. Jealousy awakens with love,
discord triumphs, and the gentlest of passions receives sacrifices of human
blood.
As ideas and feelings follow on one
another and the mind and heart are trained, the human race continues to become
domesticated, relationships expand, and bonds are tightened. People got used to
assembling in front of the huts or around a large tree. Singing and dancing,
true children of love and leisure, became the amusement or rather the occupation
of idle men and women gathered together. Each man began to look at the others
and to want to be looked at himself, and public esteem
had a value. The one who sang or danced the best, the handsomest, the
strongest, the most skilful, or the most eloquent became the most highly
thought of, and that was the first step towards inequality and, at the same
time, toward vice. From these first preferences were born, on the one hand,
vanity and scorn and, on the other, shame and envy, and the fermentation
brought about by these new leavening agents eventually produced combinations
fatal to happiness and innocence.
As soon as men had started to appreciate
one another and the idea of respect was formed in their minds, everyone claimed
to have a right to it, and failing to respect someone was no longer possible
with impunity. From that emerged the first obligations for civility, even among
savages, and from that all voluntary wrong became an outrage, because, as well
as the harm resulting from the injury, the offended party often considered the
contempt for his person more insupportable than the harm itself. And so,
because each man punished the contempt which had been shown to him in a manner
proportional to his own self-esteem, acts of vengeance became terrible, and men
grew bloody and cruel. This is precisely the stage reached by the majority of
savage people known to us. And because several people have not sufficiently distinguished
among ideas and observed how distant these savages already were from the first
state of nature, they have rushed to conclude that man is naturally cruel and
needs civil order to mollify him; whereas, nothing is as gentle as he is in his
primitive condition, when, placed by nature at equal distances from the stupidity
of beasts and the lethal enlightenment of civil man and equally limited by instinct
and by reason to protecting himself from the harm which threatens him, he is restrained
by natural compassion from doing harm to anyone himself, since nothing gives
him an inclination to do so, not even after he has been harmed himself. For,
according the axiom of the wise Locke, There can be no injury where
there is no property.18
But it is necessary to remark that once
society started and relationships among men were already established, different
qualities were required in them from those which they retained from their
primitive constitution. Morality began to introduce itself into human actions.
Before there were laws, each man was the sole judge and avenger of the offences
he had received, and thus the goodness suitable in the pure state of nature was
no longer appropriate to emerging society. Punishments had to become more
severe as opportunities to offend became more frequent, and the dread of
vengeance had to take the place of the restraining effect of laws. Thus, although
men had developed less endurance and natural compassion had already suffered
some change, because this period in the development of human faculties held a
clear middle position between the indolence of the primitive state and the petulant
activity of our vain self-love, it must have been the happiest and most durable
epoch. The more we reflect on this, the more we find that this state was the
least subject to revolutions and the best for man (Note 16) and that he must have emerged from it only through some fatal
chance, which for the common good should never have happened. The example of
savages, almost all of whom have been discovered at this stage of development,
seems to confirm that the human race was made to rest in it forever, that this
state is the true youth of the world, and that all later progress has looked
like so many steps towards the perfection of the individual but has, in
reality, been towards the decrepitude of the species.
As long as men were content with their
rustic huts, as long as they limited themselves to stitching their clothes of
skin with thorns or fish bones, to decking themselves out with feathers and
shells, to painting their bodies various colours, to improving or embellishing
their bows and arrows, to carving some fishing canoes or crude musical instruments
with sharp stones—in a word, as long as they did not occupy themselves except
with tasks which one man could do by himself and to arts which did not require
the collaboration of several hands—they lived free, healthy, good, and happy
lives, as much as their nature enabled them to do so, and they continued to enjoy
among themselves the pleasures of independent interaction. But from the moment
a man had need of someone else’s help, from the time they noticed that it was
useful for one man alone to have provisions for two, equality disappeared,
property was introduced, work became necessary, and the vast forests were
transformed into smiling fields, which had to be watered with men’s sweat and
in which slavery and misery were soon seen sprouting up and growing along with
the crops.
Metallurgy and agriculture were the two
arts whose invention produced this great revolution. For the poet, what has civilized
men and ruined the human race is gold and silver, but for the philosopher it is
iron and wheat. Both of these were unknown to the savages of America, who for
that reason have always remained savage. Other peoples even seem to have stayed
barbarous as long as they practised one of these arts without the other. And
perhaps one of the main reasons why Europe has been civilized, if not earlier,
at least more continuously and better than the other parts of the world, is
that it has been, at one and the same time, the most abundant in iron and the
most fertile in wheat.
It is very difficult to conjecture how
men came to know and use iron. For it is not credible that they got the idea on
their own of extracting the raw material from the mine and giving it the necessary
preparations for getting it to fuse, before they knew what the result of that
would be. On the other hand, we can attribute this discovery even less to some
accidental fire, since mines are built only in dry places devoid of trees and
plants, so that we could say nature had taken precautions to conceal this fatal
secret from us. So the only thing left is that an extraordinary event with some
volcano ejecting metallic materials in molten form would have given observers
the idea of imitating this natural operation. Even so, we must assume they had
plenty of courage and foresight to undertake such a difficult task and to see
from a considerable distance the advantages they could derive from it,
something hardly appropriate even to minds already more trained than theirs
must have been.
As for agriculture, its principles were
known long before its practice was established, and it is scarcely possible
that men who were constantly busy taking their subsistence from trees and
plants did not relatively soon get an idea of the ways nature uses to grow
plants. But their industry probably did not turn in this direction until a
great deal later, either because the trees, which, along with hunting and
fishing, provided their food, did not need their care, or because they did not
know how to use wheat or had no tools to cultivate it, or because they lacked
the foresight to think of future needs, or finally because they had no way of
preventing others from taking away the fruits of their labour. Once they became
more industrious, it is plausible that they began using sharp stones and
pointed sticks to cultivate some vegetables or roots around their huts long
before they knew how to prepare wheat and had the tools necessary for
large-scale cultivation, to say nothing of the fact that, in order to devote
oneself to this occupation and seed the earth, one has to resolve at first to
give up something in order to gain a great deal later on, a way of anticipating
things far removed from the frame of mind in savage man who, as I have said,
has considerable trouble thinking in the morning about his evening needs.
The invention of other arts was thus necessary
to force the human race to apply itself to the art of agriculture. As soon as
men were needed to melt and forge iron, other men were needed to feed them. The
more the number of metal workers multiplied, the smaller the number of hands
used to provide their common subsistence, without there being fewer mouths to
consume it. And since some of them had to have foodstuffs in exchange for their
iron, others finally discovered the secret of using iron to increase the
production of food. From that was born, on the one hand, ploughing and agriculture
and, on the other, the art of working with metals and multiplying their uses.
From the cultivation of the land
necessarily followed its division, and from property, once it became recognized,
the first rules of justice. For in order to give each man what is his, it is
necessary that each man can have something. In addition, men began to direct
their gaze into the future and, since all of them saw that they had some goods
to lose, there was no one who did not have to fear retaliation against him for
the wrongs he might do to others. This origin is all the more natural since it
is impossible to conceive of the idea of property emerging from anything other
than manual labour. For it is not clear what a man can add over and above his
work in order to appropriate things he has not made. It is labour alone that
gives the farmer the right to the products of the earth which he has worked on
and hence gives him a right to the land, at least until the harvest, and thus
from year to year. Since that constitutes a continuous possession, it is easily
transformed into property. When the ancients, says Grotius, gave Ceres the epithet
of legislatrix and the name Thesmophoria to a festival celebrated in her honour,
they let it be known by this action that the division of the earth produced a
new sort of right, that is, the right of property, different from the right
which results from natural law.19
Once things were in this state, they
could have remained equal, if the talents had been equal, and if, for instance,
the use of iron and the consumption of foodstuffs had always remained in an
exact balance. But the proportion, which nothing maintained, was soon broken.
The strongest man did more of the work. The most skillful was better at turning
his work to his own advantage. The most ingenious found ways to shorten his
labour. The farmer had a greater need for iron or the iron-worker for wheat,
and, while both worked equally, one earned a great deal while the other had
hardly enough to live. In this way, natural inequality imperceptibly spread,
along with inequality arising out of social groups, and the differences among
men, developed out of their different circumstances, become more perceptible
and more permanent in their effects and begin to have the same relative influence
on the lot of individuals.
Once matters had reached this point, it
is easy to imagine the rest. I will not pause to describe the successive
inventions of the other arts, the progress of languages, the testing and use of
talents, the inequality of fortunes, the use or abuse of riches, or all those details
which follow these and which anyone can easily provide. I will limit myself
merely to casting a glance at the human race situated in this new order of
things.
There we are, then, with all our
faculties developed, memory and imagination at work, vain self-love involved,
reason activated, and the mind almost at the limit of the perfection it can
attain. There we have all the natural qualities set into action, the rank and
lot of each man established, not only on the basis of the quantity of goods and
the power of helping or harming, but also on the basis of the mind, beauty,
strength or skill, and merit or talents. Since these qualities were the only
ones which could attract respect, it was soon necessary to have them or to
pretend to have them and, for one’s own advantage to show oneself as different
from what one really was. Being and appearing became two entirely different
things, and from this distinction emerged imposing ostentation, deceitful
cunning, and all the vices which follow in their train. On the other hand, no
matter how free and independent man had been previously, there he was, thanks
to a multitude of new needs, subject, as it were, to all of nature and, above
all, to his fellow men, to whom he has, in a sense, become a slave, even in
becoming their master: if rich, he needs their services; if poor, he needs
their help, and if he is in between the two he cannot do without them. Thus, he
must constantly seek to interest them in his lot and to make them discover a
real or apparent profit for themselves in working for his. This makes him
deceitful and artificial with some men, imperious and harsh with others, and
requires him to abuse all those he needs, when he cannot make them afraid of
him and does not find it in his interests to serve them usefully. Finally,
devouring ambition, the passionate desire to raise the relative size of his fortune,
less from a real need than to set oneself above others, inspires in all men a
dark tendency to inflict injuries on each other, a secret jealousy all the more
dangerous because, in order to strike a blow in greater safety, it often
assumes a mask of goodwill: in a word, competition and rivalry, on the one
hand, and opposing interests on the other, and the constant hidden desire to
make one’s profit at the expense of others. All these evils are the first
effects of property and the inseparable attendants of emerging inequality.
Before the signs which represent riches
had been invented, wealth could scarcely have consisted of anything other than
lands and livestock, the only real goods men could possess. But when inheritances
had increased in number and extent to the point of covering the entire land,
all adjoining one another, some could no longer grow except at the expense of
others, and the people left over, whom weakness or indolence had prevented from
acquiring an estate of their own, became poor without having lost anything, because,
with everything changing around them, they alone had not changed and so were
obliged to receive or to steal their subsistence from the hands of the rich.
From that began to emerge, according to the different characters of the two
groups, dominion and servitude, or violence and plunder. The rich, for their
part, had hardly learned about the pleasure of dominating than they soon
disdained all others, and, making use of their old slaves to conquer new ones,
dreamed only of subjugating and enslaving their neighbours, like those starving
wolves which, having once tasted human flesh, reject all other food and no
longer want to devour anything but men.
In this way, when the most powerful or
the most wretched used their strength or their needs to create a kind of right
to the goods of others, equivalent, according to them, to the right of property,
equality was fractured, and the most horrific disorder followed. Thus, the
usurpations of the rich, the thievery of the poor, and the frantic passions of
all snuffed out natural compassion and the still feeble voice of justice and
made men avaricious, ambitious, and wicked. Between the right of the strongest
and the right of the first occupant there arose a perpetual conflict, which
ended only in fights and murders (Note 17). The emerging society
turned into the most horrific state of war. The human race, debased and desolate,
unable to retrace its steps or to renounce the unfortunate acquisitions it had
made and working only for its shame by abusing the faculties which honour it,
brought itself to the verge of its own ruin.
This
strange disaster
fills him with dismay. For all his wealth,
he is a wretched man. He wants to flee
from all his riches and now despises
the very things he recently desired.20
It is impossible that men would not finally
have reflected about such a miserable situation and about the calamities
devastating them. The rich, above all, must soon have felt how much a perpetual
war worked to their disadvantage, where they alone paid all the costs and
where, though the risk to life was common to all, they alone risked their property.
Moreover, however they might have been able to colour their usurpations, they
knew well enough that they were based only on a precarious and abusive right
and that, since they had been acquired merely by force, force could take them
away from them without their having a reason to complain about it. Even those
who had been enriched by their industry alone could hardly base their property
on better claims. They could well say, “I am the one who built this wall. I won
this land through my own labour.” “Who laid out its boundaries for you?” people
could reply to them, “And by virtue of what do you claim to be paid at our
expense for labour which we did not impose on you? Do you not know that a
multitude of your brothers is dying or suffering from a need for what you have
in excess and that you had to have express and unanimous consent of the human
race in order to appropriate for yourself from the common subsistence everything
over and above your own?” Lacking valid reasons to justify himself and
sufficient strength to defend himself, easily crushing an individual, but
himself crushed by gangs of bandits, alone against everyone and, because of mutual
jealousies, unable to join with his equals against an enemy united by a common
hope of pillage, the rich man, hard pressed by necessity, eventually conceived
the most cleverly designed project which has ever entered the human
mind. That was to use to his advantage the very forces of those who were attacking
him, to turn his enemies into his defenders, to inspire them with other maxims,
and to give them other institutions which were as beneficial to him as natural
right was against him.
With this in mind, after showing his
neighbours the horror of a situation which armed them all against the others,
which made their possessions as onerous as their needs, and in which no one
found his security either in poverty or in wealth, he easily came up with specious
reasons to lead them to his goal. “Let us unite,” he said to them, “to protect
the weak from oppression, to restrain the ambitious, and to assure to each man
the possession of what belongs to him. Let us set up rules of justice and peace
to which everyone is obliged to conform, which do not exempt any one, and which
in some way make up for the whims of fortune, by subjecting the powerful and
the weak equally to mutual obligations. In a word, instead of turning our
forces against ourselves, let us collect them into one supreme power which
governs us according to wise laws and which protects and defends all the
members of the association, repels common enemies, and keeps us in an eternal
harmony.”
He required much less than the
equivalent of this speech to convince crude and easily seduced men, who, in
addition, had too many things to disentangle among themselves to be able to go
without arbitrators and too much avarice and ambition to be able to do without
masters for any length of time. They all rushed headlong into their chains,
believing they were guaranteeing their liberty. For although they had sufficient
reason to sense the advantages of a political establishment, they did not have
enough experience to foresee its dangers. Those most capable of anticipating
the abuses were precisely the ones who counted on profiting from them, and even
the wise ones saw that they had to resolve to sacrifice a part of their liberty
in order to preserve the rest, just as a wounded man has his arm cut off to
save the rest of his body.
Such was, or must have been, the origin
of society and laws, something which provided new shackles for the weak and new
power to the rich (Note
18), destroyed natural liberty irretrievably,
established forever the law of property and inequality, turned a clever usurpation
into an irrevocable right, and for the profit of a few ambitious men from that
time on subjected all the human race to labour, servitude, and misery. It is
easy to see how the establishment of a single society made the establishment of
all the others indispensable and how, to stand up against united forces, people
had to unite in their turn. Societies multiplied or extended themselves rapidly
and soon covered the entire surface of the earth. It was no longer possible to
find a single corner of the universe where one could free oneself from the yoke
and duck out from under the often badly wielded sword which each man saw
permanently suspended above his head. Since civil law thus became the common
rule for citizens, the law of nature had no place, except among the various
societies, where, under the name of the right of nations, it was tempered with
a few tacit conventions to make commerce possible and to take the place of
natural compassion, which, by losing almost all the power between one society
and another which it used to have between man and man, no longer is found anywhere,
other than in some great cosmopolitan souls, who transcend the imaginary
barriers separating peoples and, following the example of the Sovereign Being
who created them, include the entire human race in their benevolence.
Since the political bodies thus
remained in a state of nature among themselves, they soon felt the disadvantages
which had forced individuals to leave it, and this condition became even more
deadly among these large bodies than it had been before among the individuals
who made them up. From that emerged national wars, battles, murders, reprisals
that make nature tremble and shock reason, and all those horrible prejudices
which rank the honour of shedding human blood among the virtues. The most decent
people learned to count among their duties that of butchering their fellow men.
Finally, men were seen massacring each other by the thousands without knowing
why. And more murders were committed in a single day of fighting and more
horrors in the capture of a single town than had been committed in the state of
nature during entire centuries over the whole face of the earth. Such are the
first effects one glimpses of the division of the human race into different
societies. Let us go back to their founding.
I know that several people have
provided other origins for political societies, like conquests by the most
powerful or the union of the weak. The choice among these causes is irrelevant
to what I want to establish. However, the one I have just laid out seems to me
the most natural for the following reasons: (1) Since in
the first case the right of conquest is not a right, it could not have been the
basis for any other right. The conqueror and the vanquished people constantly
remain in a state of mutual warfare, unless the nation regains its full liberty
and voluntarily chooses its conqueror as its leader. Up to that point, whatever
capitulations have been made, since they were not founded on anything but
violence and consequently are rendered null and void by that very fact, there
cannot be with this hypothesis either a genuine society or a body politic or
any law other than the law of the strongest. (2) In the second case, these
words strong and weak are ambiguous. In the
interval occurring between the establishment of the right of property or of the
first occupant and that of political governments, the meaning of these terms is
better rendered by the words rich and poor, because,
in fact, before there were laws, a man did not have any way to subjugate his
equals other than by attacking their goods or by giving them a part of his own.
(3) Since the poor had nothing to lose but their liberty, it would have been
very foolish of them to give away voluntarily the only benefit remaining to
them without gaining anything in return. By contrast, since the rich were, so
to speak, sensitive about all aspects of their goods, it was much easier to
harm them, and thus they would take more precautions to protect themselves. Finally,
it is reasonable to believe that something was invented by those to whom it is
useful rather than by those it harms.
The newly emerging government did not
have a constant and regular form. The lack of philosophy and experience enabled
men to see only the present inconveniences, and they did not think of remedying
others except as they arose. In spite of all the work of the wisest legislators,
the political state always remained imperfect, because it was almost a work of
chance and because, since it began badly, time revealed the faults in it and
suggested remedies but could never repair the defects in the constitution.
People constantly patched it up; whereas, what was required was to begin by
clearing the air and rejecting all the old materials, as Lycurgus did at
Sparta, in order to raise a good edifice later.21 At first, society
consisted only of some general conventions which all the individuals committed
themselves to observe and the community pledged itself to guarantee for each of
them. Experience necessarily revealed how weak such a constitution was and how
easy it was for lawbreakers to avoid conviction or punishment for wrongdoing
where the public had to act as the only witness and judge. The law must have
been evaded in a thousand ways, and the disadvantages and disorders must have
continually multiplied, in order for people eventually to think of conferring
on particular individuals the dangerous trust of public authority and for them
to commit to magistrates the task of making sure the resolutions of
the people were observed. For to say that leaders were chosen before the
confederation was created and that ministers of the laws existed before the
laws themselves is an assumption which does not merit a serious argument to
refute it.
It would be no more reasonable to believe
that people were at the start thrown into the arms of an absolute master, unconditionally
and irrevocably, and that that the first way of providing communal security
which proud and untamed men might have imagined was to hurl themselves into slavery. In fact, why did they give
themselves superiors, unless it was to defend them against oppression and to
protect their goods, their liberties, and their lives, which are, so to speak,
the constituent elements of their being? Now, since in the relationships between
man and man the worst that could happen to one was to see himself at the mercy
of the other, would it not have been against good sense to begin by handing over
to a leader the only things for whose preservation they required his help? What
equivalent could he have offered them for conceding such a fine right? If he
had dared to demand it under the pretext of defending them, would he not have
immediately received the response of the old story: “What more will the enemy
do to us?” It is thus incontestable and the fundamental maxim of
all political right that the people gave themselves leaders to defend their liberty
and not to enslave them. “If we have a prince,” said Pliny to Trajan, “it is so
that he may protect us from having a master.”22
Our political writers produce the same
sophistries about the love of liberty that our philosophers have produced about
the state of nature. On the basis of things they see, they judge very different
matters which they have not seen, and they attribute to men a natural inclination
to servitude because of the patience with which the men before their eyes
support theirs, without thinking that liberty is like innocence and virtue,
whose value one does not feel except to the extent that one enjoys them oneself
and the taste for which is lost as soon as they are lost. “I know the delights
of your country,” said Brasidas to a satrap
who was comparing the life of Sparta with that of Persepolis, “but you cannot
know the pleasures of mine.”23
Just as an untamed stallion bristles
his mane, paws the earth with his hoof, and struggles furiously at the very
approach of a bit, while a trained horse patiently endures the whip and the
spur, barbarous man does not bend his head under the yoke which civilized man
carries without a murmur, and he prefers the most stormy liberty to a quiet
subjugation. Thus, we must not judge the natural dispositions of man for or
against servitude by the degradation of enslaved people but by the amazing
things all free people have done to protect themselves against oppression. I
know that the former do nothing but boast all the time about the peace and
quiet they enjoy in their chains, and that they call the most miserable
slavery peace, but when I see the latter sacrificing pleasures, repose,
riches, power, and life itself to the preservation of the only good so
disdained by those who have lost it, when I see animals born free and abhorring
captivity smashing their heads against the bars of their prison, when I see
multitudes of totally naked savages scorning European pleasures and enduring
hunger, fire, sword, and death merely to preserve their independence, I feel
that it is not appropriate for slaves to reason about freedom.24
As for paternal authority, from which
several people have derived absolute government and all of society, it is
enough, without going back over the proofs to the contrary by Locke and Sidney,
to observe that nothing in the world is further removed from the ferocious
spirit of despotism than the tenderness of this authority, which considers more
the advantage of the one who obeys than the benefit to the one who commands. By
the law of nature the father is the master of the child only for as long as the
father’s help is necessary to him, and once beyond this term, they become
equals. At that point the son, perfectly independent of his father, owes him
only respect and not obedience. For gratitude is clearly a
duty which should be paid, but not a right which can be demanded. Instead
of saying that civil society stems from paternal power, we should say the
reverse, that this power draws its main strength from society: an individual
was not recognized as the father of several children until they remained gathered
around him. The father’s goods, of which he is truly the master, are the bonds
which keep his children dependent on him, and he has the power to give them as
a portion of his estate only as much as they have deserved from him by constant
deference to his wishes. Now the subjects, far from having a similar favour to
look forward to from their despot, given that they belong to him personally, both
they and all they possess, or at least that is what he claims, are reduced to receiving
as a favour what he leaves them of their own goods. He carries out justice when
he robs them and shows them mercy when he lets them live.
In continuing to examine the facts in
this way by focusing on rights, we would find no more solidity than truth in
the voluntary establishment of a tyranny. It would be difficult to show the validity
of a contract which would be binding on only one of the parties, in which everything
would be placed on one side and nothing on the other, and which would turn out
to the disadvantage only of the man who had committed himself to it. Even today
this odious system is very far from being that of wise and good monarchs, and
above all of the kings of France, as we can see in various parts of their
edicts and especially in the following passage from a famous edict published in
1667, in the name and by the orders of Louis XIV: Let no one say,
therefore, that the sovereign is not subject to the laws of his state, since
the contrary proposition is a truth of the law of nations, which flattery has
sometimes attacked, but which good princes have always defended as a tutelary
divinity of their states. How much more legitimate is it to say with the wise
Plato that the perfect happiness of a kingdom is that a prince is obeyed by his
subjects, that the prince obeys the law, and that the law is right and always
aims at the public good. I shall not stop to explore whether, since
liberty is the most noble of man’s faculties, it is not degrading his nature,
putting him on the level of beasts enslaved by instinct, and offending even the
Author of his being to renounce unreservedly the most precious of all His gifts
and to subject himself to committing all the crimes which He has forbidden us,
in order to please a ferocious or insane master, and whether this Sublime
Craftsman should be more angry to see his most beautiful work destroyed than to
see him dishonoured. I will overlook, if you wish, the authority of Barbeyrac, who states clearly, following Locke, that no one
can sell his liberty to the extent of submitting himself to an arbitrary power
which treats him as it pleases: “For,” he adds, “that would be selling his own
life of which he not the master.”25 I will only ask by what right those who have not
been afraid to debase themselves to this point could have subjected their
posterity to the same ignominy and renounced on its behalf goods which do not depend
on their generosity and without which life itself is onerous to all those
worthy of it.
Pufendorf says that just as one transfers one’s possessions
to someone else by conventions and contracts, so one can also divest oneself of
one’s liberty in favour of someone else. That, it seems to me, is extremely
poor reasoning. For, first of all, the goods which I alienate become something
totally foreign to me, and their abuse leaves me indifferent. But it is
important to me that someone does not abuse my liberty, and I cannot, without
making myself culpable of the bad things I will be forced to do, risk becoming
an instrument for crime. In addition, given that the right of property is only
a convention and a human institution, any man can dispose of what he possesses
as he wishes. But it is not the same with the essential gifts of nature, such
as life and liberty. Each man is permitted to enjoy these, and it
is at least doubtful that he has the right to strip himself of them. In giving
up one, he degrades his being; in giving up the other he destroys his being as
much as he can. And since no temporal goods can make up for one or the other,
it would offend nature and reason at the same time to renounce them no matter
what the price. But even if a man could alienate his freedom just as he can his
possessions, the difference would be very great for the children, who enjoy
their father’s goods only by transmission of his right; whereas, liberty is a
gift which they hold from nature in their capacity as men, and so their parents
had no right to deprive them of it. Hence, just as it was necessary to treat
nature with violence in order to establish slavery, so it was necessary to
change nature to perpetuate this right. And the jurists who have solemnly pronounced
that the child of a slave would be born a slave have decided in different terms
that a man would not be born a man.
Thus, it appears certain to me not only
that governments did not begin through arbitrary power, which is only their
corruption and extreme limit and which leads them back finally to the single
law of the strongest, for which they were initially the remedy, but also that,
even if this is the way they did start, such power, being by its nature
illegitimate, could not have served as the foundation for the rights of society
and thus for institutional inequality.
Without entering today into investigations
which still remain to be made on the nature of the fundamental pact of all governments,
I am following common opinion and limiting myself to considering here the
establishment of the body politic as a genuine contract between the people and
the leaders it chooses for itself, a contract through which the two parties
obligate themselves to observe laws that are stipulated in it and that form the
bonds of their union. Since the people have, so far as social relations are concerned,
united all their wills into a single will, all the articles on which this will
is explicitly clear become so many fundamental laws which obligate all members
of the state without exception. One of these laws rules on the selection and
power of the magistrates charged with looking after the execution of the
others. This power extends to everything that can maintain the constitution,
without going to the point of changing it. To this are added honours which make
the laws and their ministers worthy of respect, and
for the latter some personal prerogatives which compensate them for the tiresome
work a good administration demands. The magistrate, for his part, commits himself
to use the power entrusted to him only according to the intention of the
constituents, in order to keep each man in the peaceful enjoyment of what
belongs to him and to prefer at all times the public good to his own interest.
Before experience had demonstrated or
knowledge of the human heart had enabled men to anticipate the inevitable
abuses of such a constitution, it must have appeared all the better because
those who were charged with making sure it was preserved were themselves the
most interested in doing so. For, given that the magistracy and its rights were
established only on fundamental laws, as soon as the laws were destroyed, the
magistrates would cease to be legitimate, and the people would no longer be
bound to obey them. Since it was not the magistrate but the law which
constituted the essence of the state, each man would by right return to his
natural liberty.
The slightest attentive reflection
would confirm this with new reasons, and by the nature of the contract we would
see that it could not be irrevocable. For if there were no superior power which
could guarantee the fidelity of the contracting parties or force them to
fulfill their reciprocal commitments, the parties would remain sole judges in
their own cause, and each of them would always have the right of renouncing the
contract, as soon as it found that the other was contravening the conditions or
those conditions ceased to suit its interests. It appears that the right to abdicate
could be founded on this principle. Now, to consider, as we are doing, only the
human institution: if the magistrate who has all the power in his hands and who
appropriates all the advantages of the contract for himself, nevertheless had
the right to renounce his authority, then there is an even stronger reason why
the people, who pay for all the faults of their leaders, should have a right to
renounce their dependency. But the horrific dissentions and the innumerable
disorders which this dangerous power would necessarily bring with it show more
than anything else how much human governments needed a more substantial basis
than reason alone and how much it was necessary to the public peace that Divine
Will intervened to give sovereign authority a sacred and inviolable character
which removes from the subjects the fatal right of disposing of it. If religion
had achieved only this benefit for men, that would
be enough to require them to cherish and adopt it, even with its abuses, because
it spares even more blood than fanaticism causes men to shed. But let us follow
the thread of our hypothesis.
The various forms of government derive
their origin from the greater or lesser differences which existed among the
individuals at the moment of its institution. Was one man eminent in power, virtue,
riches, or esteem? He was elected the only magistrate, and the state became a
monarchy. If several men, more or less equal among themselves, prevailed over
all the others, they were elected as a group, and people had an aristocracy.
Those whose fortune or talents were less disproportionate and who were the
least removed from the state of nature kept the supreme administration communal
and formed a democracy. Time confirmed which of these forms was the most
advantageous for men. Some remained subjected solely to the laws; others soon
obeyed masters. Citizens wanted to protect their freedom; subjects thought of
nothing but taking that away from their neighbours, since they could not accept
that others were enjoying a benefit which they no longer enjoyed themselves. In
a word, on one side were riches and conquests, on the other happiness and
virtue.
In these various governments, all the
magistrates were at first elected, and if wealth did not win out, preference
was given to merit, which confers a natural pre-eminence, and to age, which provides
experience in business and composure in deliberations. The Hebrew elders,
the Gerontes in Sparta, the Senate in Rome, and
even the etymology of our word Seigneur show how much old age
was respected in earlier times.26 The more the elections fell to men of advanced age,
the more frequent they became, and the more problems people experienced with
them. Intrigues were introduced, factions formed, parties grew embittered,
civil wars broke out, and finally the blood of citizens was sacrificed for the
alleged happiness of the state. People were on the verge of falling back into
the anarchy of earlier times. The ambition of the leading men took advantage of
these circumstances in order to perpetuate within their families their official
positions. The people, already accustomed to dependency,
repose, and the conveniences of life, and already beyond the point where they
could break their chains, agreed to allow their servitude to increase in order
to reinforce their tranquility. That is how the leaders became
hereditary and grew accustomed to looking on their magistrate’s office as a
family possession, to considering themselves the owners of the state, in which
at first they had been only officials, to describing their fellow citizens as
their slaves, to counting them like livestock among the number of things which
belonged to them, and to calling themselves the equals of the gods and kings of
kings.
If we follow the progress of inequality
in these different revolutions, we will find that the establishment of law and
the right of property was its first stage, the institution of the magistracy
was the second, and the third and last was the transformation of legitimate
power into arbitrary power, so that the condition of the rich and poor was
authorized by the first age, that of the powerful and the weak by the second,
and that of master and slave by the third, which is the final degree of inequality
and the limit to which all the others eventually lead, until new revolutions
dissolve the government entirely or move it closer to a legitimate institution.
To understand the necessity of this
progress we must consider, not so much the motives for the establishment of the
body politic, as the form it takes in what it does and the disadvantages it
brings with it. For the vices which make social institutions necessary are the
same which make their abuse inevitable. And since, with the sole exception of
Sparta, where the law watched principally over the education of the children
and where Lycurgus established moral traditions that almost did away with the
need to add laws, laws in general are not as strong as the passions and keep
men in check without changing them, it would be easy to prove that any government
which, without being corrupted or altered, always worked exactly according to
the purpose for which it had been established would have been instituted unnecessarily,
and that a country where no one evaded the laws and abused the magistracy would
have no need for either magistrates or laws.
Political distinctions necessarily lead
to civil distinctions. The growing inequality between the people and its
leaders soon makes itself felt among individuals and is modified in them in a
thousand ways according to passions, talents, and events. The magistrate could
not usurp illegitimate power without creating some hangers on to whom he is
forced to cede part of it. In addition, since the citizens do not let themselves
be oppressed except to the extent that they are led on by blind ambition and
since they look more below than above them, domination becomes dearer to them
than independence, and they consent to carry chains in order to be able to give
them out in their turn. It is very difficult to reduce to obedience someone who
does not seek to command, and the most adroit politician would not succeed in
subjecting men who wished only to be free. But inequality spreads without difficulty
among ambitious and cowardly souls, always ready to run the risks of fortune
and to dominate or serve almost indifferently, according to whether it is
favourable or unfavourable to them. That is why there had to come a time when
the eyes of the people were so spellbound that their leaders only had to say to
the most insignificant of men: “Be great, you and all your family” and immediately
he appeared great to everyone, as well as in his own eyes, and his descendants
were raised even more, in proportion to their distance from him. The more remote
and uncertain the cause, the more the effect grew. The more lazy slackers one could count in a family, the more illustrious
it became.
If this were the place here to go into
details, I would easily explain how inequality in prestige and authority
becomes inevitable among individuals (Note 19), even without the government
getting involved, as soon as they are united in the same society and thus are
forced to make comparisons among themselves and to take into account the differences
they find in the continual use they have to make of one another. These differences
are of several kinds but, in general, since riches, nobility or rank,
power, and personal merit are the principal distinctions by which people are
measured in society, I would prove that the cooperation or the conflict of
these various forces is the most certain indication of whether a state is well
or badly constituted. I would show that among these four types of inequality,
since personal qualities are the origin of all the others, wealth is the last
to which they are finally reduced, because, given that it is the most immediately
useful for one’s well being and the easiest to pass on, men readily make use of
it to purchase all the rest, an observation which enables us to judge with sufficient
precision the extent to which each people is removed from its primitive
institution and how far it has gone along the road to the final stage of
corruption. I would point out how much this universal desire for reputation,
honours, and preferment, which devours us all, trains and compares talents and
strengths, how much it excites and multiplies the passions, and, by turning all
men into competitors, rivals, or rather enemies and making so many contestants
run the same course, how much it causes setbacks, successes, and catastrophes
of all kinds every day. I would show that it is to this passionate desire to
have people talk about us, to this frantic urge to distinguish ourselves, which
keeps us almost always outside ourselves, that we owe what is best and worst
among men, our virtues and our vices, our sciences and our mistakes, our
conquerors and our philosophers, that is, a multitude of bad things compared to
a small number of good ones. Finally, I would prove that if one sees a handful
of powerful and rich men at the peak of their greatness and fortune, while the
crowd grovels in obscurity and misery, it is because the former value the
things they enjoy only to the extent that the latter are deprived of them and
because, without changing their condition, they would cease to be happy if the
people ceased to be wretched.
But these details alone would be material
for a considerable work in which one weighed the advantages and the
disadvantages of all governments relative to the rights of the state of nature
and where one would reveal all the different faces behind which inequality has
shown itself up to the present time and will be able to show itself in future
ages, according to the nature of those governments and to the revolutions which
time will necessarily bring about in them. We would see the multitude oppressed
from within as a result of the very precautions which it had taken against what
threatened it from outside. We would see oppression constantly growing without
the oppressed ever being able to know what limits it would have or what
legitimate means they had left to stop it. We would see the rights of citizens
and national liberties gradually extinguished, and the complaints of the weak
treated as seditious murmurs. We would see politics restrict the honour of defending
the common cause to a mercenary section of the population. From that we would
see emerge the need for taxes, the discouraged farmer leaving his field, even
during peacetime, and abandoning the plough to gird on a sword. We would see
deadly and bizarre rules arise about points of honour. We would see the
defenders of the homeland sooner or later become its enemies, constantly
holding a raised dagger over their fellow citizens, and there would come a time
when we would hear them saying to the oppressor of their country: If
you order me to thrust a sword into my brother’s chest or into my father’s
throat or into the womb of my pregnant wife, I will do all that, even though my
right hand is unwilling.27
From the extreme inequality in
conditions and fortunes, from the diversity of passions and talents, from
useless arts, from pernicious arts, and from frivolous sciences would emerge
mobs of prejudices, equally contrary to reason, happiness, and virtue. We would
see the leaders fomenting everything which could make men in groups weak and
split them up, everything which could give society an air of apparent harmony
while sowing in it seeds of real division, everything which could inspire in
the different orders a mutual distrust and hatred, by setting their rights and
interests against each other, and thus reinforce the power which contains them
all.
From the bosom of this disorder and of
these revolutions despotism, lifting by degrees its hideous head and devouring
everything which it had perceived as good and healthy in all sections of the
state, finally would succeed in riding roughshod over the laws and the people
and establishing itself on the ruins of the republic. The times preceding this
last change would be periods of troubles and calamities, but by the end
everything would be swallowed up by the monster, and the people would no longer
have leaders and laws, but only tyrants. From this moment on, it would also
cease to be a question of morals and virtue, for wherever despotism
reigns, in which there is no hope from honesty, it suffers no other master.28 As soon as it speaks, one can consult neither
probity nor duty, and the blindest obedience is the only virtue which remains
for slaves.
This is the final stage of inequality and
the extreme point which closes the circle and touches the point where we set
out. Here all individuals become equal again because they are nothing, and
since the subjects no longer have any law other than the will of the master,
and the master has no rule other than his passions, the notions of good and the
principles of justice vanish once more. Here everything is led back to the single
law of the strongest and, as a result, to a new state of nature, different from
the one with which we began, for the first one was the state of nature in its
purity, and this last one is the fruit of an excess of corruption. In other respects,
there is so little difference between these two states and the contract with
the government is dissolved by despotism in such a manner that the despot is master
only as long as he is the strongest, and as soon as he can be expelled, he has
nothing he can appeal to against the violence. The uprising which ends by
strangling or dethroning a sultan is an act as lawful as those by which the
previous day he disposed of the lives and the goods of his subjects. Force
alone preserved him, and force alone overturns him. Thus, everything occurs
according to natural order, and whatever the outcome of these short and
frequent revolutions may be, no one can complain of injustice from anyone, but
only of his own imprudence or misfortune.
In this way, by discovering and
following the forgotten and lost routes that must have led man from the natural
state to the civil state, and by re-establishing, along with the intermediate
stages which I have just noted, those which the pressures of time have made me
suppress or which my imagination has not suggested to me, every attentive
reader cannot but be struck by the immense gap which separates these two conditions.
In this slow succession of things he will see the solution to an infinite number
of problems of morality and politics that philosophers cannot resolve. He will
appreciate that since the human race of one age is not the human race of
another age, the reason Diogenes did not find a man is that he was searching
among his contemporaries for a man from an age which no longer existed.29 Cato, he will say, perished with Rome and liberty,
because he was out of place in his century, and the greatest of men merely
astonished the world he would have governed five hundred years earlier. Briefly
put, he will explain how the human soul and passions, by imperceptibly altering,
change their nature, as it were, why our needs and our pleasures change their
objects over a long period of time, why, as the original man disappears by degrees,
society no longer offers to the eyes of a wise man anything other than an
assembly of artificial men and manufactured passions, which are the work of all
these new relationships and have no genuine basis in nature. What reflection
teaches us in this matter, observation confirms perfectly: savage man and civilized
man are so different in the depths of their hearts and in their inclinations
that what constitutes supreme happiness for one would reduce the other to
despair. The former breathes nothing but repose and liberty; he wishes only to
live and remain idle. Even the ataraxia of
the Stoic does not come close to his profound indifference for all
other objects.30 By contrast, the always active citizen sweats,
gets agitated, and worries all the time about finding even more laborious occupations.
He works himself to death; he even runs towards it in order to put himself in a
position to live, or he renounces his life to acquire immortality. He courts
the great, whom he hates, and the wealthy, whom he
despises. He spares nothing to obtain the honour of serving them. He boasts
proudly of his low position and of their protection and, proud of his
servitude, speaks with disdain of those who do not have the honour of sharing
it. What a spectacle the wearisome and envied labours of a European minister
would be for a native of the Caribbean! How many cruel deaths would this indolent
savage not prefer to the horror of such a life, which often is not even
mitigated by the pleasure of doing good? But to
understand the purpose of so many cares, his mind would have to have a sense of
the words power and reputation. He would have to
learn that there is a type of man who counts the estimation of the rest of the
universe as something and who knows how to be happy and content with himself on
the basis of what other people say rather than on his own testimony. Such is,
in fact, the real cause of all these differences: the savage lives in himself;
social man, always outside himself, cannot live except in the opinions of
others, and it is, so to speak, only from their judgment that he derives the
feeling of his own existence. It is not part of my subject to show how from
such a disposition emerges such a great indifference to good and evil, together
with such fine discourses on morality, how, with everything reducing itself to
appearances, it all becomes artificial and false—honour, friendship, virtue and
often even vices, which we finally discover the secret of boasting about; how,
in a word, by always asking others what we are and never daring to ask
ourselves that question, in the middle of so much philosophy, humanity, politeness,
and sublime maxims, we have only a deceptive and frivolous exterior, honour without
virtue, reason without wisdom, and pleasure without happiness. It is sufficient
for me to have proved that this is not man’s original condition and that it is
only the spirit of society and the inequality it engenders which change and
transform in this way all our natural inclinations.
I have tried to set out the origin and
progress of inequality, the establishment and the abuse of political societies,
as much as these matters can be deduced from the nature of man by the light of
reason alone and independently of sacred doctrines that give to sovereign
authority the sanction of divine right. It follows from this account that
inequality, almost non-existent in a state of nature, derives its strength and
growth from the development of our faculties and from the progress of the human
mind and finally becomes stable and legitimate through the establishment of
property and laws. It follows further that moral inequality, authorized only by
positive right, is contrary to natural right, whenever it is not combined in
the same proportion with physical inequality, a distinction which demonstrates
sufficiently what we should think in this regard of the type of inequality
which prevails among all civilized peoples, since it is manifestly against the
law of nature, no matter how that is defined, for a child to give orders to an
old man, for an imbecile to lead a wise man, and for a handful of men to stuff
themselves with superfluities while the starving multitude lacks the necessities
of life.
(1) Herodotus relates that after the
murder of the false Smerdis, when the seven
liberators of Persia gathered to discuss the form of government they would give
the state, Otanes was strongly in favour of
a republic. This opinion was all the more extraordinary from the mouth of a satrap,
since, in addition to the claim which he could make to the empire, great men
fear more than death a form of government which requires them to respect
men. Otanes, as we can well imagine, was not
listened to and, seeing that they were going to proceed to the election of a
monarch and not wishing to obey or to command, willingly gave up his right to
the crown to the other claimants, requesting as his total compensation that he
and his posterity be free and independent. The others granted him this
condition. If Herodotus had not told us of the restriction which was set on
this privilege, it would be necessary to assume it. Otherwise, Otanes, not recognizing any sort of law and not having to
account to anyone, would have been all-powerful in the state and stronger even
than the king. But there was hardly any indication that a man who could remain
content with such a privilege in a case like this was capable of abusing it.
And, in fact, it seems that this right never caused the least trouble in the
kingdom, either on the part of the wise Otanes or
of any of his descendants. [Back
to Text]
(2) From the very beginning I have been
relying with confidence on one of those authorities respected by philosophers
because they are the product of firm and sublime reasoning, which only
philosophers understand how to discover and appreciate: “Whatever interest we
have in knowing ourselves, I do not know whether we do not have a better understanding
of everything that is not us. Provided by nature with organs uniquely intended
for our preservation, we use them only to take in impressions alien to us; we
seek only to spread ourselves out into the beyond, and to exist outside
ourselves. We are too busy multiplying the functions of our senses and
increasing the exterior range of our being; we rarely make use of that interior
sense which reduces us to our true dimensions and separates us from everything
that is not in us. However, if we wish to know ourselves, this is the sense we
need to employ, the only one with which we are able to judge ourselves. But how
do we activate this sense to its full extent? How do we free our soul, in which
it resides, of all the illusions of our mind? We have lost the habit of using
it. It has lived without exercise in the middle of the tumult of our physical
sensations; it has been withered by the fire of our passions. The heart, the
mind, the senses—they have all worked against it.” Histoire Naturelle.Vol. 4, p. 151, De la Nature de l’homme.31 [Back to Text]
(3) The changes which a long habit of
moving on two feet could have produced in the structure of man, the relationships
we still observe between his arms and the anterior limbs of quadrupeds, and the
conclusion derived from their way of moving could have given rise to doubts
about the manner that must have been most natural for us. All children begin by
moving on four limbs and require our example and lessons from us to learn to
stand upright. There are even some savage nations, like the Hottentots, who are
very negligent with their children and leave them to move along on their hands
for such a long time that later they have considerable difficulty getting them
to stand straight. The children of the Caribbean savages in the Antilles do the
same. There are various examples of human quadrupeds. Among others I could cite
that of the child who was found in 1344 near Hesse,
where he had been nourished by wolves, and who used to say later at the court
of Prince Henry that, if the choice had been up to him alone, he would have preferred
to return among them rather than live among men. He had acquired the habit of
moving like these animals to such an extent that it was necessary to attach
pieces of wood to him that forced him to stand upright and balanced on his two
feet. It was the same with the child found in 1694 in the forests of Lithuania,
who lived among bears. He did not show, says M. de Condillac,
any trace of reason, moved on his hands and feet, had no language, and made
sounds unlike anything made by man. The little savage of Hanover, who was taken
several years ago to the English court, had all the difficulty in the world forcing himself to walk on two feet. And in 1719 two other
savages were found in the Pyrenees, who ran through the mountains like quadrupeds.
With respect to the objection one could make that this deprives us of the use
of our hands, from which we derive so many advantages, apart from the fact that
the example of monkeys demonstrates that the hands can be used very effectively
in both ways, that would prove nothing except that man can give his limbs a
more convenient purpose than their natural use, and not that nature intended man
to move differently from what she teaches him to do.
But there are, it seems to me, much
better reasons to put forward in order to assert that man is a biped. First of
all, even if it were shown that at first he could have been structured differently
from the way we see him and nonetheless could eventually become what he is,
this would not be sufficient to conclude that that is what happened. For, after
establishing the possibility of these changes, one would still have to
demonstrate, before accepting them, that they were at least probable. In addition,
the fact that the arms of a man appear to have been able to serve him as legs
when necessary is the only observation in support of this theory, in the face
of a large number of others which oppose it. The main ones are as follows: if
he moved on four feet, the way in which the human head is attached to the body,
instead of directing his gaze horizontally, as in all the other animals and as
it does in him when he moves upright, would have kept his eyes fixed directly
on the ground, a position not very favourable for the preservation of the individual;
the tail, which he lacks and does not need when moving on two feet, is useful
for quadrupeds, and none of them is without one; a woman’s breast is very well
placed for a biped who is holding her child in her arms but is so inconveniently
situated for a quadruped that none of them has it positioned in this way; since
the hindquarters are of an excessive height in proportion to the front limbs—a
feature which causes us when moving on all fours to crawl on our knees—the
whole arrangement would have created a poorly proportioned animal that could
not move easily; if he had set his feet as well as his hands down flat, he
would have had in the posterior limb one fewer joint than the other animals,
that is, the one which joins the canon bone to the tibia, and by placing only
the tip of his foot on the ground, as he would have undoubtedly been forced to
do, the tarsus, not to mention the many bones which make it up, would appear
too large to replace the canon, and its articulations with the metatarsus and
the tibia would be too compressed to give the human leg in this position the
same flexibility as the legs of quadrupeds. The example of children taken at an
age when their natural forces have not yet developed and the limbs have not yet
grown strong proves nothing at all. I could just as well claim that dogs are
not intended to walk because they do nothing but crawl for some weeks after
their birth. In addition, isolated facts have little force against the
universal practice of all men, even of nations which, having had no
communication with others, have not been able to imitate them in anything. A
child abandoned in a forest before being able to walk and nourished by some
beast will have followed the example of his nurse by practising how to walk
like her. Habit could have given him abilities which he did not have naturally,
and just as people lacking arms succeed by dint of practice in doing with their
feet all the things we do with our hands, he will eventually manage to use his
hands as feet. [Back to Text]
(4) If among my readers there is a scientist
incompetent enough to make difficulties for me concerning this assumption that
the earth is naturally fertile, I am going to answer him with the following passage:
“Since for their nourishment plants
take much more material from air and water than they take from the earth, what
happens when they rot is that they return to the earth more than they have
drawn from it. Moreover, a forest retains rainwater by preventing evaporating.
Thus, in a wood which has been preserved for a long time without being touched,
the layer of earth which provides vegetation would increase considerably. But
animals return less to the earth than they take from it, and, since men consume
enormous amounts of wood and plants for fire and other uses, it follows that
the layer of soil that produces vegetation in an inhabited land must always
grow smaller and finally become like the terrain of Arabia Petraea and of so many other provinces in the East,
which is, in fact, the area with the most ancient habitations, where one finds
only salt and sand. For the fixed salt of plants and animals remains, while all
the other parts vaporize.” M. de Buffon, Histoire naturelle.
To this we can add the factual evidence
of the number of trees and plants of every species which fill almost all the
deserted islands discovered in these last centuries, as well as what history
teaches us about the immense forests which had to be felled all over the earth
as it was populated and civilized. On this point I will make three more observations,
as follows: First, if there is a sort of plant that could make up for the loss
of vegetative material brought about, according to the reasoning of M. de
Buffon, by the animals, that is, more than anything, the trees, whose tops and
leaves gather and absorb more water and vapour than do the other plants;
second, the destruction of the soil, that is to say, the loss of material
suitable for vegetation, has to accelerate proportionately as the earth is more
cultivated and as the more industrious inhabitants consume its productions of
every species in greater amounts; my third and most important comment is that
the fruits of trees provide animals with more abundant nourishment than other
vegetation can, an experiment I made myself by comparing the production of two
parcels of land equal in size and quality, one covered with chestnut trees and
the other sown with wheat. [Back
to Text]
(5) Among quadrupeds, one of the two
most universal distinguishing features of the carnivorous species is derived
from the shape of the teeth and the other from the structure of the intestines.
The animals which live only on plants all have flat teeth, like the horse, the
ox, the sheep, and the hare, but carnivorous animals have pointed teeth, like
the cat, the dog, the wolf, and the fox. As for the intestines, the frugivorous
animals have some, like the colon, not found in carnivorous animals. It seems,
therefore, that man, who has teeth and intestines like those in frugivorous
animals, should naturally have been placed in this class. Not only do
anatomical observations confirm this opinion, but the historical records of
antiquity also strongly favour it. “Dicaearchus,”
states St. Jerome, “reports in his books of Greek antiquities that under the
reign of Saturn, when the earth was still fertile on its own, no man ate meat;
instead they all lived on fruit and vegetables which grew naturally” (Book
2, Adversus Jovinianum).
This view can also be supported by what several modern travelers have reported.
Francois Coreal, among others, states that most
of the inhabitants of the Lucayes taken by the
Spaniards to the islands of Cuba, Santo Domingo, and elsewhere, died from eating
flesh. One can see from this that I am overlooking a number of
helpful points which I could put to good use. For since prey is almost the only
thing carnivorous animals fight about and since the frugivorous animals live
with each other in continual peace, if the human species was in the latter genus,
it clearly would have found it a great deal easier to survive in the state of
nature and have had much less need and far fewer occasions to leave it. [Back to Text]
(6) All forms of knowledge which
require reflection, all those acquired only by linking ideas and improved only
in stages, seem to be completely beyond the grasp of savage man, for lack of communication
with his fellow men, that is to say, for lack of the tool which serves for this
communication and of those needs which make it necessary. His knowledge and
industry are limited to jumping, running, fighting, throwing stones, and
climbing trees. But if these are the only things he does, he makes up for that
by doing them much better than we do, who do not have the same need for them as
he does. And since these activities depend entirely on physical exercise and cannot
be communicated or improved from one individual to another, the first man could
have been just as skilled at them as his most recent descendants.
The accounts of travellers are full of
examples of the strength and the vigour of men among the barbarous and savage
nations, and the praise they give to their dexterity and agility is scarcely
any less. Since the only things people need to observe these things are their
eyes, nothing prevents us from accepting in good faith what visual witnesses affirm
in this matter. I draw some examples of this at random from the first books
which come to hand.
“The Hottentots,” says Kolben, “have a better understanding of fishing than do the
Europeans of the Cape. They are equally adept with nets, hooks, and spears, in
bays as well as in rivers.32 They catch fish in their hands with no less ease.
Their skill in swimming is incomparable. The way they swim is surprising and
entirely unique to them. They swim with their bodies upright and their hands
stretched out of the water, so that they look as if they are walking on land.
When the sea is extremely rough and the waves are shaped like so many mountains,
they somehow dance on the back of the waves, rising and falling like pieces of
cork.”
“The Hottentots,” the same author goes
on to say, “are surprisingly skilful at hunting,
and the nimbleness of their running is beyond imagination.” He is surprised
that they do not put their agility to bad use
more often, although that does happen with them sometimes, as we can judge from
the example he gives of that: “A Dutch sailor disembarking at the Cape,” he
says, “asked a Hottentot to follow him to town
with a roll of tobacco weighing about twenty pounds. When the two of them were
some distance from the group, the Hottentot asked
the sailor if he knew how to run. ‘Run,’ replied the Dutchman, ‘yes, really
well.’ ‘Let’s see,’ replied the African, and racing off with the tobacco he disappeared
almost immediately. The sailor, amazed at his astonishing speed, did not think
of chasing after him and never saw his tobacco or his porter again.
“They have such acute vision and such a
sure hand that Europeans do not even come close to them. In throwing stones,
they will hit a target the size of a halfpenny from a hundred paces, and what
is more astonishing is that instead of fixing their eyes on the target, the way
we do, they move around making constant contortions. Their stone seems to be
carried by an invisible hand.”
In discussing the savages of the
Antilles, Father du Tertre says almost the
same thing we have just read on the Hottentots from the Cape of Good Hope.33 He
praises above all their accuracy with arrows in shooting birds in flight and
swimming fish, which they then catch by diving. The savages of North America
are no less celebrated for their strength and skill. Here is an example which
will enable us to judge these attributes in the Indians of South America.
In the year 1746, an Indian from Buenos
Aires was condemned to the galleys in Cadiz. He proposed to the governor that
he purchase his freedom back by risking his life in a public festival. He
promised that he would attack the most ferocious bull all by himself without
any weapon in his hand other than a rope, that he would wrestle it to the ground,
seize it with his rope by whatever part people pointed to, saddle it, put a
bridle on it, mount it, and then, riding on that bull, would fight against two
more of the fiercest bulls which they let out of the torillo,
and that he would kill them all one after the other the instant he was ordered
to, without anyone’s help. His offer was accepted. The Indian kept his word and
succeeded in everything he had promised. For information on the way he did that
and on all the details of the fight, one can consult the first volume of Observations sur l’histoire naturelle by M. Gautier, page 262, from
which these facts are taken. [Back
to Text]
(7) “The length of life of horses,” says
M. de Buffon, “is, as in every other species of animals, proportional to the
length of time they spend growing. Man takes fourteen years to grow and can
live six or seven times as long, that is, ninety or one hundred years; the
horse completes its growth in four years and can live six or seven times as
long, that is, twenty-five or thirty years. The examples which could go against
this rule are so rare that we should not even look upon them as exceptions from
which we can draw any conclusions. And just as big horses finish growing in
less time than delicate ones, so they do not live as long and are old at the
age of fifteen years.” [Back
to Text]
(8) I believe I see another difference
between carnivorous and frugivorous animals, something even more general than
the one I mentioned in Note 5, since this one includes birds. This difference
consists of the number of the young, which never exceeds two in each litter for
the species which live only on plants and which is usually greater than this
number for carnivorous animals. It is easy to recognize nature’s purpose in
this matter by the number of teats, which is only two in each female of the
first group, like the mare, cow, goat, doe, ewe, and so on, and is always six
or eight in the other females, like the bitch, cat, wolf, tigress, and so on.
The hen, goose, and duck, which are all carnivorous birds, as well as the
eagle, sparrow-hawk, and owl, also lay and hatch a large number of eggs, something
which never happens with the pigeon, turtle dove, or birds which eat absolutely
nothing but grain. These hardly ever lay and hatch more than two eggs at a
time. The reason we can ascribe to this difference is that the animals which
live only on grasses and plants spend almost the entire day feeding and are
forced to spend a long time nourishing themselves;
thus, they would not be capable of suckling several young. By contrast, the
carnivorous animals eat their meals almost instantaneously and so can more
easily and more frequently return to their young and to the hunt and make up
for the loss of such a large quantity of milk. We could make many particular
observations and reflections about all these matters, but this is not the place
for that, and it is sufficient for me to have shown in this section the most
general system of nature, a system which provides a new reason for taking man
out of the class of carnivorous animals and setting him among the frugivorous
species. [Back to Text]
(9) A famous author, weighing the good
and bad things of human life and comparing the two amounts, has found that the
latter far surpassed the former and that, all things considered, life was a
rather poor gift for man. His conclusion does not surprise me, for he drew all
his arguments from the constitution of civil man. If he had gone back to natural
man, we can imagine he would have come up with very different results: he would
have noticed that man has hardly any ills other than those he has given himself
and that nature would have been exonerated. It is not without effort that we
have succeeded in making ourselves so unhappy. When, on the one hand, we consider
the immense labours of men, so many sciences gone into in depth, so many arts invented,
so many forces used, chasms filled in, mountains flattened, rocks smashed, rivers
made navigable, lands opened up, lakes excavated, marshes drained, enormous
buildings erected on the earth, the sea covered with ships and sailors, and
then, on the other, we investigate with a little meditation the true advantages
which have resulted from all that for the happiness of the human species, we
cannot fail to be struck by the astonishing disproportion which reigns in these
matters and to deplore the blindness of man, which, to feed his idiotic pride and
some kind of vain admiration for himself, makes him run passionately after all
the miseries he is susceptible to, which beneficent nature had taken care to
keep from him.
Men are bad. Melancholy and continual
experience removes the need for proof. However, man is naturally good. I believe
I have shown that. So what is it that could have corrupted him to this point,
if not the changes which have arisen in his constitution, the progress he has
made, and the knowledge he has acquired? Let us admire human society as much as
we wish; it will be no less true that it necessarily leads men to hate each
other to the extent their interests clash, to carry out apparently mutual
services and, in fact, to do to each other all the bad things imaginable. What
can we think of dealings where every individual’s reason dictates to him maxims
directly contrary to those which public reason preaches to the social body and
where each man profits from the misfortunes of others? There is perhaps not a
single well-off man whose death his greedy heirs and often his own children do
not secretly hope for, not a single ship at sea whose wreck would not be good
news for some merchant, not a single business which a debtor would not desire
to see burn along with all the papers it contains, not a single people which
does not rejoice at the disasters of its neighbours. In this way we benefit ourselves
from the harm done to our fellow men, and one person’s loss almost always makes
someone else prosperous. But what is still more dangerous is that a great many
individuals expect and hope for public disasters. Some want sicknesses, others
death, others war, others famine. I have seen despicable men weeping with grief
at the prospect of a year with bountiful harvests, and the great and fatal fire
of London, which cost the lives or the goods of so many unfortunate people,
perhaps made a fortune for more than ten thousand individuals. I know that
Montaigne criticizes the Athenian Demades for
having had a worker punished who, by selling coffins for a very high price,
earned a great deal from the deaths of citizens. But since the reason Montaigne
offers is that it would be necessary to punish everyone, his argument clearly
confirms my own. Let us therefore look through our frivolous demonstrations of
kindness to what happens in the depths of our hearts, and let us reflect on
what the condition of things must be where all men are forced to caress and to
destroy each other and where they are born enemies by duty and deceitful by
self-interest. If, in response, people tell me that society is so constituted
that each man gains by serving others, I will reply that that would be all very
well if he did not gain even more by injuring them. There is no legitimate
profit which is not exceeded by what one can get illegitimately, and the wrong
done to one’s neighbour is always more lucrative than rendering him a service.
So it is merely a matter of finding ways to make sure one does so with
impunity, and for that the powerful use all their strength and the weak all their
cunning.
When savage man has eaten, he is at
peace with all nature and the friend to all his fellow men. What if there is
sometimes a quarrel over a meal? He never comes to blows over it without having
previously compared the difficulty of prevailing with that of finding his subsistence
somewhere else, and since his pride is not involved in the fight, it is finished
with a few punches. The winner eats, the loser goes to seek his fortune, and
everything is peaceful. But with man in society, such quarrels are very
different matters. It is primarily a matter of providing what is necessary and
then what is superfluous; then come the
delicacies, then immense riches, then subjects, then slaves. He does not have a
moment’s rest. What is most remarkable is that the less natural and urgent his
needs, the more his passions increase, and, what is worse, so does the power to
satisfy them. As a result, after long
periods of prosperity, after gobbling up many treasures and ruining many men,
my hero will end up slitting every throat until he is the sole master of the
universe. Such, in summary, is the moral picture, if not of human life, at
least of the secret pretensions in the heart of every civilized man.
Compare without bias the state of civil
man with that of savage man, and, setting aside civil man’s maliciousness, his
needs, and his miseries, investigate, if you can, how many new doors he has
opened to pain and death. If you consider the mental afflictions which consume
us, the violent passions which wear us out and distress us, the excessive toil
with which the poor are overburdened, the even more dangerous soft life to
which the rich surrender themselves, things which make the former die from
their needs and the latter from their excesses, if you think of the grotesque
mixtures of foods, their pernicious seasonings, the corrupt provisions, the
counterfeit drugs, the dishonesty of those who sell them, the mistakes of those
who administer them, the poisoned containers in which they are prepared, if you
consider the epidemic illnesses produced by the bad air among the hordes of
people crowded together and the sicknesses brought about by the delicacy of our
way of life, the moving back and forth from the interior of our houses into the
open air, the use of clothing put on or taken off with too little precaution,
and all the cares which our excessive sensuality has turned into essential habits,
whose neglect or lack then costs us our life or health, if you take into account
the fires and earthquakes that engulf or overturn entire cities and kill off
their inhabitants by the thousands—in short, if you add up the dangers which
all these causes are continually gathering above our heads, you will sense how
dearly nature makes us pay for the contempt we have shown for her lessons.
I will not repeat here what I have said
elsewhere about war, but I wish that informed people wanted or dared for once
to provide the public details of the horrors committed in armies by contractors
for provisions and for hospitals. We would see that their tactics, which are
not very secret and thanks to which the most brilliant armies melt away into
less than nothing, cause more soldiers to
die than are cut down by enemy swords. It is no less astonishing to calculate
the number of men the sea swallows every year, whether by hunger, or scurvy, or
pirates, or fire, or shipwreck. It is clear that we must also credit established
property, and therefore society, with the assassinations, poisonings, highway
robberies, and even the punishments for these crimes. These punishments are
necessary to prevent greater evils, but for the murder of one man, they cost
the lives of two or more and thus, in effect, double the loss for the human species.
How many shameful ways are there to prevent the birth of human beings and to
cheat nature, whether by those brutal and depraved tastes which insult its most
charming work, tastes which neither savages nor animals ever know and which
emerge in civilized countries only from a corrupt imagination, or by those secret
abortions, fruits worthy of debauchery and vicious honour, or by the exposure
or slaughter of a multitude of children, victims of their parents’ poverty or
their mothers’ barbarous shame, or, finally, by the mutilation of those unfortunate
men for whom a part of their existence and all of their posterity are
sacrificed to vain songs or, what is even worse, to the brutal jealousy of a
few men, a mutilation which in this latter case is a double outrage to nature,
both for the treatment received by those who suffer it and for the use to which
they are destined?34
But are there not a thousand more
frequent and even more dangerous cases where paternal rights overtly offend humanity?
How many talents are buried and inclinations forced by fathers’ imprudent constraints!
How many men who would have distinguished themselves in an appropriate social position
die miserable and dishonoured in another position for which they had no taste!
How many happy but unequal marriages have been broken or upset, and how many
chaste wives disgraced by these conditions of the social order, which permanently
contradict the order of nature! How many other bizarre unions formed by interest
and disavowed by love and reason! How many honest and virtuous married couples
torment each other because they are badly matched! How many young and unhappy
victims of their parents’ greed hurl themselves into vice or spend their
wretched days in tears and groan in the indissoluble bonds which the heart
rejects and which have been made by gold alone! Fortunate sometimes are those
women whose courage and even virtue tear them from life before barbaric violence
drives them into crime or despair. Forgive me, my forever to be pitied father
and mother. I regret embittering your sorrows, but may they serve as an eternal
and terrible example to anyone who ventures, in the name of nature herself, to
violate her most sacred rights.
If I have spoken only about those badly
made unions which are the work of our civil society, should we believe that those
where love and sympathy have presided are themselves without their disadvantages?
What would it be like if I undertook to show the human species attacked at its
very source and even in the most sacred of all bonds, where no one any longer
dares to listen to nature until after he has consulted fortune and where, with
civil disorder confusing virtues and vices, continence becomes a criminal precaution
and the refusal to give life to a being like oneself a humanitarian act? But
without tearing aside the veil covering so many horrors, let us rest content to
indicate the evil for which others must supply the remedy.
Let us add to all this the number of
unhealthy trades which shorten men’s days or destroy their constitution—like
working in the mines, the various ways of preparing metals and minerals, above
all, lead, copper, mercury, cobalt, arsenic, and realgar,
and those other perilous occupations which every day cost the lives of a number
of working men, some roofers, others carpenters, others masons, others quarry
workers. Let us add up, I say, all these things, and we will be able to see in
the establishment and improvement of societies the reasons for the diminution
of the species, which more than one philosopher has observed.
Luxury, which is impossible to guard
against among men greedy for their own conveniences and for the esteem of
others, soon completes the evil which societies have started, and under the pretext
of keeping the poor alive, which it should not have been necessary to do,
impoverishes all the rest and sooner or later depopulates the state.
Luxury is a remedy far worse than the
evil it claims to cure, or rather, it is
itself the worst of all evils in a state, large or small. In order to feed the
hordes of lackeys and miserable people it has created, luxury overwhelms and
ruins the farmer and the city dweller. It is like those burning winds in the
south which cover the grass and greenery with all-devouring insects and thus
remove the subsistence of useful animals and carry famine and death into all
the places where they are felt.
From society and the luxury it produces
are born the liberal and mechanical arts, business, literature, and all those
useless things which make industry flourish, enriching and destroying states.
The reason for this decline is very simple. It is easy to see that by its nature
agriculture must be the least lucrative of all the arts. Since its product is
the most indispensably useful to all men, the price for it must be proportional
to the resources of the poorest people. From the same principle we can derive
this rule, that in general the arts are profitable in an inverse proportion to
their utility and that the most necessary must finally become the most neglected.
From that we see what we should think of the genuine advantages of industry and
of the real effect its progress brings about.
Such are the perceptible causes of all
the wretchedness into which opulence finally hurls the most admired nations. As
industry and the arts expand and flourish, the scorned farmer, burdened with
taxes essential for maintaining luxury and condemned to spend his life between
work and hunger, abandons his fields to go to the cities to seek the bread he
ought to carry there. The more the stupid eyes of people are struck with
admiration for our capital cities, the more we will have to groan at the sight
of abandoned fields, uncultivated land, and the major roads swamped with
unfortunate citizens who have become beggars or thieves, destined one day to
end their misery on the wheel or a dung heap. This is how the state enriches
itself on the one hand and grows weak and loses its population on the other,
and how the most powerful monarchies, after a great deal of work to make
themselves rich and deserted, end up becoming the prey of poor nations that
succumb to the fatal temptation to invade them and then, in their turn, make
themselves wealthy and weak, until they themselves are invaded and destroyed by
others.
For once let someone deign to clarify
for us what could have produced those swarms of barbarians who inundated
Europe, Asia, and Africa for so many centuries. Did they owe this immense population
to the industry of their arts, to the wisdom of their laws, or to the excellence
of their civil society? Let our learned men be so good as to tell us why,
rather than multiplying to this point, these ferocious and brutal men, without
knowledge, without restraint, without education, did not all cut each other’s
throats at every moment in quarrels over their food or their hunting?
Let them explain to us how these miserable men even had the audacity to look directly
at such clever people as we were, with such excellent military discipline, such
fine codes, and such wise laws, and finally, why, since society has perfected
itself in the countries of the north and people have taken so much trouble to
teach men their mutual duties and the art of living agreeably and peacefully together,
we no longer see coming from them anything like these multitudes of men which
it used to produce previously. I am truly afraid that someone may eventually
get the idea of answering me that all these great things—namely, the arts,
sciences, and laws—have been very wisely invented by men as a beneficial plague
to check the excessive multiplication of the species, for fear that this world,
which is intended for us, might finally become too small for its inhabitants.
What then? Is it necessary to destroy
societies, eliminate yours and mine, and return to live in the
forests with the bears? A conclusion in the style of my adversaries, one I
prefer to anticipate rather than allow them the shame of inferring. O you, to
whom the heavenly voice has not made itself heard and who do not recognize any
purpose for your species other than to conclude this short life in peace, you
who in the midst of cities can leave your fatal acquisitions, your restless
minds, your corrupted hearts, and your frantic desires, since it depends on
you, take back your ancient and first innocence. Go into the woods to lose the
sight and memory of the crimes of your contemporaries, and do not be afraid
that you are demeaning your species by renouncing its knowledge in order to renounce
its vices. As for men like me, whose passions have forever destroyed their
original simplicity, who can no longer nourish themselves on grass and acorns
or do without laws and leaders, those who were honoured in their first father
with supernatural lessons, those who will see in the intention of first giving
to human actions a morality which they would not have acquired for a long time
the reason for a precept indifferent in itself and inexplicable in any other
system, those people, in a word, who are convinced that the Divine Voice has
called all the human race to the enlightenment and happiness of the celestial
intelligences, all these will try, through exercising the virtues which they
obligate themselves to practise as they learn to understand them, to deserve
the eternal reward which they ought to expect from them. They will respect the
sacred bonds of the societies of which they are members; they will love their
fellow men and will serve them with all their power; they will scrupulously
obey the laws and the men who are their authors and ministers; above all, they
will honour the good and wise princes who will know how to prevent, cure, or
mitigate this host of abuses and evils always ready to overwhelm us. They will
inspire the zeal of these worthy leaders by showing them without fear and
without flattery the greatness of their task and the strictness of their duty.
But they will no less despise a constitution which cannot be maintained except
with the help of so many respectable people, more often desired than found, and
from which, despite all their cares, are always born more actual calamities
than apparent advantages. [Back
to Text]
(10) Among the men we know, either
ourselves personally or from historians or travelers, some are black, others
white, others red; some have long hair; others have only woolly curls; some are
almost all hairy; others do not even have a beard. There used to be, and
perhaps still are, nations of men of gigantic height, and, setting aside the
fable of the pygmies, which could well be nothing but an exaggeration, we know
that the Laplanders and especially the people in Greenland are far below a
man’s average height. The claim is even made that there are entire peoples who
have tails like quadrupeds. Without putting blind faith in the stories of Herodotus
and Ctesias, we can at least take from them this
very probable opinion, that if people could have made good observations in
those ancient times, when various peoples followed ways of life more different
from each other than they do today, they would have also noticed many more
striking varieties in the shape of the body and in physical habits.35 All these facts, for which it is easy to provide
incontestable proofs, can surprise only those who are accustomed to look at nothing
but the things which surround them and who are ignorant of the powerful effects
of the diversity in climates, weather, nourishment, ways of life, general habits,
and, above all, of the astonishing force of these very causes when they operate
continuously over a long series of generations. Nowadays, when trade, voyages,
and conquests increasingly bring different peoples together and when their ways
of life are constantly drawing closer through frequent communication, we notice
that certain national differences have diminished. For example, everyone can observe
that the French today no longer have those large pale bodies and fair hair described
by Latin historians, although time, along with the mixing of the Franks and
Normans, who were themselves pale and fair-haired, should have re-established
what interaction with the Romans could have taken away from the influence of
climate on the natural constitution and complexion of the inhabitants. All
these observations on the varieties which a thousand causes could produce and
have, in fact, produced in the human species make me question whether several
animals similar to men, taken by travelers for beasts without much examination,
either because of some differences they noticed in the external shape or merely
because these animals did not speak, could not have been, in fact, real savage
men, whose race, scattered throughout antiquity in forests, had no opportunity
to develop any of its potential faculties, did not acquire any degree of
improvement, and was still in the primitive state of nature. Let me give an
example of what I mean:
“In the kingdom of the Congo,” says the
translator of L’Histoire des
Voyages, “we find a number of those large animals people in the East Indies
call orangutang, which occupy something
like a middle position between the human species and the baboons. Battel states that in the forest of Mayomba, in the kingdom of Loango,
people observe two kinds of monsters: the larger ones are called pongos and the others enjokos. The former resemble man exactly but are
much stouter and really tall. They have a human face and very deep-set eyes.
Their hands, cheeks, and ears have no hair, except for their eyebrows, which
are extremely long. Although the rest of their body is quite hairy, the hair is
not particularly thick, and its colour is brown. Finally the only part which
distinguishes them from men is their leg, which lacks a calf. They walk
upright, with their hands gripping the hair on each other’s necks. They take
refuge in the woods, sleep in trees, and make a kind of roof up there which
keeps them covered from the rain. Their foods are fruit or wild nuts. They
never eat meat. Negroes who move through the forest habitually light fires
there during the night. They notice that in the morning, once they leave,
the pongos take their place around the fire
and do not leave until it is out. For with all their skill, they do not have
sufficient sense to maintain the fire by bringing wood to it.”
“Sometimes they move in groups and kill
the Negroes moving through the forests. They even attack elephants that come to
graze in the places where they live and upset them by hitting them so hard with
their fists or with sticks that they force them to run away screaming. Pongoes are never taken alive, because they are so strong
that ten men would not be enough to stop them. But the Negroes capture a number
of young ones after killing the mother, to whose body the little one clings
tight. When one of these animals dies, the others cover its body with a pile of
branches or leaves. Purchas adds that in conversations he has had with Battel he learned from him personally that a pongo had taken from him a small Negro who spent a complete
month in the company of these animals.36 For they do not do
any harm to men they come upon unexpectedly, at least when the men do not look
at them, as the small Negro noticed. Battel did
not describe the second species of monster.”
“Dapper confirms that the kingdom of
the Congo is full of those animals which in the Indies are called orangutangs, that is, dwellers in the woods, and which the
Africans call quojas-morros. This beast,
he says, is so like man that some travelers have had the idea that it could
have come from a woman and a monkey, a fanciful tale which the Negroes
themselves reject. One of these animals was taken from the Congo to Holland and
presented to the Prince of Orange Frederick Henry. It was as tall as a child at
three years of age and of medium build, but square and well proportioned,
extremely agile, and very lively. Its legs were thick and sturdy, and its
entire body was bare in front but covered with black hair on the back. At first
glance, its face looked like a man’s, but it had a flat, turned-up nose. Its
ears were also those of the human species. Its breasts, for it was a female,
were chubby, its navel deep set, its shoulders very well articulated, its hands
divided into fingers and thumbs, and its calves and heels thick and fleshy. It
often moved upright on its legs and was capable of lifting and carrying fairly
heavy loads. When it wanted to drink, it would take the lid of a pot in one
hand and hold the bottom with the other. Afterwards it would gracefully wipe
its lips. It lay down to sleep with its head on a cushion, covering itself with
such dexterity that one would have taken it for a man in bed. The Negroes tell
strange stories about this animal. They claim that it not only takes women and
young girls by force but also dares to attack armed men. In short, it seems readily
apparent that it is the satyr of the ancients. Merolla is
perhaps talking only about these animals when he recounts that the Negroes sometimes
capture savage men and women in their hunts.”37
The third volume of the same Histoire
des Voyages talks about these species of anthropomorphic animals
again, under the name beggos
and mandrills. But to confine
ourselves to the above accounts, we find in the description of these alleged
monsters some striking similarities to the human species and smaller differences
than those one could establish between one man and another. We do not see in
these passages the reasons why the authors refuse to give the animals in
question the name savage men, but it is easy to guess that it is because
of their stupidity and also because they did not speak, weak reasons for those
who know that, although the organ for speech is natural to man, speech itself
is not natural to him and who understand to just what point his perfectibility
could have raised civil man above his original state. The small number of lines
which contain these descriptions enables us to judge how poorly these animals
were observed and how biased the view of them was. For example, they are considered
monsters, and yet people agree that they reproduce. In one place Battel says that the pongos kill
the Negroes who cross through the forests; in another Purchas adds that they do
not do them any harm, even when they take them by surprise, at least not when
the Negroes make no attempt to look at them. The pongos gather
around the fires lit by the Negroes when the latter move away and go off in
their turn when the fire has gone out. There you have the fact. Now here is the
observer’s comment: “For with all their skill, they do not have sufficient
sense to maintain the fire by bringing wood to it.” I would like to
work out how Battel or his compiler Purchas
could have known that the pongos left the
fire because of their stupidity rather than their will. In a climate like that
in Loango, fire is not something very necessary
to animals, and if the Negroes light them, it is less to fight the cold than to
scare off ferocious beasts. It is thus a very simple matter that, after enjoying
the flames for some time or growing quite warm, the pongos get
tired of staying constantly in the same spot and go away to graze, an activity
which demands more time than if they ate flesh. Moreover, we know that most
animals, not excepting man, are naturally lazy, and that they refuse all sorts
of care for themselves which is not absolutely necessary. Finally, it appears
extremely strange that the pongos, whose dexterity
and strength people praise, the pongos who
know how to bury their dead and to make themselves roofs out of branches, do
not understand how to push pieces of wood into the fire. I remember watching a
monkey carry out this same maneuver which these people want to claim the pongos cannot do. It is true that my ideas were not at
that time focused on this subject, and so I myself committed the mistake for
which I am criticizing our travelers: I neglected to examine if the monkey’s intention
was, in fact, to maintain the fire or simply, as I believe, to imitate the action
of a man. Whatever the case, it has been well demonstrated that the monkey is
not a variety of man, not only because it lacks the capacity to speak, but
above all because it is certain that its species does not have the ability to improve
itself, which is the particular characteristic of the human species.
Experiments do not seem to have been made on the pongo and
the orangutang with sufficient care for us
to be able to draw the same conclusion in their case. Nonetheless, there should
be a way by which, if the orangutang or others
were in the human species, even the crudest observers would be able to assure
themselves, even with a demonstration; but apart from the fact that a single
generation would not be sufficient for this experiment, such a test must be
considered impractical, because what is only a hypothesis would have to be
shown to be true, before the test which should confirm the fact could be
innocently attempted.
Judgments which are precipitous and not
the results of informed reasoning tend to be excessive. Without any fuss our
travellers used the names pongos, mandrills,
and orangutangs, to make beasts of the same
creatures which the ancients made gods using the names satyrs, fauns,
and sylvans. Perhaps after some more
precise investigations we will find that they are neither beasts nor or gods
but men. In the meantime, it seems to me that in this matter it is every bit as
reasonable to rely onMerolla, an educated priest and
a visual witness, who, for all his naïveté, was an intelligent man, as it is to
trust the merchant Battel, Dapper, Purchas, and
the other compilers.
What judgment do people think observers
like these would have made on the child found in 1694, whom I
have already spoken about above and who did not give any sign of reason, moved
on his hands and legs, had no language, and formed sounds which were nothing
like those of a man? It took a long time, continues the same philosopher who provided
me this fact, before he was capable of producing a few words, and he still did
that in a barbarous manner. As soon as he could speak, he was questioned about
his first state, but he remembered no more about it than we remember about what
happened to us in the cradle. If by some misfortune for him, this child had
fallen into the hands of our travellers, we cannot doubt that, after noticing
his silence and stupidity, they would have been in favour of sending him back
into the forests or shutting him up in a menagerie, after which they would have
spoken knowledgeably about him in their splendid reports as a really curious
beast that looked quite similar to man.
During the three or four hundred years
the inhabitants of Europe have been flooding other parts of the world and
constantly publishing new collections of travels and reports, I am convinced
that the only men we know are Europeans. And from the ridiculous biases which
have not been extinguished, not even among men of letters, it still seems that
each one, under the grandiose name Study of Man, does hardly anything
but study the men of his own country. Individuals may well come and go; it appears
that philosophy does not travel. And so the philosophy of one people is not
very suitable for another. The reason for this is obvious, at least for
countries far away: there are scarcely more than four sorts of men who undertake
lengthy voyages—sailors, merchants, soldiers, and missionaries. Now, we should
hardly expect that the first three groups would provide good observers, and as
far as the members of the fourth are concerned, they would be busy with the sublime
vocation which calls them, and even if they were not subject to social prejudices,
like all the others, we would have to think they would not willingly devote themselves
to investigations which appear merely curious and which would divert them from
the more important tasks for which they are destined. In addition, in order to
preach the gospel effectively, nothing is required except zeal, and God provides
the rest. But to study men requires talents which God does not promise to give
to anyone and which are not always shared by saints. In every travel book we
open we find descriptions of characters and customs, but we are completely astonished
to notice in them that these people who have described so many things have said
only what everyone knew already, that at the other end of the world they have
grasped only those things they could have observed without leaving their
street, and that the true characteristics which distinguish nations and which
strike eyes made to see have almost always escaped theirs. That is the origin
of the fine moral saying, so tossed around by the philosophical crowd, that men
are the same everywhere, and because they have the same passions and the same
vices everywhere, it is quite pointless to seek to characterize the different
peoples, a line of reasoning about as good as if one said that we cannot distinguish
Peter and James because both of them have a nose, mouth, and eyes.
Will we never see reborn those happy
times when people did not get mixed up with philosophizing but when men like
Plato, Thales, and Pythagoras, gripped by a passionate desire to know, undertook
the greatest voyages solely for the purpose of instructing themselves and went
far away to shake off the yoke of national prejudices, to learn to understand
men by their similarities and their differences, and to acquire that universal
knowledge which is not knowledge of one century or of one country exclusively,
but which, being of all times and all places, is, as it were, the common
science of the wise?
We admire the munificence of some
curious men who have made or commissioned at great expense voyages to the
Orient with scholars and painters, so that they could sketch pictures of
tumbledown buildings and decipher or copy inscriptions, but I have difficulty
conceiving how, in an age when people pride themselves on their fine knowledge,
we cannot find two closely linked affluent men—one financially rich and the
other rich in genius, both with a love glory and a desire for immortality, one
of whom would sacrifice twenty thousand crowns of his wealth and the other ten
years of his life for a famous voyage around the world, in order to study, not
always the rocks and plants, but for once the men and the customs, and who,
after so many centuries taken up with measuring and assessing the house,
finally got the idea of wanting to know the inhabitants.
When academicians have traveled through
the northern parts of Europe and the southern regions of America, the purpose
of the trip has been to visit more as mathematicians than as philosophers. However,
since La Condamine and Maupertuis were both of these at once, we cannot consider
the regions which they saw and described as completely unknown. The jeweller Chardin, who traveled like Plato, has left nothing to say
about Persia. China appears to have been well observed by the Jesuits. Kempfer provides a passable idea of the little he saw
in Japan.38 But apart from these accounts, we do not know the
people of the East Indies, who have been visited solely by Europeans more
intent on filling their purses than their heads. All of Africa and its numerous
inhabitants, as remarkable for their character as for their colour, remain to
be studied. The entire earth is covered with nations we know nothing about
except their names, and yet we make it our business to judge the human race!
Suppose a Montesquieu, a Buffon, a Diderot, a Duclos,
a d’Alembert, a Condillac, or men of that stamp,
traveling to instruct their compatriots, observed and described, in the way
they know how to do, Turkey, Egypt, Barbary, the empire of Morocco, Guinea, the
lands of the tribes in southern Africa, the interior and the east coast of
Africa, the Malabars, Mongolia, the banks of the
Ganges, the kingdoms of Siam, Pegu and Ava,
China, Tartary, and especially Japan; then in the other hemisphere, Mexico,
Peru, Chile, the lands of Magellan, without overlooking the Patagonias,
true or false, Tucamen, if possible Paraguay,
Brazil, finally the Caribbean, Florida, and all the savage countries, the most
important voyage of all and one which would have to be undertaken with the
greatest care. Suppose that these new Herculeses returned
from these memorable journeys, then at their
leisure created a natural history, both moral and political, of what they had
seen. We would ourselves see a new world emerge from under their pens, and from
this we would learn to understand our own. I say that when observers like these
affirm that such and such an animal is a man and that another is a beast, we
will have to believe them. But it would be extremely simplistic in this matter
to rely on inaccurate travelers, about whom one is tempted sometimes to pose
the same question they take it upon themselves to resolve concerning other animals. [Back to Text]
(11) This appears to me to be absolutely
obvious, and I cannot understand where our philosophers could find the source
for all the passions they ascribe to natural man. With the sole exception of
physical necessity, which nature herself demands, all our other needs are only
those which arise from habit, before which they were not needs, or from our desires,
and one does not desire what one is not in a condition to know. From this it
follows that since savage man desires only things that he knows and knows only
things that he is capable of possessing or that are easy to acquire, nothing
should be so tranquil as his soul and
nothing so limited as his mind.
[Back to Text]
(12) In Locke’s Civil
Government I find an objection that appears to me too specious for me
to be permitted to conceal it.
“The purpose of the social interaction
between the male and female,” says this philosopher, “is not simply to procreate
but to continue the species, and so this interaction must last, even after
procreation, at least as long as is necessary for the nourishment and the
preservation of the offspring, that is to say, until they are capable of supplying
their own needs themselves. We see that creatures inferior
to man constantly and strictly observe this rule, which the infinite wisdom of
the Creator has established for the works of His hands. In those animals which
live on grass, the interaction between the male and female lasts only as long
as each act of copulation, because the mother’s teats are sufficient to nourish
the young until the point where they are capable of grazing on grass; thus, the
male is content with begetting and does not involve himself after that with the
female or with the young, to whose subsistence he cannot contribute anything.
But where beasts of prey are concerned, the interaction lasts longer, because
the mother is unable to provide properly for her own subsistence and to nourish
her young at the same time by means of prey alone, for this way of feeding
oneself is more laborious and more dangerous than feeding on grass. Hence, the
assistance of the male is absolutely essential for the maintenance of their common
family, if one may use this term, which cannot survive to the point where the
young are able to go in search of prey except through the care of the male and
female. We observe the same thing among all the birds, with the exception of
some domestic ones that are found in places where the continual abundance of
food exempts the male from the care of feeding the young. We see that while the
young in their nest require nourishment, the male and the female bring it
there, until these young can fly and provide their own subsistence.
“And in that, I believe consists the principal, if not the only, reason why the
male and the female of the human genus are committed to a social interaction
longer than the one which other creatures maintain. This reason is that the
woman is capable of conceiving and is typically pregnant once again and producing
a new child long before the earlier one is at the stage where it can do without
the help of its parents and provide for its needs itself. Thus, since a father
is obliged to take care of those whom he has engendered and to continue that
care for a long time, he also has an obligation to continuing living in a
conjugal association with the same woman with whom he had them and to remain in
this relationship much longer than other creatures, among whom, because the
young can survive on their own before the time for a new procreation arrives,
the bond between male and female is broken on its own, and both find themselves
completely free, until the season which customarily prompts animals to pair off
requires them to choose new partners. And here we cannot admire enough the
wisdom of the Creator, who, having given man the qualities appropriate to
providing for the future as well as for the present, wanted and saw to it that
the social interaction of the man and woman would last much longer than that of
the male and the female among other creatures, so that in this way the industry
of the man and woman would be more stimulated and their interests more unified,
with a view to providing for their children and leaving them their goods, since
nothing could be more prejudicial to children than an uncertain and vague union
or an easy and frequent dissolution of conjugal society.”39
The same love of truth which has made
me candidly set down this objection prompts me to accompany it with some
remarks, if not to refute it, at least to illuminate it.
1. I will first observe that moral
proofs do not have much force in matters of physical science and that they
serve to provide reasons for existing facts rather than to confirm the actual
existence of these facts. Now, that is the kind of proof which Mr. Locke uses
in the passage I have just cited. For although it could be advantageous for the
human species that the union of the man and the woman be permanent, it does not
follow that things have been established this way by nature; otherwise we would
have to say that nature also instituted civil society, arts, commerce, and all
the things which people claim are useful to men.
2. I do not know where Mr. Locke
discovered that among animals of prey, the interaction between the male and female
lasts longer than among animals living on grass and that one helps the other
feed the young. For we do not see the male dog, cat, bear, or wolf acknowledging
their female any better than the horse, ram, bull, stag, or all the other
quadrupeds acknowledge theirs. On the contrary, it seems that, if the male’s assistance
was necessary to the female in order to preserve the young, this would be above
all in the species which lived only on grass, because the mother requires a
great deal of time to graze and during this whole period she is forced to
neglect her brood; whereas, the prey of a female bear or wolf is devoured in an
instant, and so she has more time to suckle her young without suffering from
hunger. This reasoning is confirmed by an observation on the relative number of
teats and young which distinguishes the carnivorous species from the frugivorous
ones, a point I discussed in Note 8. If this observation is accurate and
general, since the woman has only two teats and rarely has more than one child
at a time, there is a powerful additional reason for doubting that the human
species is naturally carnivorous. Hence, it seems that, in order to draw
Locke’s conclusion, we would have to turn his reasoning completely around. The
same distinction applied to birds is no more reliable. For who can believe that
the union of male and female lasts longer among the vultures and crows than
among the turtle doves? We have two species of domestic birds, the duck and the
pigeon, that provide us examples directly contrary to this author’s system. The
pigeon, which lives on nothing but grain, remains united with his female, and
they feed their young together. The duck, whose voracity is well known, does
not recognize either his female or his young and does not help at all with
their subsistence. Among chickens, a species hardly less carnivorous, we do not
observe the cock making any effort at all for the brood. And if in other species
the male shares with the female the care of feeding the young, that is because
birds, which cannot fly at first and which the mother cannot suckle, are far
less able to do without the help of the father than are quadrupeds, for whom
the mother’s teat is sufficient, at least for a while.
3. There is considerable uncertainty
about the main fact which serves as the basis for Mr. Locke’s entire argument.
For, in order to know if, as he claims, in a pure state of nature the woman is
typically pregnant once again and producing a new child long before the previous
one can provide for its needs by itself, we would require experiments which
Locke certainly did not make and which no one is in a position to make. The
continued cohabitation of husband and wife provides such an immediate
opportunity for them to experience a new pregnancy that it is very difficult to
believe that the fortuitous meeting or the mere impulse of temperament produced
these results as frequently in the pure state of nature as in conjugal society,
a tardiness which would perhaps contribute to making the children more robust
and which, in addition, could be compensated for by an ability to conceive
which is prolonged to an older age among women who would have abused it less
during their youth. As far as children are concerned, there are a number of
reasons for believing that their strength and their organs develop later among
us than they did in the primitive condition I am talking about. The original weakness which they get from the constitution of their
parents, the cares which are taken to wrap and constrain all their limbs, the
tenderness with which they are raised, perhaps the use of milk other than their
mother’s—all these work against and retard in them the first progress of
nature. The care they are required to give to a thousand things on which their
attention is constantly fixed, without being given any exercise for their
bodily strength, could again considerably hamper their growth, so that, if,
instead of at first overloading and exhausting their minds in a thousand ways,
we let them exercise their bodies with the continual movements which nature appears
to demand of them, we can believe they would be capable much earlier of
walking, being active, and providing for their own needs themselves.
4. Finally, Mr. Locke proves at most
that there could well be in man a motive for living attached to a woman when
she has a child. But he in no way proves that he must have been attached to her
before the delivery and during the nine months of the pregnancy. If a given
woman is indifferent to the man during these nine months, if she has even become
unknown to him, why will he assist her after the birth? Why will he help her
raise a child which he does not know belongs to him alone and whose birth he
did not decide or anticipate? Mr. Locke is evidently assuming what is in
question. For it is not a matter of knowing why the man will remain attached to
the woman after the birth of the child, but why he will attach himself to her
after conception. His appetite satisfied, the man has no more need for that
particular woman, nor does the woman for that particular man. He has not the least
concern for and perhaps the least idea about the consequences of his action.
One of them goes off in one direction, the other in another, and it is not
likely that at the end of nine months they retain the memory of having known
each other. For this sort of memory by which one individual gives preference to
another for the act of procreation demands, as I demonstrate in the text, more
progress or corruption in the human understanding than one can assume it has in
the condition of animality we are talking about here.
Thus, another woman can satisfy the man’s new desires just as easily as the one
whom he has already known, and another man can satisfy the woman in the same
way, assuming that she is motivated by the same desire during pregnancy, something
we can reasonably doubt. If in the state of nature the woman no longer feels
the passion of love after the conception of the child, the obstacles facing
interaction with the man become much greater still, since she then has no
further need either of the man who has impregnated her or of any other. There
is thus in the man no reason to seek out the same woman,
nor in the woman any reason to seek out the same man. Hence,
Locke’s reasoning collapses in ruins, and this philosopher’s whole argument has
not saved him from the mistake which Hobbes and others have committed.
They had to explain a fact about the state
of nature, that is, a state where men lived by themselves and where two
particular men had no motive to live near one another, nor perhaps did men to
live near other men, a situation which is much worse. Those writers did not
think of taking themselves back before the centuries of society, in other
words, before those times when men always have a reason to live close together
and where a given man often has a reason to live near a particular man or
woman. [Back to Text]
(13) I will take good care not to
embark on the philosophical reflections one would need to make concerning the
advantages and disad& vantages of this institution
of languages. It is not for me to be allowed to attack vulgar errors, and
well-read people respect their prejudices too much to endure patiently my
alleged paradoxes. So let us permit those people to speak for whom it has not
been made a crime to dare sometimes to take the side of reason against the
opinion of the multitude. And nothing of the happiness of the human race
would go away, if, when the trouble and confusion of so many languages have
been dispensed with, mortals understood one art, and it would be permitted to
explain anything by signs, motions, and gestures. But now, given the way things
are, the condition of animals popularly believed to be brutes seems far better
than ours in this respect, since they signify their feeling and thoughts without
an interpreter more readily and perhaps more aptly than any mortals can,
particularly if they use a foreign language. Isaac Vossius,
de Poematum Cantu & Viribis Rythmi, p. 66.40 [Back to Text]
(14) In demonstrating how much ideas of
discrete quantity and its relationships are necessary in the least significant
arts, Plato with reason mocks the authors of his time who claimed that Palamedes had invented numbers at the siege of Troy, as if,
says this philosopher, Agamemnon could not have known up to then how many legs
he had. In fact, we know that it would have been impossible for society and the
arts to have reached the stage they had already attained at the time of the
siege of Troy if men had not known the use of numbers and calculation. But the
need to understand numbers before acquiring other knowledge does not make their
invention easier to imagine. Once the names of the numbers are known, we can
easily explain what they mean and bring out the ideas these names represent,
but to invent them, one must, before conceiving these same ideas, be, as it
were, familiar with philosophical meditations, educated in thinking about beings
according to their essence alone, independently of all other perceptions, a
very difficult and very metaphysical abstraction, scarcely natural, and yet
without which these ideas could never have been carried from one species or
genus to another, nor could numbers have become universal. A savage could have
considered his right leg and his left leg separately or looked at them together
under the indivisible idea of a pair, without ever thinking he had two of them.
For the representative idea which pictures an object for us is one thing, and
the numerical idea which determines it is another. Even less could he have
counted up to five, and although, by placing his hands against each other, he
would have been able to notice that the fingers corresponded exactly, he was
still very far from thinking about their numerical equality. He did not know
the sum of his digits any more than the sum of his hairs, and if, once he was
made to understand what numbers were, someone had said to him that he had as
many digits on his feet as on his hands, perhaps he would have been extremely
surprised, when he compared them, to discover that that was true. [Back to Text]
(15) We must not confuse vain self-love
with love of oneself, two very different passions in their natures and in their
effects. Love of oneself is a natural feeling which inclines
every animal to watch out for its own preservation and which, guided in man by
reason and modified by compassion, produces humanity and virtue. Vain self-love
is only a relative feeling, something artificial and born in society, which
inclines each individual to have a higher opinion of himself than of anyone
else, which inspires in men all the evils they do to each other, and which is
the true source of honour.
Once this is well understood, I say
that in our primitive condition, in the true state of nature, vain self-love
does not exist. For since each individual man looks at himself as the only
spectator who observes him, as the only being in the universe who takes an
interest in him, and as the only judge of his own merit, it is impossible that
a feeling which originates from comparisons, which he has no inclination to
make, could spring up in his soul. For the same reason, this man could have
neither hatred nor desire for vengeance, passions which can arise only from the
feeling of some offense he has received. And since it is scorn or the intention
of hurting and not the harm that constitutes the offense, men who do not know
either how to assess or to compare themselves can commit a great deal of
violence against each other when there is some advantage to them in doing so,
without ever offending each other. In a word, since each man hardly looks at
his fellow men except in the way he would look at animals of a different species,
he can carry off the prey of the weaker man or yield his to the stronger,
without envisaging these thefts as anything other than natural events, without
the least impulse of insolence or bitterness and without any passion other than
the pain or joy at a good or a bad outcome. [Back to Text]
(16) It is extremely remarkable that in
all those years that Europeans have been obsessed with bringing savages from
various regions of the world to their way of life they have still not been able
to win over a single one of them, not even with the support of Christianity.
For our missionaries have sometimes made them Christians, but never civilized
men. Nothing can overcome the invincible repugnance they have against adopting
our customs and living in our manner. If these poor savages are as wretched as
people claim, by what inconceivable lack of judgment do they constantly refuse
to civilize themselves by imitating us or to learn how to live happily among
us? By contrast, we read in a thousand places that Frenchmen and other
Europeans have voluntarily taken refuge among these nations and spent their
entire lives there, without being able to leave such a strange way of
life. We even see sensible missionaries touchingly missing the calm
and innocent days they spent among those people we despise so much. If someone
responds that these savages do not have enough knowledge to judge soundly of
their condition and ours, I will answer that evaluating happiness is less a matter
of reason than of feeling. In addition, this response could be turned against us
with even more force. For there is a greater distance between our ideas and the
mental disposition we would have to have to understand the taste which the
savages have for their way of life than between the savages’ ideas and those
which could make them understand the way we live. In fact, after a few observations
it is easy for them to see that all our labours are directed at only two objectives,
namely, at conveniences of life for ourselves and at respect from other people.
But how are we to imagine the sort of pleasure a savage takes at spending his
life alone in the middle of the woods or fishing or blowing on a badly made
flute, without ever knowing how to draw from it a single note and without taking
the trouble to learn?
On several occasions people have
brought savages to Paris, London, and other cities. They have been quick to lay
out for them our luxuries, our riches, and all our most useful and most curious
arts. All this has never aroused in them anything but a stupid admiration, without
the least reaction of covetousness. Among others stories I remember one about a
chief of some North Americans who was brought to the English court some thirty
years ago. They had a thousand articles paraded before his eyes in an attempt
to find something which would please him as a gift, without discovering
anything he appeared to care about. Our weapons seemed heavy and awkward to
him, our shoes hurt his feet, and our clothes bothered him. He refused everything.
Finally, they noticed that he took up a woolen blanket and seemed to get
pleasure from wrapping it around his shoulders. “You will at least concede,”
someone said to him immediately, “the usefulness of this item?” “Yes,” he replied,
“it seems to me almost as good as an animal skin.” And he would not have said
even that if he had worn them both in the rain.
Perhaps I will be told that it is habit
which, by attaching each man to his manner of life, prevents savages from
sensing what there is good in ours. If so, it must appear at least really
extraordinary that habit has more power to maintain in savages a taste for
their misery than it does to preserve in Europeans’ an enjoyment of their happiness.
But to frame a response to this last objection to which one cannot offer a single
word in reply and without referring to all the young savages whom people have
tried hard but in vain to civilize and without mentioning the Greenlanders and
the inhabitants of Iceland whom they tried to raise and feed in Denmark, all of
whom were killed off by sadness and despair, whether from listlessness or in
the sea, when they attempted to swim back to their country, I will content
myself with citing a single well-attested example, which I offer to admirers of
European civilization for their consideration.
“All the efforts of the Dutch missionaries
of the Cape of Good Hope have never been able to convert a single Hottentot. Van der Stel, governor of the Cape, took one of them in infancy and
had him raised in the principles of the Christian religion and the practice of
European habits. He was richly dressed, they had him learn several languages,
and his progress responded extremely well to the cares people took with his education.
The governor, who had high hopes for the Hottentot’s
mind, sent him to the Indies with a commissioner general, who employed him
usefully in the affairs of the company. He came back to the Cape after the
commissioner’s death. A few days after his return, while visiting some Hottentots
in his family, he took it upon himself to strip off his European finery in order
to clothe himself with a sheepskin. He returned to the fort in this new outfit,
carrying a package which contained his old clothes, and, as he presented them
to the governor, said the following to him (see the frontispiece41). “Have the goodness, sir, to
pay attention to the fact that I am renouncing these clothes forever. I also
renounce for all my life the Christian religion. My resolution is to live and
die in the religion, manners, and customs of my ancestors. The only favor I ask
of you is to leave me the necklace and cutlass I am wearing. I will keep them
for love of you.” Without waiting for Van der Stel’s response, he immediately ran off in flight and
they never saw him again at the Cape.” Histoire des
Voyages, Vol. 5, p. 175. [Back to Text]
(17) One could make an objection
against me that in such a chaos, instead of stubbornly butchering each other,
men would have scattered, if there were no boundaries to their dispersion. But,
first of all, these boundaries would have to have been at least the limits of
the world, and if we think about the excessive population which results from
the state of nature, we will see that the earth in this condition would not
have taken long to become covered with men compelled, because of this, to
remain together in groups. In addition, they would have dispersed if the evil
had been quick and the change something which happened from one day to the
next. But they were born under the yoke. They were habituated to bear it when
they felt its weight, and they were content to wait for an opportunity to shake
it off. Finally, since they were already accustomed to the thousands of
conveniences which forced them to remain together, scattering was no longer as
easy as in the first days, when no man had a need for anything except himself
and each of them decided what to do without waiting for another man’s consent. [Back to Text]
(18) Marshal de V*** used to tell the
story that in one of his campaigns, when the excessive corrupt dealing of one
of the contractors for provisions made the army suffer and grumble, he scolded
him sharply and threatened to have him hanged. “This threat does not concern
me,” the scoundrel brazenly answered him, “and I am very pleased to tell you
that they don’t hang a man who has at his disposal a hundred thousand crowns.”
“I don’t know how that came about,” the marshal added naively, “but in fact he
was not hanged, although he deserved to be strung up a hundred times.” [Back to Text]
(19) Distributive justice would still
be against this strict equality in the state of nature, even if were practical
in civil society. And since all the members of the state owe it their services
in proportion to their talents and their strengths, the citizens, in their
turn, should be distinguished and favoured in proportion to their services. It
is in this sense that we should understand a passage of Isocrates where he
praises the first Athenians for having well understood how to distinguish which
was the more advantageous of the two sorts of equality: one which consists of
dividing the same advantages indifferently among all the citizens, and the
other of distributing them according to each man’s merit. These skilful politicians,
the orator adds, banned that unjust equality
which establishes no difference between good and bad men and committed themselves
inviolably to the one that rewards and punishes each man according to his
merit. But, first of all, there has never existed a society, no matter what
degree of corruption it might have reached, in which people make no distinction
between good and bad men. And in the matter of morals, where the law cannot
establish a measurement sufficiently precise to serve as a rule for the magistrate,
it very wisely, in order not to leave the lot or the rank of the citizens to
the discretion of the magistrate, prohibits him from judging persons and allows
him to judge nothing but actions. There are no morals so pure that they can
endure censors, other than those of the ancient Romans, and similar tribunals
would soon have wreaked complete havoc among us. It is up to public esteem to
establish the difference between the bad and good people; the magistrate judges
only matters of explicit law. But the populace is the true judge of morality,
an honest and even enlightened judge in this matter, one who is sometimes
mistaken but never corrupted. The ranks of the citizens thus ought to be
regulated, not on the basis of their personal merit, which would allow the magistrate
a way of making an almost arbitrary application of the law, but on the basis of
the actual services they render the state, which can be more accurately assessed. [Back to Text]
1The Latin epigraph reads: “Non in depravatis, sed in his quae bene secundum naturaam
se habent, considerandum est quid sit naturale.”
[Back to Text]
2In Rome’s very early history the citizens were
ruled by an Etruscan clan called the Tarquins. [Back to Text]
3Tacitus was a Roman historian, Plutarch a
very famous Greek biographer (of great men), and Grotius (1583-1645)
an influential Dutch writer on law. Rousseau’s father, a watchmaker, was an educated
man. [Back to Text]
4This phrase “unfortunate events,” like the earlier
“fatal misunderstanding” Rousseau talks about, refers to an ongoing conflict
between the leading magistrates and the legislative body in Geneva at various times
throughout the eighteenth century. These had been apparently resolved by the
time Rousseau was writing, but disputes flared up again in the 1760’s and
1780’s. [Back to Text]
5The inscription (in Greek) read “Know thyself.” [Back to Text]
6Jean Jacques Burlamaqui (1694-1748)
was Swiss jurist and writer on natural law. [Back to Text]
7Rousseau quotes the Latin from Persius, “Quem te Deus esse/ Jussit, et humana qua
parte locatus esin
re,/ Disce.” [Back to Text]
8Xenocrates (396-314 BC) was Greek philosopher.
He became head of Plato’s Academy. [Back to Text]
9Thomas Hobbes (1688-1679) was an English philosopher,
famous for his political theory and his bleak view of the state of nature. Richard
Cumberland (1631-1718), an English bishop and philosopher, wrote against
Hobbes’ theories and proposed a utilitarian doctrine; Samuel Pufendorf (1632-1674), a German baron and historian, was
well-known for his writings on international law. [Back to Text]
10Francisco Coreal (1648-1708)
was a Spanish traveler who visited North and South America and wrote about his
journeys. [Back to Text]
11In Homer’s Iliad, Podaleirus and Machaon are
the healers in the Argive army fighting against Troy;
Aulus Cornelius Celsus (fl.
14 AD), a Roman, wrote books on medicine; Hippocrates (460-370 BC) was
the most famous Greek healer, the father of medicine. [Back to Text]
12Johannes de Laet was
a Dutch writer who published a book on his travels in the Americas in
1625. [Back to Text]
13Eurotas was the river associated with Sparta,
a much more fertile territory than Attica, the area around Athens. [Back to Text]
14Etienne Bonnot de Condillac (1715-1788) was a French philosopher and
cleric who wrote about the origins of human knowledge in sense perception. [Back to Text]
15Rousseau quotes the Latin: tanto plus
in illis proficit vitiorum ignoratio, quam in
his cognitio virtutis—a
comment by the historian Justin comparing barbarians favourably to the Greeks. [Back to Text]
16The Fable of the Bees is a famous satiric poem
written in 1705 by the Dutch-Englishman Bernard Mandeville. It explores the
connections between vice and social progress. Mandeville is the person Rousseau
is referring to earlier in the paragraph when he uses the phrase “the most extravagant
detractor of human virtues.” [Back to Text]
17Sulla (138 BC to 78 BC) was a Roman politician who seized
control of Rome and persecuted his enemies. Alexander of Pherae (d. 358 BC) was a tyrant in Thessaly, finally
killed by members of his family. Priam and
Andromache, of the Trojan royal family, were frequently portrayed in tragic
drama. Rousseau then quotes the Latin from the satirist Juvenal: Mollissima corda/ Humano generi dare se natura fatetur/ Quae lacri-mas dedit. [Back to Text]
18John Locke (1632-1704) was an enormously influential
and important English philosopher. Rousseau quotes Locke from the French translation
and substitutes injury for the
word injustice. [Back
to Text]
19Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) was a very famous Dutch jurist
whose writings are considered the first definitive treatment in modern times of
international law. Ceres is the Latin name for the Greek deity
Demeter, goddess of the harvest. The Greek word thesmophoros means
law-giving. [Back
to Text]
20Rousseau’s Latin quotation reads: Attonitus novitiate mali, divesque miserque,/ Effugere optat
opes, et quae modo voverat, odit” Ovid, Metamorphoses XI.
Ovid is describing Midas who had been given by Apollo the power of turning all things
he touched into gold. [Back to Text]
21Lycurgus was the legendary founder of the
Spartan constitution (probably in the 7th century BC), a political arrangement
that lasted for about two hundred years. [Back to Text]
22Pliny the Younger (62-113 AD) was well known Roman
politician and Trajan was Roman
emperor (53-117 AD). [Back
to Text]
23Brasidas was an important Spartan general in the
5th century BC. A satrap was a Persian official, Persepolis an important city
in the Persian empire. [Back to Text]
24Rousseau’s text quotes the Latin miserrimam servitutem pacem appellant, from the Roman historian Tacitus. [Back to Text]
25Jean Barbeyrac (1674-1744)
was French jurist who wrote on international law. [Back to Text]
26The French word Seigneur, meaning Lord, was
derived from the Latin word for older. In
Sparta the age of qualification for the senior council—the Gerontes—was sixty years. [Back to Text]
27Rousseau quotes the Latin
Pectore si fratris gladium juguloque parentis/ Condere me jubeas, gravidaeque in viscera a partu/ Conjugis, invita peragam tamen omnia dextra,
Lucan Pharsalia. [Back to Text]
28Rousseau quotes the Latin cui ex honesto nulla est spes, a
reworking of a line from the Roman historian Tacitus. [Back to Text]
29Diogenes, a Greek Cynic philosopher (c. 412– 323
BC), is reported to have spent his life looking for an honest man. Cato
the Younger (95-46 BC) was an important Roman political figure, a staunch defender
of the republic. [Back to Text]
30Ataraxia is a Greek word meaning tranquillity. For the Stoics the word meant absence of passion,
a highly desirable state. [Back to Text]
[Back to Text]
31A work by the celebrated
French natural scientist Buffon, 1752. [Back to Text]
32Peter Kolben was
a German astronomer who worked in the Cape of Good Hope from 1705 to 1713 and published
a book in German in 1719 about the Hottentots. The book was translated into
English in 1731. [Back to Text]
33Pere du Tertre,
a French priest, wrote a history of the Antilles in 1667 based on his experiences
there. [Back to Text]
34The “mutilation” Rousseau refers to is castration,
used to produce male soprano singers and eunuchs for harems. [Back to Text]
35Herodotus and Ctesias were
ancient Greek historians in the fifth century BC. [Back to Text]
36Battel was an English
sailor who spent time in West Africa c. 1590; Samuel Purchass
published an account of West Africa in 1613. [Back to Text]
37Dapper was a Dutch explorer
in Africa in the 1640’s. Father Jerom Merolla published his account of a voyage to West Africa c.
1682. [Back to Text]
La Condamine (1701-1774) was a French mathematician who
traveled in Peru and was the first to write extensively about the Amazon River;
Maupertuis (1698-1759) was a famous French mathematician
who traveled in Peru; Jean Chardin or Sir John Chardin (1643-1714) was a French merchant who traveled
extensively in Persia in 1673; Englebert Kempfer (1651-1716) was a German who went with Dutch
traders to Japan in the late 1600’s. All of these wrote about their
travels. [Back to Text]
39Rousseau quotes from the French translation of
Locke, and the above passage is a translation of that text, rather than a direct
quotation from Locke. [Back
to Text]
40Rousseau quotes the
Latin: Nec quidquam felicitate
humani generis decederet, pulsa tot linguarum peste et confusion, unam artem callerent mortals, et signis, motibus, gestibusque licitum foret quidvis explicare.
Nunc vero ita comparatum est, ut animalium
quae vulgo bruta creduntur melior longe quam nostra hac in parte videatur condition, ut pote quae promptius et forsan felicius, sensus et cogitationes suas sine interprete significant,
quam ulli queant mortals, proesertim si peregrine utantur sermonione. Is Vossium, de Poemat. Cant. Et Viribus
Rythmi, p. 66. [Back to Text]
41In the original edition the
frontispiece depicted this scene. [Back to Text]
[Back to johnstonia Home Page]
Page loads on johnstonia web files
20,660,930 
View Stats