Alasdair MacIntyre: After Virtue. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981.

Stanley Rosen: Nihilism: A Philosophical Essay. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969.

An earlier version of this review was published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. It is republished with permission.

“There seems to be no rational way of securing moral agreement in our culture” (6), MacIntyre writes. Not only the “language of morality” (2) but its “integral substance” (5) have been savaged. He invokes G. W. F. Hegel and R. G. Collingwood as exemplars of ways in which to reconstruct moral reasoning; MacIntyre would counter nihilism with a form of ‘Right’ Hegelianism.

In contemporary moral philosophy, morals are often said to reduce to the sentiments of individuals. When on occasion they have not simply endorsed “emotivism” (as Bertrand Russell did, to take a prominent example), both ‘analytic’ and existentialist philosophers have failed to overcome it (6 ff.). In this they echo the nineteenth-century debate on “utility” versus “rights”—that “matching pair of incommensurable fictions” (68).

Emotivism fails because it is circular; if I say I feel that something is right, I am appealing to what kind of feelings if not, well, moral ones, which doesn’t much help to tell me why they are moral. Emotivist morality gives no reasons, having ruled out reasoning when it comes to morality. As a historicist, MacIntyre turns not to philosophic argument for a substitute for emotivism but to history. Emotivism is “connected with one specific stage in moral development or decline, a stage which our own culture entered early in the present century” (17). He traces this stage to the thought of Kierkegaard, and before him, Kant, whose failure to provide a persuasive rational maxim for moral principles was exposed by Hegel. It might be observed that Hegel’s refutation of Kant is logical, not historical, and obviously does not depend upon Hegel enjoying the vantage point of a more advanced historical “stage” than Kant did, but MacIntyre, having endorsed Hegel’s historicism, overlooks this.

MacIntyre blames contemporary moral confusion on the Enlightenment, wherein philosophers attacked religion but in effect made their own moral theories parasitic upon the beliefs of “their shared Christian past” (49) while appealing, contradictorily, to arguments grounded in human nature. Protestantism and Jansenist Catholicism convicted reason of moral incompetence (except for the calculation of means) and upheld divine revelation as man’s only trustworthy source of teleological enlightenment. “[O]nce the notion of essential human purposes or functions disappears from morality, it begins to appear implausible to treat moral judgments as factual statements” (57)—unless, one might add, one regards sentiment or faith as a reflection of morally significant fact.

To restrict reason to the calculation of means and morality to sentiment or to faith results in two moves characteristic of Anglophone philosophy in the nineteenth century: the attempt to formulate a new teleology (utilitarianism) or the attempt to formulate a new categorical status for right. Utilitarianism fails because its pleasure principle runs into the multifariousness of human pleasures. By what criterion can it rank or order them? A theory of rights reconceived neither as natural nor as Kantian-categorical fails because it falls back on claims of moral ‘intuition’—that is, conscience without God or moral sentiment without nature. “The introduction of the word ‘intuition’ by a moral philosopher is always a sign that something has gone badly wrong with an argument” (67). The “mock rationality”ensuing utility-versus-rights debate “conceals the arbitrariness of the will and power”—or maybe the will to power—”at work in its resolution” (68), which typically involves protest, indignation, unmasking (accusing your opponent of hypocrisy whilst masking your own), and (very often) appeals to supposed expertise. The latter prevails in bureaucratic settings. But claims of expertise in moral matters runs into such notorious problems as the fact-value distinction, which lands us back into the Humean skepticism Kant was trying to overcome. “Whenever those immersed in the bureaucratic culture of the age try to think their way through to the moral foundation of what they are and what they do, they will discover suppressed Nietzschean premises” (108).

MacIntyre observes that older writers understood ethics differently. “A man in heroic society is what he does” (115). The same could be said for a modern bureaucrat making his way up the ladder of ‘meritocracy,’ but MacIntyre is thinking of the classical understanding of virtue as excellence of character not of skill. Sounding a bit like Nietzsche himself, he endorses Sophoclean tragedy’s presentation of an “objective moral order” that avoids the harshness of Homer’s tribalism and the too-optimistic ethical harmony MacIntyre ascribes to Aristotle. And, as in Nietzsche, for the Greek tragedians “life is the standard of value” (117) not in the Hobbesian sense of preferring its preservation above all else but in the sense of owing a life for a life; if someone kills my brother, I owe it to my brother to kill his killer. Such honor killings show that for the tragedians “morality and social structure are in fact one and the same in heroic society” (116); my fellow-citizens expect no less an action of me. By contrast, he rejects Aristotle’s “metaphysical biology” (151) and repeats Hegel’s complaints about Aristotle’s defense of slavery and is refusal to provide a sense of ‘History,’ a telos for all mankind. He does, however, share Aristotle’s esteem for practical reasoning or phronēsis as a moral capacity, in sharp contradistinction to Kant, who eschews prudence except as an instrument of low calculation. Politically, he wants to think about what this partly Aristotelian, partly Hegelian, and partly Nietzschean morality might look like in a world without poleis. He ends his historical survey with a chapter on the medieval ‘synthesis’ of Aristotle and Christianity in which he carefully leaves Christianity in limbo.

Thus the first two-thirds of the book contain an outline of our current moral dilemma and of reasons for it. They do not contain an explanation of why moral chaos is a true dilemma. nor do they contain an account of the foundation(s) of MacIntyre’s praise and blame of Western intellectual history’s various aspects. This is, after all, a history told with more care and at least as much accuracy by several earlier writers.

MacIntyre began to address these more fundamental matters while he discussed Sophocles, just before turning to Aristotle. MacIntyre’s “theory of knowledge” allows him to call “each particular set of moral or scientific beliefs… intelligible and justifiable—insofar as it is justifiable—only as a member of a historical series” (136). But even the last “belief” in the series is “open to being in turn corrected and transcended by some more adequate point of view” (136)—a claim that puts him at odds with Hegel and ‘the end of History.’ This novel historicism, obviously, requires some standard of “adequacy” by which one can correct and transcend current beliefs if it is not to descend into the historical and moral relativism MacIntyre deplores. After discussing Aristotle, sidestepping Christianity, he returns to this problem, devoting his two longest chapters to an account of the moral virtues, beginning by pointing again to Sophocles and tragedy but now attempting to put tragic conflict into a framework of a kind of logic, although not quite Hegelian logic.

He attempts a compromise between rationalism and historicism whereby he can produce a “core conception” of the virtues, a conception that “in some sense embodies the history of which it is the outcome” [italics added; in what sense, by the way, can a “conception” embody a history?] (174). He describes three “stages” of this conception’s “logical development” (174). The “first stage of the virtues’ logical development is a “practice,” defined as “any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative activity through which good internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence [that] are appropriate to, and partly definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the goods and ends involved, are systematically extended” (175). Architecture is a practice, bricklaying is not; farming is a practice, planting turnips is not. War, household management, flute-playing, and geometry are all practices. Virtues are acquired human qualities need to achieve the goods internal to a practice. “Practices never have a goal or goals fixed for all time—painting has no such goal nor has physics—but the goal themselves are transmuted by the history of the activity” (180-181).

Of the several problems here, two stand out; credit MacIntyre for seeing one of them. By defining an art, painting, and a science, physics, as practices, MacIntyre forgets that, while an art’s “goal” might change, a science’s “goal” may not—at least insofar as it is a science and not an art. The purpose of physics remains knowledge of physis. It cannot become anything else and remain physics; it has not become anything else. Of course, the purpose of acquiring knowledge can and has changed.

MacIntyre does see that his definition of a practice could include evil activities. He mentions torture but, following his own distinction between farming and planting turnips, a concentration camp would be the better example. He could mitigate this consequence by putting extra weight on “human conceptions of the good and ends involved” in a practice; his “second stage” of virtue’s logical development does in fact attempt a definition of humanness.

Man is “essentially a story-telling animal” whose stories combine intentions, beliefs, and settings (201). (This may account for the enthusiasm of the novelist John Gardner, who called After Virtue “the best book of philosophy in years”). Man “is not essentially, but becomes through history, a teller of stories that aspire to truth” (201).  Reason comes into the narrative because “history is not a sequence of actions, but the concept of an action is that of a moment in an actual or possible history abstracted for some purpose from that history, so the characters that history are not a collection of persons, but the concept of a person is that of a character abstracted from a history” (202).  What, then, is “history” abstracted from, what is the background of “history,” this story whereby story-tellers aspire to truth? MacIntyre calls it a quest for “the good,” a quest that the virtues sustain. This leads to a somewhat tautological formulation: “the good life for man is the life spent in seeking the good life for man” (204). On to the “third stage.”

MacIntyre calls it “tradition” (206). Here we get something that begins to look a bit more like philosophizing. A tradition is “an historically extended, social embodied argument… in part about the goods which constitute [it]” (207). One needs, first, “an adequate sense” of one’s tradition and of any other tradition(s) that confront(s) one and, second, “a grasp of those future possibilities [that] the past has made available to the present” (207).

Such undefined notions as “argument,” “the good,” “adequacy,” “sense,” and “grasp” leave MacIntyre with a lot of explaining to do. Credit him, again, with acknowledging this. “My negative and positive evaluations of particular arguments do indeed presuppose a systematic, although here unstated, account of rationality” (242). He promises one in a future book.

The unresolved problem in this book—its insufficiently articulated combination of logic, storytelling, events, and social forms—results in part from MacIntyre’s failure to see the significance of historicism (as distinguished from history) in modernity. MacIntyre omits from his bibliography one book that could have prevented this failure: Nihilism: A Philosophical Essay by Stanley Rosen. If MacIntyre does not come to see the links between historicism and such lesser doctrines as analytic philosophy and existentialism his project will collapse. That would be unfortunate; for a number of reasons, MacIntyre has the attention of many intellectuals who may never read Rosen.

This quasi-political consideration leads to a purely political consideration. MacIntyre ends his book with a call for the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages [that] are already upon us” (245). However he intends this, it will surely be read as an endorsement of some ‘small-is-beautiful,’ Lindisfarnesque communalism. In this his hero is St. Benedict, a hermit. Imagining himself surrounded by barbarism pure and simple, MacIntyre fails to distinguish between barbarians who tolerate Lindisfarnes and saints and barbarians who don’t tolerate Lindisfarnes or uphold heroes and saints anything like Benedict. To show what emergence from the post-virtuous age would mean in practice as well as in theory, he will need to begin with that distinction.

Rosen quotes the definition of nihilism Nietzsche borrowed from Dostoevsky: “the situation which obtains when ‘everything is permitted'” (xiii). If everything is permitted, then there is nothing to talk about, morally speaking; “the speech of ‘justification’ is indistinguishable from silence,” and this nihilism or ‘nothing-ism’ “reduces reason to nonsense by equating the sense or significance of speech to silence” (xiii). “The danger of nihilism is a permanent human possibility,” but nihilism pervades contemporary societies because “a series of specific philosophic decisions” in the past has inclined us towards it (xiv). Rosen published his book in 1969, the same year in which Henry B. Veatch’s Two Logics appeared; both men point to the re-conception of reason (in Rosen’s words) “exclusively on the model of mathematics” (xv). Veatch concentrates his attention on the Principia Mathematica of Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead as the principal agent of this re-conception, whereas Rosen looks further back to the redefinition of mathematics itself as the mode of expressing Newtonian physics (as distinguished from Pythagoreanism). The nature Newtonian physics describes changes constantly to no purpose; in so concluding, it adopts the metaphor of a machine as its picture of nature, and (at least in Newton’s case) looks exclusively to Biblical revelation for moral bearings. This inclined subsequent philosophers to conclude that reason alienates man from his own desires; simultaneously, it inclined them to ‘secularize’ metaphysics “by transforming it into the philosophy of history, whereupon the influence of history, together with the autonomous tendencies of the mathematizing ego, led to the historicizing of mathematical physics”—rebounding against the rationality of science itself (xvi). “Today philosophy and historical existence are both threatened by the nihilistic consequences of the denaturing of reason, which was ostensibly the purification of reason” (xviii).

Rosen would re-connect reason with philosophy and with human nature. He begins by saying that “the problem of nihilism [is] implicit in human nature” (xviii); by showing how nihilism inheres in human nature itself he takes the first step toward reversing the denaturing of reason. Dividing his book into six chapters, he shows the nihilism implicit in the West’s two dominant contemporary philosophic schools, then discusses the philosophic ancestors of those schools and the political consequences of their teachings. He concludes the book with two chapters contrasting nihilism with Platonic philosophy.

The first of the contemporary schools he considers, ‘analytic’ or ‘linguistic’ philosophy, finds its most important spokesman in Ludwig Wittgenstein, the proponent of what he called “ordinary language philosophy,” which Rosen does not hesitate to identify as “a version of nihilism” (1). Wittgenstein believes nature and theory mythological. In the Philosophical Investigations he reduces logical thought to “a language at a given historical stage” (9)—the Lebensform, “the verbal incarnation of history” (13). He “denies the possibility of a logos or theoretical account of speech” because all that is not speech can only be contemplated in silence (9). The problem with claiming that a form of human action or ‘doing’ (speech, playing ‘language games’) cannot itself be spoken of is simple: before speaking intelligibly, one must exercise intelligence. Wittgenstein tries to “ignore the derivation of speech from the prior intelligence of doing” (10). “By demoting logical form to the status of speech, Wittgenstein destroyed the last vestige of ‘nature’ in the classical sense of the standard or end of speech” (12). For nature he substitutes utility as the standard, “identify[ing] the fact of use with the philosophical soundness of that fact” (17). But “to say that x is a sound use is not to use x but to generalize upon the difference between x and non-x, and therefore to refer to a universal framework or theory of signification” (17). The celebration of convention and practice ends in circularity because Wittgenstein cannot make his conventionalists claims without interpreting something; by conventionalist definition, definition reduces to “an arbitrary attribution of sense to nonsense” (27). Unlike Nietzsche, whose arbitrariness partakes of grandeur, Wittgensteinian arbitrariness prides itself on a verbal microscopy that limits it to triviality. He “teaches us to philosophize, not with a sledgehammer, but with a nail file” (28).

Any “theory about speech [that] is itself a denial that such a theory may be stated or fully formulated” yields nihilism (29). This is as true of Heidegger as it is of Wittgenstein. Heidegger differs from Wittgenstein in that he does not simply deny Being but regards it as so radically temporal/historical that it cannot be said to be a thing at all. ‘His’ Being is rather like Wittgensteinian convention, but in fact is no-thing. No-thing resembles the Supreme Being of the Bible in one way: hidden, it speaks. But No-thing, unlike the Supreme Being, cannot speak; Heidegger attempts to “transcend verbal speech, or to evoke the silent process of Being itself” (37), to “elicit pre-verbal experiences of Being” (38). “Heidegger and his disciples are not saying, as does Plato indirectly, that whereas noēsis is the preverbal intuition of silent forms themselves, we are nevertheless enabled to, and in fact must, say what we have seen in discursive speech. Instead, they claim that what we ‘intuit’ is itself speaking pre-verbally, and that ‘intuition’ (the new kind of thinking) is preverbal listening or apprehending that ‘speech’.” (39) Being is movement, process, not form or nature; “Being is the source of the emergence of forms” (41). The problem here is that “whatever the nature and revelatory capacities of pre-verbal experience, the significance of such revelations can only be expressed discursively” (41). Heidegger is left with the unenviable job of trying to speak silence; he produces a sort of poetry he calls ‘ontic’ speech, a celebration of acts—that is, a celebration of not-words. This is “not just self-refuting but self-canceling” (45). “Heidegger, as it were, ‘reduces’ the act of speech to existential activity (such as gathering in the harvest); he does not make clear that visibility of what is gathered together depends upon its structure. Thus he does not distinguish clearly between the structure of speech and the structure of what is spoken.” (47)

Wittgenstein and Heidegger offer us the curious spectacle of attempts simultaneously to exalt and dissolve the present. Rosen traces their genealogy to the Christian (as he calls it) effort to divide nature into prelapserian and postlapserian phases. After the Fall, reason can aim only at utility, at secondary goods, whereas understanding of the primary good is said to be transrational, a divine gift. Disbelieve the existence of divinity and one will invent a sort of imperial utilitarianism that would use all of nature to satisfy human desires. Historicism, “the inability to distinguish between being and time,” theory and practice, results from this attempt at a vast subsumption of existing nature to restless, acting man (56). “The crucial decision”—taken by thinkers prior to Wittgenstein and Heidegger—”was to neglect practice in favor of theory, while at the same time conceiving theory as a kind of practice,” as “a human project or the instrument of a human project” (56). Theory-as-project “emerges from the pre-rational stratum of desire, basically, the desire to master nature” seen in Machiavelli, Descartes, and Bacon (56). While succeeding in satisfying this desire, we have rendered ourselves “unable to explain to ourselves in a rational way the point of our success, and consequently the difference between success and failure” (56). “Contemporary man desperately needs a rational interpretation of reason” (56).

Socratic philosophers did have such an interpretation. To them, “the world is ‘logical’ or ‘reasonable’ because it provides us with a basis for speaking meaningfully about the relative merits of various human activities: (59); that basis is nature—specifically, human nature. “The link between theory and practice, then, is not an abstract argument in epistemology or an imagined developing pattern in world history, but the nature of man as the animal who both speaks and acts” (59). To see and say what the nature of such a being is, is to be able to see and say what is good for it; for example, if man has by nature the capacity to speak it cannot be good for him to lose his voice. Voicelessness in a human being contradicts the nature of that being. “There is then a reasonable basis in nature for distinguishing and responding to the unreasonable” (59).

Christianity (in Rosen’s view, but, if one proceeds more cautiously, certain forms of Christianity) and modern mathematics introduce a split between two constituents of the good. They retain utility as a good attainable by reason. After the Fall, human beings obey God by (among other things) working, whereas understanding of the primary good is said to be transrational, a divine gift; modern mathematics, following the Machiavellian turn in philosophy, empowers human beings to work more masterfully than before by giving them substantially greater power over nature. Cartesian ratio “is the ‘will to power,’ still articulated in a mathematical vocabulary, but one which is spoken, and to some extent created, by the ego cogitans” (63-64); “reason is, or is on the verge of, being defined as construction in accordance with human will” (64). But if one then applies the ratio to human nature itself, and one has conquered the human soul in the name of—what, exactly? If the passions drive the human soul, and these are nothing “but facts,” and moreover “the pattern of the facts is a matter of chance, man has been revanquished by fortune” (69). The mathematization of reality provides “no basis for the reconstruction of moral or psychological imperatives (71), ‘categorical’ or otherwise. Rationalist historicism makes its most impressive stand in Hegel, who replaces Cartesian mathematics with ‘History’ or the dialectical unfolding of the ‘Absolute Spirit’; Rosen’s interpretation and critique of Hegel begins in his book G. W. F. Hegel and continues in his Hegel’s Science of Logic.

With the rebellion against Hegelian rationalism, historicism finally yields irrationalism. “Hegel’s successors retain his conception of man as radically temporal and historical; they reject his conception of the completeness of time in eternity and history in wisdom” (91-92). They do so for what one might call Tocquevillian reasons (although Rosen does not mention Tocqueville). Hegelianism ran into the solid reef of Enlightenment (and in Tocqueville’s account Christian) democratization: “Hegel claimed to have carried through to completion the Cartesian project to make men gods, but by defining divinity as speculative wisdom rather than as virtue [read “virtù], technics, or merely external work, he made it the genuine possession of the few and therefore unpalatable to the many,” “incompatible with the moral and political forces of the Enlightenment from which [Hegelian rationalism] sprang” (92). Will-to-power and imagination, often at the service of egalitarianism, have proved more palatable than the sparingly-bestowed highest gifts of the Absolute Spirit.

Before that happened, however, historicism went through an irrationalist halfway house in the form of Nietzsche’s valorization of the will to power as a force for aristocracy. Nietzsche’s world is the arena of “purposeless play” and “eternal return” or the joyfully meaningless cyclicality of Being. In rejecting the Nietzschean ‘return,’ Heidegger proves the “much more thoroughgoing nihilist” (97). Being now becomes pure possibility, inarticulable silence, the no-thing out of which all things are created. Morally, this registers as a call for “authenticity,” freedom from all formal determinations of conduct; this bows to egalitarianism by commanding, “No one can say anything to anyone about what constitutes genuine choice in as specific situation” (100). Resolute moral relativism prevails. Epistemologically, this registers in the “search for an ontologically adequate speech” (101), a search that results in “a profound resignation in the face of nihilism” (102).

With the establishment of this moral and epistemological stance, historicism finally yields poeticist politics in both Nietzsche and Heidegger. If Being and History are the same, and if neither is rational (much less kind) then the fact of human cruelty in History exemplifies “the self-preservation of chaos” renewing itself (107). Heidegger’s notorious endorsement of Nazism itself exemplifies this on the ‘Right,’ as Maurice Merleau-Ponty (in his book Humanism and Terror) may be said best to exemplify it on the ‘Left.’ This politics destroys cruelly in order to bring the forgetfulness ostensibly needed in order to create anew. “To be reborn means to recur to the level of beasts through the loss of one’s memory” (108). The poeticist politician negates the present “on behalf of an unknown and unknowable yet hoped-for future” (108). Historicism in this form thus exalts those aspects of the present that tend toward the destruction of the present. Unfortunately for its publicists, “in the absence of a creator God, creation ex nihilo is unintelligible” (108). The philosopher must finally submit to the politics of the time, and if the politician of one’s time and place is Hitler, then that is that.

Rosen avoids suggesting that historicism may be fully explained by a history, even by a history of philosophy. Although nihilism has become easily noticeable today because a series of thought-events have encouraged it, “nihilism has its origin in the nature of man, and not in contingent historical events” (137). This insight underlies his final two chapters, which concern the good and wisdom, respectively.

The chapter on the good contrasts nihilism with Platonic philosophy. “Nihilism is fundamentally an attempt to overcome or repudiate the past on behalf of an unknown and unknowable yet hoped-for future,” an attempt that negates the present (at its most bloody, negating many present human beings), “remov[ing] the ground upon which man must stand in order to carry out or even merely to witness the process of historical transformation,” urging us to “destroy the past on behalf of a wish which he cannot articulate, let alone guarantee fulfillment” (140). Plato’s Socrates understood this as well as any modern philosopher; in The Republic he proposes the expulsion of all citizens over the age of ten. The differences between Socrates and Merleau-Ponty are, first, that Socrates arguably understood that his proposal wasn’t feasible, advancing it rather as a specimen of his celebrated irony and, second that “whereas nihilism points us toward the historical future, Plato turns us neither backward nor forward in a historical sense” but ‘upward’ to the Ideas (140). He wants us to stand our ground and think, neither as ‘progressives’ nor as ‘reactionaries.’ In terms of the Platonic vocabulary, “nihilism is doomed to shipwreck because it sunders courage from wisdom, justice, and moderation” (142-143), “ignor[ing] the danger implicit in the marvelous powers of the daimonic” and to aspire to godhood (145). “The problem arises,” Rosen drily remarks, “of how, in the absence of the genuinely divine, divine madness may be distinguished from mere madness” (145). Now, the young Socrates made something of the same mistake, an observation that buttresses Rosen’s claim that nihilism is a permanent or transhistorical feature of human nature itself: the young Socrates’ “identification between divinity and number has the same disastrous consequences for the relation between reason and good as does contemporary nihilism” (146), and likewise draws powerfully from mathematics and the mathematical frame of mind. Unlike the mature Socrates, mathematical physicists, devotees of symbolic logic, and Heideggerian ontologists “share a disdain for icons; they are iconoclasts, who in their eagerness to see the divine disregard the merely human, which requires some mediation between itself and the divine (149). Such thinkers overlook the fact that physics and ontology are also speeches, also icons; to attempt to purge speech of “iconic content” tempts the thinker to forget about the origin of speech and the images his speech describes “in the human psyche” (150). “To see is to see something—in the language of sense perception, to collect (or re-collect) the sensuous qualities in a spatio-temporal field into a determinate shape,” a process “takes place with speech,” whereby “the psyche identifies to itself unities within the perceptual field” (150). Speech guided by the principle of non-contradiction helps us perceive the articulations of nature, by the act of articulating. To Plato’s Socrates (as seen for example in the Phaedo 99e 5-6), “there is a difference between the speech and the form revealed by speech. Truth in the fullest sense is not a property of proposition or icons, but is the being reflected within the icon” (152); unlike the moving bodies physicists study, and unlike the hidden Being of the ontologists, ideas are stable, intelligible, requiring for their perception the steadfastness of a soul fortified by the virtues of courage, prudence, and moderation. To philosophize, to love wisdom, the soul must first be rightly ordered. “The philosopher is also a soldier or citizen” (163). “Only those who are by nature friendly to the good will be illuminated by its image” (176).

Politics comes in because “divine madness is permissible only after the polis has been made sober and steadfast” (154). Stable and silent, the Ideas provide a standard for judging moral and political conduct without giving us to suppose that we can embody them and become perfectly just ourselves, personally or by founding a political regime. “We can count upon the Ideas precisely because they do not care about us,” having “no intentions, no will, no perspective, and no history”; “all men are equal before the Ideas” (156). “Political stability depends upon the stability of logos” because “if men cannot give an account of their deeds, they will never be able to measure the relative value of those deeds” (157). And “without measure, speech becomes self-contradictory or is reduced to silence”—a “freedom which cannot give account of itself” and therefore “indistinguishable from slavery” (157). Or, as Socrates famously says, the unexamined life is not worth living.

“It is the human psyche, conceived as a whole, that unifies philosophy and politics. Man is the principle of his own unity because he is able to measure himself by the Ideas.” (163)  The dichotomy between ‘facts’ and ‘values’ doesn’t exist in Platonic philosophy because “what we today call a ‘fact’ is for him rather a moment or phase in a dialectic between the psyche and the domain of intelligibility” (166). Whereas moderns now take ‘facts’ to “represent an unanalyzed historical synthesis of nature and history”—data to be explained in mathematical terms within the framework of ‘natural history’ or law-governed change—Socrates “does not identify nature with history, nor does he restrict it to the subject of the mathematical sciences” (166). The Platonic eschewal of mathematics as a comprehensive means of understanding reality looks not to what moderns call knowledge but to the standard of perfection, blessedness, the satisfaction of human desires as a whole. Accordingly, “there cannot be any other standard of goodness than wisdom,” as distinguished from technical expertise (167). Wisdom is knowledge of the good, the whole good for human beings: “We know what we can be by an actual investigation, through the instrumentality of logos [and not of mathematics], of what we do” (167). Moreover, “if wisdom is knowledge of the whole, and the intelligibility of the whole is the good, or more precisely the ground or form of he good, then the good, whether as the perfection of the psyche or the order of the noetic cosmos, can no longer be called ‘useful'” (171).

As wholeness, as the “form of forms,” the good isn’t itself an Idea, although there is an Idea of the good (171). To speak in the Platonic/Socratic metaphor, the good is the sun considered not, as moderns do, in terms of its motions and substance, but rather in terms of the “generative or biological powers of the sunlight” (176). By this, Socrates means that “we can infer the mathematical properties of form from biological visibility, but we cannot infer life from the mathematical properties of form” (176). The good is what sheds light on both formal structure and life, and knowledge of the good or wisdom shows the philosopher that life takes on shapes without being the same as shapes and without having been generated by the shapes it takes. The sunlight or the good generates the Ideas but does not generate the particulars of reality. (If it did, the good would be identical to God). Similarly, speech or logos is “an icon of things” but not the truth itself. Seeing with the indispensable aid of the light represents wisdom because by sight “we combine discrimination of form with detachment from body,” in contrast to touch (whereby we can discriminate form but not as detached from the body) and hearing (which detaches our knowledge from the corporeal entirely). Unlike sense perception, thinking is reflexive, inasmuch as “the cooperative and in part self-correcting activities of the senses take place only under the unifying direction of thinking” (179). Platonic Ideas do not exist in a world separate from what we call the ‘real world.’ “In looking at the looks of things, thinking grasps a pattern which cannot be reduced to the looks without blurring, and even negating, them. This is true in every instance of mental work, from sense perception to logical or mathematical inference.” (180)  (On Rosen’s own Platonic terms, one might quibble with his choice of the word ‘grasp,’ a metaphor of touch, that is to say of Machiavellian knowledge by means of manipulation of matter, but that is only a quibble). Yes, of course individual human beings see only from their own perspectives, and “the perspectival nature of thinking prevents a complete, determinate, synoptic vision of the Idea,” but that does not prevent us from inferring the existence of the Idea, even if only partially. It is this acknowledgment of one’s own necessary intellectual limitations that prevents the classical philosophers from regarding the regime of the Republic with anything other than irony, guarding them from the intellectual and political excesses of Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. If religion posits the existence of God, that is, a link between the good and life, these later philosophers attempt to do away with God but retain the link; they would “replace the church with the body” (200).

“In noetic terms, the Ideas stand to the good as the light stands to the sun: they light up the shape of the object, which corresponds to the color of the visible body. Furthermore, the good stands to the mind as the sun does to the eye: both noetic and visual perception occur thought the mediation of a third or binding element (Ideas, sunlight) which not only is different from but draws our attention away from, its source. In order to see an object, we do not look at the sun or even at the light, but at the illuminated object.” (182) We would be blinded if we looked directly at the sun, and we can’t actually see the light the sun generates, apart from the bodies it makes visible to us. Thus “the good does not cause things or beings in the sense of instances, but is the ground or principle of their intelligibility” (182). More specifically, “to say that the mind sees in the light of the good is not to say that the mind has been generated by the good,” inasmuch as illumination isn’t the same thing as generation (183). We see the light of the good thanks to the shapes or forms or structures of particular things; the light is “visible only in and as a specific intelligible form, a what, or in a pattern of whats” (184). This is why Socrates characteristically asks ‘What is?’ questions of his interlocutors.

The answers to such questions aren’t always pretty. Noesis or apprehension of the truth may or may not be beautiful; dianoesis or correct statement of the truth is always beautiful. The doctor who correctly tells me I have cancer is reporting and ugly truth, but the report itself is beautiful, fitting, in perfect harmony with what is. The truth ‘is what it is,’ but the manifestation of the truth in the human soul “serves as the stable foundation for the dianoetic judgments of beauty, justice, utility, and the like” (187). Right moral and political principles “emerge from man’s vision of the Ideas, or from the measurement of desire by that vision, hence not simply from a harmony between mind and being, but rather on the basis of the unity of the theoretical and practical psyche” (187). This isn’t the modern ‘unity of theory and practice’ seen (for example) in Marx because Marx wants to unify theory and practice by realizing the Ideas instead of using them as a measure that always remains ‘above’ us in its good indifference to what we want. As for the good that generates the Ideas, “it is present in the noetic world without delimiting itself as the class of all the whats, or as a specific what, just as the sun is present in the world of genesis without (Socrates’ phrase) itself being genesis, or an element undergoing genesis” (190). To put it in Heideggerian terms, there is “no concept of ‘Being’ in Plato, identical to that of Heidegger, which encompasses mind and form, but only the incompletely analyzed conception of nature, cosmos, or the whole”: “life is not the same as form,” and although “one can speak of the ‘whole’ of life and form” one can “never give a logos which serves to exhibit the ground from which the two are derived” (196). That is religion’s task.

The Platonic-Socratic understanding of reason defends “against the emergence of nihilism” but does not serve as “an infallible preventive or cure” of it (194). Nihilism springs eternal, “a fundamental danger of human existence” (194), one that even Socrates had to think his way out of. “To be a man is to be constantly falling apart and growing together again. This means that nihilism is a perpetual danger, rooted in the very division which make speech, thought and so completeness possible” (197). The full cure for nihilism in the human soul would be wisdom, but at best human beings can become only lovers of wisdom, partially wise.

Among historicists, Hegel comes the closest to overcoming nihilism, in Rosen’s estimation. Hegel claims that ‘History’ has come to an end in his own work, the assertedly comprehensive speech about Being. Earlier, Rosen had noted in passing that Hegel’s solution is not so much refutable as unbearable—excessively elitist for democratic souls. He now contrasts Hegel’s self-deification to the teaching of Plato’s Socrates. To deify the human, obviously, one must destroy its nature in an attempt to achieve a different and superior nature—if godliness may be said to have a nature. Hegel thus attempts to end the problem of nihilism, inherent in human nature, by overcoming human nature: a new version of the old promise, ‘Ye shall be as gods.’ Rosen doubts that that Hegel fulfilled the promise, or that it can be fulfilled, because human beings (even Hegel) continue to desire and continue to speak until they die; gods may rest content, in silence, if they so choose, without dying. Nature gives human beings both desire and speech; ‘History’ failed to overcome nature in the person and thought of Hegel. Real history, the narrative of the course of events, continues as an inquiry, not as a final answer (214). “The very conception of a complete speech is self-negating,” inasmuch as the complete speech would need to include a statement about itself, which could not exist until after the speech was finished (229).

The superiority of Plato’s Socrates over Hegel amounts to the fact that he sees this. Socrates’ speaks “in the light of wisdom” but not as wisdom (221). He regards the whole as intelligible but he does not believe it achievable in speech. Much less does he believe it achievable by human action. A philosopher may be thought wise in that he partakes of wisdom. He cannot make himself into wisdom. At most, Socrates may playfully suggest that he is a good; literal-minded self-deification—often monotheistic self-deification, at that—he leaves to more hubristic souls.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Discourse which won the prize of the Academy of Dijon in the Year 1750.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men.

Translated and collected in Victor Gourevitch, ed.: The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002 [1997].

Marc F. Plattner: Rousseau’s State of Nature: An Interpretation of the Discourse on Inequality. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1979.

Walter Scheidel: The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017.

If political life concerns justice, and justice consists of granting equal things and honors to equals, unequal things and honors to non-equals, then charges of both equal and unequal grants of things and honors will always vex political life. In view of the origins of political relations in family relations, the question of equality (and therefore of inequality) will vex family life, too. Among modern philosophers, Jean-Jacques Rousseau remains the master of this question, and his shade haunts even the most recent writers on it.

Although Rousseau’s “First Discourse” on the question, “Whether the Reestablishment of the Sciences and Arts has contributed to the Purification of Moeurs,” immediately concerns the value of the Enlightenment, the topic of the “Second Discourse,” inequality, serves as a leitmotif throughout. The “First Discourse” leads into the “Second Discourse.” In both essays, Rousseau argues not for egalitarianism simply (as many of his readers have supposed, some foolishly and some dangerously) but for a certain kind of egalitarianism and also a certain kind of aristocracy. It turns out that there is a good or natural aristocracy among men as well as a bad one, and a bad or unnatural democracy among men as well as a good one. In seeing this, both Thomas Jefferson (in a famous letter to John Adams) and Alexis de Tocqueville proved themselves exact readers of Rousseau.

Rousseau calls the Dijon Academy’s question un-‘academic’, a question that concerns “one of those truths that affect the happiness of mankind” (4). Beginning with the fundamental philosophic problem of distinguishing appearance from reality—specifically, the appearance of right from its reality—he presents himself as a latter-day Socrates, “an honest man who knows nothing and esteems himself none the less for it” (5). He will argue that the Enlightenment, in re-establishing the sciences and the arts after their decline in the ‘Dark Ages,’ has not enlightened Europeans at all, but has obfuscated reality by corrupting the moral foundations of the quest for understanding reality.

He divides the discourse into two parts. Part I turns on the contrast between the learned but tyrannized Chinese and the unlettered but free ancient Persians, Scythians, and Germans, along with an unnamed modern people—presumably the Swiss, inasmuch as the author of the discourse identifies himself only as “A Citizen of Geneva.” Beneath Rousseau’s critique of learnedness in peoples one immediately notices (or perhaps imagines) a surreptitious glance at the people who tried to live their lives according to a book, indeed the Book of books. In his reply to a critique of his Discourse by Stanislaus Lasczinski, the deposed king of Poland and father-in-law of Louis XV of France, Rousseau is takes pains to dispel any such impression, arguing rather that the Israelites “never cultivated the Sciences” and were assiduously kept “as separate as possible from the idolatrous and learned nations adjoining them” (40); Jesus selected not scholars but fishermen and artisans as His apostles, His message later perverted by Schoolmen. But this as it may, “It is a grand and a fine spectacle to see man go forth as it were out of nothing by his own efforts; to dispel by the lights of his reason the darkness in which nature had enveloped him; to raise himself above himself; to soar by the mind to the celestial realms…” (6). The elevation of man “out of nothing” of course alludes to God’s creation of the heavens and the earth; as always in Rousseau, man effectively creates himself “as it were out of nothing,” his own nature overcoming the rest of nature, which is dark, hard to know. To emphasize this, Rousseau immediately takes his own (secularized-Biblical) version of the Socratic turn: “What is grander and more difficult still, [man undertakes] to return into himself, there to study man and to know his nature, his duties, and his end” (6). As it will transpire, this ‘Socratic’ turn will take a Cartesian inflection.

More specifically and historically, man has raised himself above “the Barbarism of the first ages” which had recurred in the Dark Ages, during which “ignorance had usurped the name of knowledge, and stood as an almost insurmountable obstacle in the path of its return”; only “a revolution” could “return men to common sense,” and the revolution “came from the quarter from which it was least to be expected,” the attempted conquest of Europe by “the stupid Muslim, the eternal scourge of Letters,” which caused men learned in Greek literature and science to flee religio-despotic Constantinople to Italy and France, where it civilized semi-barbaric peoples without initially corrupting them (6).

That happy equilibrium didn’t last long. “The mind has its needs, as has the body” (6), and among them is the need for going along in order to get along. If society meets bodily needs through agriculture and commerce, it meets mental needs by teaching men to crave agreeability. “While the Government and the Laws see to the safety and the well-being of men assembled, the Sciences, Letters, and Arts, less despotic and perhaps more powerful, spread garlands of flowers over the iron chains with which they are laden, throttle in them the sentiment of that original freedom for which they seemed born, make them love their slavery and fashion them into what is called civilized Peoples. Need raised up Thrones; the Sciences and Arts have made them strong.” (6) Moderate-minded Tocqueville read that, providing himself with the foundation for his critique of the “soft despotism” of the administrative state, while eschewing the radicalism of Rousseau’s polemic.

The garlands concealing the chains amount to appearances concealing reality. The modern Enlighteners, heirs to the thinkers of what we now call the Medieval Enlightenment, confuse others and perhaps above all themselves. “How sweet it would be to live among us if the outward countenance were always the image of the heart’s dispositions; if decency were virtue; if our maxims were our rules; if genuine Philosophy were inseparable from the title of Philosopher!” (7) But the artfulness of Enlightenment has caused us to become adepts at the appearance of morality; although Thomas Hobbes regarded the abolition of liberty accomplished by absolute monarchy to be the only sound guarantee of security, Rousseau argues rather that when “our morals were rustic but natural” we found “security in how easily [we] saw through one another” (8).

Why did we do this to ourselves, decorate ourselves with the “vile ornaments” of self-deception and slavery” (7), make ourselves into conformists unto mere custom, members of “the herd that is called society” (8), a herd in which no animal sensibly befriends, esteems, or trusts another?

American savages are “impossible to tame”: “What yoke could be imposed upon men who need nothing?” (7) Enlightenment seduces us by making us believe we need more than we do; in our neediness, we accede to despotism ‘hard’ and ‘soft.’ We are by nature vulnerable to such seduction; in another allusion to (and appropriation of) the Book of Genesis, Rousseau writes, “the ills caused by our vain curiosity are as old as the world” (9). Conspicuously omitting ancient Israel, Rousseau here constructs Part I’s central contrast between the over-civilized nations—Egypt (“the mother of Philosophy and the fine Arts,” soon conquered after giving birth to them [9]); Greece (twice the heroic conqueror of Asian invaders, but corrupted by philosophy and enslaved by Macedon); Rome, (conquered by barbarians); Byzantine Constantinople (conquered by fanatical barbarians); and China (conquered by “the ignorant and coarse Tartar” [10])—and the aforementioned, unconquered Persians, Scythians, Germans, and Swiss—nations “prefer[ring] other forms of exercise to those of the mind” (11), practicers rather than theorists of morality. Greece itself saw a city “equally famed for its happy ignorance and for the wisdom of its Laws, that Republic of demi-Gods rather than of men, so much superior to humanity did their virtues appear”: the Spartans, who “expelled the Arts and Artists, the Sciences and Scientists from your walls” (11), whose polis was “where virtue was purest and lasted longest,” the one in which “there were no Philosophers” (“Last Reply of J.-J. Rousseau of Geneva,” in Gourevitch, 73).

Lest one charge the obviously well-read Rousseau with the opposite hypocrisy, that of the civilized man who pretends to love barbarism, Socrates immediately reappears, now as the philosopher who knew he knew nothing, as distinguished from sophists and philosophers who believed they knew something but didn’t. Socratic or ‘zetetic’ philosophy is good, uncorrupting because it makes no attempt to replace one set of unfounded opinions with another. The thirty-first of the essay’s sixty-one paragraphs recalls the transfer of Socratic philosophy to Rome in the person of Cato the Elder, who “continued… to inveigh against those artful and subtle Greeks who seduced virtue and enervated the courage of his fellow-citizens” in what turned out to be a losing cause (13). The names of Epicurus, Zeno, and Arcesilaus replaced “the sacred names of liberty, disinterestedness, obedience to the Laws”: “until then the Romans had bee content to practice virtue; all was lost when they began to study it” (13). And to those who would rejoin that at least the Enlightenment protects philosophers from the death penalty, Rousseau remarks, “Among us it is true, Socrates would not have drunk the hemlock; but he would have drunk from a cup more bitter still, insulting jeers, and the scorn that is a hundred times worse than death” (14). The natural sociality of the human mind may cause pain even to the rare Socratic philosopher. How much worse does philosophy afflict the non-philosophic ‘many’: “Peoples, know, then, once and for all, that nature wanted to preserve you from science as a mother snatches a dangerous weapon from the hands of her child”; “the difficulty you have in learning is not the least of her favors” (14).

In Part II Rousseau leaves the historical record behind, turning to an analysis of the arts and sciences themselves in all their “vanity and vacuousness” (14), beginning with their origins. “Astronomy was born of superstition; Eloquence of ambition, hatred, flattery, lying; Geometry of greed; Physics of a vain curiosity; all of them, even Ethics, of human pride”; in sum, the arts and sciences “owe their birth to our vices” (16). Moreover, they also owe their sustenance to them, as the arts feed off luxury, history off the voyeuristic sensationalism afforded by accounts of tyrants, wars, and conspiracies. Whereas “true Philosophers,” like Socrates, know their own ignorance (17n.), the average man should refrain from seriously attempting “to educate himself by studying Philosophy” (17), an effort born in idleness, leading only to further waste of time. The luxury sustaining the arts, “diametrically opposed to good morals,” sustains not the active political life of republics but imperial rule of one or few over the many. Rousseau quotes Montesquieu approvingly: the ancient politicians spoke of morals and of virtue, whereas ours speak only of commerce and of money (18). According to modern politicians, “a man is worth to the State only what he consumes in it,” and the money he makes gives the modern State “everything, except morals and citizens” (19), as such men now have minds “debased by a host of futile cares,” incapable of greatness, lacking in courage (19). With Machiavelli, Rousseau detests the feminization of manly minds: “Men will always be what it pleases women that they be: so that if you want them to become great and virtuous, teaching women what greatness of soul and virtue is,” as “Plato [did] in former times” (19n.). Voltaire himself has succumbed to the modern sickness, “lower[ing] his genius to the level of his century,” to the tastes of the salon and the drawing-room (19). Thinking again of Machiavelli, Rousseau deplores the ease with which Italian states were conquered by Charles the Eighth, who found their rulers amusing themselves to death with vacuous learning instead of “exert[ing] themselves [by] trying to become vigorous and warlike” (21). And like Machiavelli, he hearkens to “the simplicity of the first times,” the times before Christianity (20), when sedentary study had not    “enervat[ed] the vigor of the soul,” its virtù (21). Again following Machiavelli, Rousseau decries “the senseless education [which now] adorns our mind and corrupts our judgment,” an education in which children learn Greek and Latin instead of their native tongue and “the sweet name Fatherland” (22).

Here the question of inequality comes in, again. The valorization of talents and the disparagement of virtues fostered by an education centering on the arts and sciences establishes a social and political hierarchy in which “rewards are lavished upon wits, and virtue remains without honors” (23). This wrongly conceived hierarchy abuses the art of printing, initially intended to spread the Gospel but soon used to immortalize “the dangerous reveries of such men as Hobbes and Spinoza” (26). It is enough to drive Rousseau to pray for a reversal of the curse of Adam and a return to the prelapserian condition : “Almighty God, you who hold all Minds in your hands, deliver us from our Fathers’ Enlightenment and fatal art, and restore us to ignorance, innocence, and poverty, the only goods that can make for our happiness and that are precious in your sight” (26).

But not entirely. What Rousseau really objects to isn’t philosophy but its popularization. “What are we to think of those Anthologizers of works which have indiscreetly broken down the gate of the Sciences and introduced into their Sanctuary a populace unworthy of coming near it” (26)? Enlighteners have misused art, to the detriment of genuine science, by deranging the natural order science aims to discover. Specifically, they have deranged the natural hierarchy among human beings. A boy who might have grown up to be “a great clothier” instead becomes “someone who his whole life long will remain a bad versifier or an inferior Geometer” (26), thanks to the Enlightenment’s misplaced egalitarianism, the arts it has perfected, and the indiscriminate, universal education it touts. By contrast, “those whom nature intended as her disciples”—Bacon, Descartes, Newton—”had no need of masters” but only “their own vast genius” (26). What genuine philosophers need is not the apparatus of Enlightenment, with its school systems and publishing industry, but toleration, societies that allow them “to devote themselves to the study of the Sciences and the Arts” sufficiently to follow the lead of their true master-teachers, the previous philosophers (27). More than toleration, such men deserve honor, elevation to high political rank, such as Cicero enjoyed in Rome and Bacon enjoyed in England; this will give their works a practical rather than a cloistered, academic cast. Only when philosophers become Senators, or officers of kings, will talent align with the virtue that finds its exercise in political life. “But as long as power remains by itself on one side; enlightenment and wisdom by themselves on the other; the learned will rarely think great things, Princes will more rarely still perform fine ones, and Peoples will continue to be base, corrupt, and wretched” (27). In this natural hierarchy, this natural inegalitarianism, the people will listen to “the voice of [their] conscience in the silence of the passions”—the only part of “genuine Philosophy” that can actually be disseminated universally without harm (28), and the only way in which human beings can “recover their original equality” as Rousseau writes in one of several replies to critics of his discourse (32). “I have said a hundred times over that it is good that there be Philosophers, provided the People do not pretend to be Philosophers” (“Last Reply of J.-J. Rousseau of Geneva,” in Gourevitch, 69).

In the Epistle Dedicatory to his “Second Discourse,” Rousseau lauds his native city-state, Geneva, as having happily combined natural equality with institutional inequality “in the manner most closely approximating natural law and most favorable to society, to the preservation of public order and the happiness of individuals” (114). Calvinist Geneva would not seem amenable to Rousseau’s doctrine of the natural goodness of human beings, and in fact the city experienced longstanding tensions between French-speaking elite and democratic artisans. Rousseau himself had left the city as an adolescent some three decades earlier (an act he here describes as the consequence of his “youthful want of prudence” [118]) and had led a decidedly in-Calvinistic life in the meantime, but he has no intention of offending the regime which had so recently restored his citizenship. If he had chosen the place of his birth, he assures the city fathers, he would have chosen a place very much like Geneva: “a society of a size confined to the range of human faculties,” that is, one in which “all the individuals now one another,” where “neither the shady strategems of vice nor the modesty of virtue could have escaped the Public’s gaze and judgment, and where this gentle habit of seeing and knowing one another would have made the love of one’s Fatherland a love of the Citizens rather than of the soil” (114)—the modern equivalent of an ancient polis. No need for revolution in such a community: the republic and its laws are longstanding, its civil liberties tested in “long experience” (116). (Sounding rather like Aristotle, Rousseau intones, “it is above all the great antiquity of the Laws that renders them holy and venerable” [117]). As for the regime that generated those laws and now rules according to them, the people ratify the laws and other “important public business,” annually electing representatives to judge and govern day-to-day in a balance in which the magistrates and the people each “do the other honor” (117)—again, because the city-state is small enough to allow citizens to know one another. Here, Christian theologians and “Men of Letters” enjoy a “perfect union”—in obvious contrast to the relations prevailing in the larger states of Europe, handicapped by ‘Enlightenment’ hostilities—and so do men and the “amiable and virtuous Citizen-women” of Geneva, whose “chaste power, exercised in conjugal union alone” (not in public assemblies) serve “to correct the misconceptions which our young Men acquire in other countries,” where they too often pick up the “childish tone and ridiculous airs adopted among lost women” along with a fondness for “presumed grandeurs” that disguise the “servitude” of the subjects of absolute monarchy rather than the habits of “august freedom” inculcated by republican mothers and wives (121-122). Rousseau thus dedicates his essay to Geneva as its citizens might be brought to wish it to be, upon reading the “Second Discourse.”

The essay itself addresses another topic proposed by the Academy of Dijon: “What is the origin of inequality among men, and whether it is authorized by the natural Law” (130). In his Preface Rousseau lays out (Cartesian-like) his ‘method’ of investigation. “The most useful and the least advanced of all human knowledge seems to be that of man,” and without that knowledge “the source of inequality among men” cannot be known (124). Obtaining this knowledge has proven difficult because “the changes which the succession of times and of things must have wrought in his original constitution” obscure man’s “primitive state” (124). Human passions and even human bodies have “changed in appearance to the point of being almost unrecognizable”; “all one still finds is the disfigureing contrast of passion that believes it reasons and the understanding that hallucinates” (124). Civilizational “progress” leads to regress in human self-knowledge, as the more we know about everything else, the less we know about ourselves (124). Indeed, the first source of inequality among men arises in the fact that some human populations have “remained in their original state for a longer time” than others (125).

Although Rousseau quotes Aristotle in the Politics in his frontispiece—”What is natural has to be investigated not in beings that are depraved, but in those that are good according to nature”—he silently rejects Aristotle’s fourth ’cause’ of human nature, the ‘final’ or ‘teleological’ cause, while concentrating his attention on what Aristotle calls the ‘first’ or ‘generative’ cause, seen in human origins. He shares this rejection and this concentration with Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, but departs from them in a telling way. In “undertaking to disentangle what is original from what is artificial in man’s present Nature” one must attempt “to know accurately” not only “a state which no longer exists” but one “which perhaps never did exist, which probably never will exist” (125). Hobbes described the state of nature as a state of war of all against all; Locke described it as a state of scarcity. But both considered that state as fairly easy to know, precisely because it can recur even within civil society itself, as when I am attacked or robbed in the street, or wondering where my next meal will come from. Although Rousseau considers relatively primitive societies to display something closer to original human nature than do ‘enlightened’ modern states, he doubts that any societies, even the earliest, lack social conventions of some sort. His conception of human nature amounts at least at first sight to what later thinkers would call an ‘ideal type,’ yet one “about which it is nevertheless necessary to have exact Notions in order accurately to judge of our present state” (125). This raises the question of method: “What experiments would be needed in order to come to know natural man; and by what means can these experiments be performed within society?” (126). Without success in such experiments, we cannot know the nature of man, and therefore “the true definition of natural right” and of the very “idea of right” (126).

For such knowledge, philosophers ancient and modern have had recourse to the notion of natural law. But they have made knowledge of this law too abstruse. “For it to be law the will of him whom it obligates [he] must be able to submit to it knowingly”—here Rousseau alludes to the familiar idea that a law, to be a law, must be promulgated (127). At the same time, for the law to be a natural law “it must speak immediately with the voice of Nature” (127). This means that natural law cannot be a thing one need be a philosopher in order to perceive. Rousseau’s method in investigating the natural law which defines right will therefore be not to consult “scientific books that only teach us to see men as they have made themselves” but instead to “meditat[e] on the first and simplest operations of the human Soul”; again, this resembles the method of Descartes.  Unlike Descartes, however, Rousseau delves into the soul as it exists before it reasons, finding “two principles prior to reason”: one being our desire for “our well-being and our self-preservation,” the other being not a desire but “a natural repugnance at seeing any sentient Being, and especially any being like ourselves, perish or suffer”—the sentiment of pity (127). “This way one is not obliged to make a Philosopher of man before making a man of him” (133). This enables Rousseau to distinguish animals from men in a new way. Instead of identifying the human capacity for reason as the distinguishing characteristic of the species, Rousseau identifies the distinction in something like what later thinkers would call consciousness: “Since [animals] are deprived of enlightenment and of freedom, they cannot recognize” the natural law; “but since they in some measure partake in our nature through the sentience with which they are endowed, it will be judged that they must also participate in natural right, and that man is subject to some kind of duties toward them,” such as the refusal to allow them to be “uselessly mistreated” (129). Natural right amounts to the universal human desire for well-being and self-preservation along with shared sentience and the pity or compassion it engenders; natural law consists of consciousness or recognition of and the willingness to obey this “voice of Nature.” As the late Stanley Rosen observes in another context, recognition implies cognition, and cognition in Rousseau is a Cartesianism of sentiment not of ideas.

With this ‘method’ in hand, Rousseau devotes his brief Exordium to describing how he cognizes human nature in terms of the Academy’s topic, inequality. “I conceive of two sorts of inequality in the human Species”: “natural or physical” inequality consists of differences of age, health and bodily strength, along with “qualities of Mind or of Soul”; “moral or political inequality” depends not on nature but on convention, established “or at least authorized” by human consent (131). To inquire into the origins of inequality among men will be to address such questions as, When did Right replace violence? When was Nature subjected to Law? When did the strong resolve to serve the weak? When did the people purchase “the idea of repose at the price of real felicity”? (131). For this inquiry (and contra Hobbes or Locke, for example) facts will not suffice, nor will religion. Only Nature, ‘whose’ voice “never lies” (133)—perhaps because it does not literally speak at all—need be consulted—Nature, which ‘speaks’ mutely through our elementary sentiments.

Even at this preliminary stage of his argument, Rousseau has left the Calvinism of Geneva far behind. According to his Confessions, the “Second Discourse” reveals Rousseau’s thoughts “with the greatest boldness not to say audacity.” As he does in the “First Discourse,” Rousseau divides his essay into two main parts, the first and by far the longer consisting of fifty-three paragraphs amounting to an extended ‘thought experiment’ on human nature, particularly the relation between reason and the passions, upon which analysis the origin and foundation of inequality among men may be discerned.

He begins his introspection with a consideration of the human body, announcing that he will not attempt to trace the physical development of the human species. “Stripping” man of all supernatural and artificial elements, he finds “an animal”—”the most advantageously organized of all” animals (134). Hypothesizing on the basis of such competitive advantage, Rousseau acknowledges that early men might have walked on ‘all fours,’ the upright position was more likely, as it better enables the human body to preserve itself. With regard to diet, human omnivorousness suggests that man “perhaps” has no instincts (134-135). But original man lived off fruits and vegetable supplied by an earth that was more fertile than it is now; “since prey is almost the only object about which Carnivores fight, and Frugivores live in constant peace with one another, it is clear that if the human species were of the latter kind, it could have subsisted more easily in the state of Nature, and would have had much less need and fewer occasions to leave it” (Appendix V, 194). The reader begins to see that the “Second Discourse” effectively (and as it turns out comprehensively) re-writes the Book of Genesis. Man in Genesis eats fruit and suffers punishment; Man in Rousseau’s state of nature thrives on such a diet, declining only when he abandons it.

Naked, unarmed against predators, the original men “develop[ed] a robust and almost unalterable temperament”: “Nature deal[t] with them exactly as the Law of Sparta did with the Children of Citizens,” whereby the strong survived and the weak perished (135). The body was Man’s only tool, and he was “ever ready for every eventuality,” ” so to speak, always carrying all of [himself] with [him]” (135). Thus Man was effectively self-taught, with no need to communicate with members of his own species after early childhood (Appendix VI). “[L]iving dispersed amongst the animals and early finding himself in the position of having to measure himself against them, [savage man] soon makes the comparison and, feeling that he surpasses them in skill more than they do him in strength, learns to fear them no more” (136). Generally healthy, he has no need of medicines or doctors. The fear that rules the human mind in Hobbes’s state of nature has no place in Rousseau’s: solitary and asocial, men do not fear one another; self-sufficient and adaptive, they learn not much to fear beasts. With no natural enemies or friends, “they eventually die without anyone’s noticing that they cease to be, and almost without noticing it themselves” (137). Life in Rousseau’s state of nature is solitary, but not nasty, poor, brutish (in the sense of instinct-bound), or short. This analysis of human nature and the human condition leads Rousseau to describe a sort of simple ‘regime’ for original Man, although of course it is not a social or political regime but “the simple, uniform, and solitary way of life prescribed to us by Nature” (138). One notices that Rousseau’s ‘individualist’ assumption regarding human nature in some respects follows from his ‘method’: introspection centers his attention on one individual, and the body itself is irreducibly ‘individualistic’ or separate from all other bodies when considered introspectively. Aristotle would reply that Rousseau unjustifiably abstracts from the sexuality of each body, a feature of the human body which more than suggests a degree of sociality; Rousseau might reply that the males of many animal species mate but then return to a solitary way of life.

Observing that domestic animals prove weaker than the same species ‘in the wild,’ Rousseau draws the parallel between them and Man who, “as he becomes sociable and a Slave… becomes weak, timorous, groveling,” “his soft and effeminate way of life completes the enervation of both his strength and his courage”; “all the conveniences which man gives himself above and beyond those he gives to the animals he tames, are so many particular causes that lead him to degenerate more appreciably” (138-139). Not only does Rousseau depart here from Hobbes and Locke, he radicalizes Machiavelli: Christianity did not denature or ‘effeminate’ men, civil society did. Original Man’s senses of sight, hearing, and smell were better developed than those of Social Man because those are the senses most needed for self preservation, “almost his only care”; “by contrast, the organs that are perfected only by softness and sensuality must [have] remain[ed] in a state of coarseness”—the skin, which feels, the tongue, which tastes (140).

As Rousseau turns from the body to the mind, from physical Man to “the Metaphysical and Moral side” (140), he encounters a serious problem. “The man who meditates” is “a depraved animal” (138); Rousseau would of course readily acknowledge that he himself is a depraved animal in this sense, perhaps adding only that in order to understand himself, and coming as all civilized men must do from the condition of his depravity, he must work his way back to self-knowledge by the only means at civilized man’s disposal, namely, meditation. But there is more. An animal is “nothing but an ingenious machine to which nature has given senses in order to wind itself up and, to a point, protect itself against everything that tends to destroy or disturb it” (140). “The human machine,” however, can somehow need not choose or reject an action by instinct but by “an act of freedom”; while other animals “cannot deviate from the Rule prescribed to it” by Nature, “even when it would be to its advantage to do so,” Man “often deviates from it to his detriment,” as “the Mind depraves the senses, and the will continues to speak when Nature is silent” (140). Although all animals have “ideas” in the Lockean sense of the term—sense-impressions—and “up to a point” can “even combine” those ideas (one often observes an animal ‘making a mistake’), man has “the property of being a free agent” (140-141). Not reason or “the understanding” distinguishes man from other animals but “the consciousness of this freedom” to “acquiesce or resist”; this is the evidence of “the spirituality of the soul,” whose acts cannot be explained by the Laws of Mechanics (141). Other animals have a nucleus of understanding in them; as Marc F. Plattner remarks, in this respect human beings differ from them in degree but not in substance (Plattner, 42). But other animals cannot choose, and therefore lack Man’s “faculty of perfecting himself” or of degrading himself (141)—”the faculty which, over the centuries, causes his enlightenment and his errors, his vices and his virtues to arise, and eventually makes him his own and Nature’s tyrant” (141). Original Man rebels not against God but against Nature, losing his “original happiness” by “feed[ing] his insane pride and I know not what vast self-admiration” (Appendix IX, 197). “Naturally good,” self-depraved man enters society, which “necessarily moves men to hate one another in proportion as their interests cross” (Appendix IX, 198). It does so because men remain irreducibly ‘individualistic’ even in society; society causes these solitary/individualistic beings to bump up against one another, viewing life as a ‘zero-sum game’ of competition and its consequent spite, envy, and hypocrisy; the difficulty in rediscovering natural or original man comes from this very hypocrisy (including self-deception) that social life entails for a naturally asocial animal. Machiavelli is right about man in society, as in it “men are forced to flatter and destroy one another” (Appendix IX, 198). In society, “my Hero will end up by cutting every throat until he is the sole master of the Universe”—an ambition chief among “the secret aspirations of the heart of every Civilized man” (Appendix IX, 199).

From miserable marriages to abortions, infanticide, luxury, unhealthy occupations, civil strife, crime, piracy, and war, civil society causes industry to flourish and states to be first enriched, then ruined. Generally, “the arts are lucrative in inverse proportion to their usefulness,” and so, as civilization advances, the most useful art, agriculture, atrophies while urban life and its poisonous superfluities fattens. “The State, while on one side grows rich, grows weak and is depopulated on the other, and how the most powerful Monarchies, after much labor to grow opulent and empty, end up by being the prey of the poor Nations that succumb to the fatal temptation to invade them, and grow rich and weak in their turn, until they are themselves invaded and destroyed by others” (Appendix IX, 202). Rousseau would likely regard the United States in the twenty-first century, along with Russia and China, as urbanizing countries with declining native populations, threatened by leaner, rougher peoples from without and within. What is more, civilized men cannot return to nature; Rousseau isn’t Thoreau, much less a communalist attempting to subsist on bean sprouts and hallucinogens. In The Social Contract he will lay out his political remedy for civilized men, but it will not resemble any return to his hypothesized, godless Eden.

“Savage Man,” “compensated by any lack of instinct by faculties capable of making up for it at first, and of afterwards raising him far above nature,” begins simply by perceiving and sensing, like all other animals; “to will and not to will, to desire and to fear, will be the first and almost the only operations of his soul until new circumstances cause new developments in it” (141-142). Here Plattner intervenes to follow the logic. If human freedom or “perfectibility” exists, it does not exist as a true human faculty, as it might “very well remain inoperative among men in their original condition” (Plattner, 48). Nature isn’t teleological in Rousseau—not even human nature. ‘Progress’ towards civilization, human ‘perfectibility,’ depends upon “the chance workings of mechanical causation” (ibid. 50). This being so, “man’s humanity is the product of his history” (ibid. 51); “man as we know him is a historical being,” a claim that makes Rousseau “the first philosopher to indicate that the modern scientific view of man’s origins and man’s nature must lead to this conclusion” (ibid. 51). This resolves the problem mentioned above: the mystery of how what Rousseau calls the “free,” the “spiritual” or soulful aspect of human nature could have arisen in a world that evidently consists of matter in motion, with no God or gods to infuse the body with immaterial substance. If freedom is really perfectibility, and perfectibility results from accidental, material causes, then the supposed conquest of nature—aside from being temporary and cyclical—has no immaterial or genuinely spiritual dimension at all. One should add that this is not a fully-conceived doctrine of historicism, for two reasons: there is still an underlying human nature, malleable though it may be, consisting of a capacity for choice as well as the sentiment of pity or compassion; also, unlike the historicist doctrines of Hegel and Marx, Rousseau identifies no laws of historical change, the course of events being for him entirely random, except insofar as they are slightly inflected by human nature.

And so, “regardless of what the Moralists may say about it, human understanding owes much to the Passions”; “it is by their activity that our reason perfects itself” (142). And “the Passions, in turn, owe their origin to our needs, and their progress to our knowledge” (142). Our needs owe their origin to our material circumstances: in ancient Egypt, “the arts arose and spread with the flooding of the Nile,” which forced savage men to attempt to control nature; in Europe, “in general the Peoples of the North are more industrious than those of the south because they can less afford not to be so, as if Nature wanted in this way to equalize things, by endowing Minds with the fertility it denies the Soil” (142). As if, indeed. Recalling the figure of Prometheus in the “First Discourse,” Rousseau asks, “How many centuries perhaps elapsed before men were in a position to see any other fire than that of Heaven? How many different chance occurrences must they have needed before they learned the most common uses of this element?” (143)  Before even the most elementary arts of agriculture could develop, men needed first to divide nature into territories, to conceive of property (144). Similarly, reasoning requires language, but language could only have developed after many centuries of equally random occurrences. There were no families to teach new generations, as reproduction was random and fortuitous, and mothers nursed their children only because they sought to relieve their own discomfort; such subsequent care as children received derived only from the mother’s habit-induced love of ‘her own.’ With no education or transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next, any art “perished with the inventor” (157). In hypothesizing their versions of the state of nature, Rousseau argues, Hobbes and Locke imported social characteristics into a condition in which men were in fact fundamentally asocial; there is no conjugal society in the state of nature (Appendix XII, 214-215). Such language as existed among the original Man consisted of cries “wrested from him only by a sort of instinct on urgent occasions” (146). And religion has given us no better account of man’s origins than philosophers have done. There was no Adam-like naming of natural objects according to their kinds: “If one Oak was called A, another Oak was called B”; “in order to subsume the beings under common and generic designations, their properties and differences had to be know; observations and definitions were needed, that is to say much more Natural History and Metaphysics than the men of that time could have had” (147-148).

Neither good nor bad (not ‘beyond’ good and evil but prior to them), this asocial “free being” has its heart “at peace” and its body “in health” (150). “In instinct alone”—and, as we’ve seen, rather weak and malleable instinct at that—original Man “had all he needed to live in the state of Nature,” whereas “in cultivated reason he has only what he needs to live in society” (150). In this the Bible is both right and wrong. Natural Man is indeed ‘prelapserian’ or ignorant of vice. But unlike Adam, who knows exactly what God has commanded him not to do, Natural Man ‘falls’ “precisely because [he does] not know how to be good” (151). Here Rousseau introduces his important distinction between amour de soi, self-love, seeking self-preservation, and amour propre or vanity, the social, factitious, conflictual source of the love of honor. “Prior to the birth of vanity,” self-preservation “tempers [Man’s] ardor for well-being with an innate repugnance to see his kind suffer”; “the force of natural pity” keeps natural amour de soi in check (152). “Identif[ying]” with those who suffer, pre-reflective, pre-rational Man finds himself guided by “the first sentiment of humanity,” a sentiment expressed in a maxim which predates the Golden Rule and is “perhaps more useful”: “Do your good with the least possible harm to others” (154). Pity thus serves self-preservation, preventing the Hobbesian war of all against all. It isn’t easy to see how recognition of other human individuals as human does not require a power of abstraction, but Rousseau might point to other, non-rational animals which easily distinguish their own kind from others, without any more than a rudimentary power of abstraction; the original humans share the same cognitive capacity with other species. Pity has one other important characteristic: as the source of all “social virtues” it may give some very slight impetus toward social life. It is probably safer to say that it makes Man amenable to society, once this solitary animal enters into society.

It is reason (developing more or less inexplicably, by the action of chance events upon this non-reasoning species) which “turns man back upon himself” (153) and thus leads to the development of amour propre. Rousseau thinks reason turns us back upon ourselves because that is in fact the rational ‘method’ of Descartes, which he has both adopted and adapted. Self-concerning, self-centered reasoning throws off the natural balance of amour de soi animated by pity. While it is true that “Socrates and Minds of his stamp”—the rare, good philosophers of the “First Discourse”—”may be capable of acquiring virtue through reason, Mankind would long ago have ceased to be if its preservation had depended solely on the reasonings of those who make it up” (154). (George Washington, not usually associated with Rousseau, makes exactly the same point in his Farewell Address; in his case, he is probably thinking of Franklin. But Washington looks to religion, not pity, as humanity’s moral compass). In Rousseau’s state of nature, “sluggish passions,” tempered by the “salutary curb” of pity, produce a condition of peace punctuated with minor quarrels. With “not the slightest notion of thine and mine, or any genuine idea of justice,” never “dream[ing] of vengeance except perhaps mechanically like the dog that bites the stone thrown at him” (154), these gatherers of plant foods had no need to compare themselves with one another, no sense of honor or offense, “no other passion than the pain or pleasure at success or failure” (Appendix XV, 218). Even sexual passion was random; with no sentiment of possession, and no “notions of merit or of beauty which a Savage is not in a position to possess” (“his mind could not frame abstract ideas of regularity and of proportion”), Man found that “any woman suit[ed] him” (155). There could be no inequality because such men didn’t know what subjection and domination are; there could be no politics in Aristotle’s sense of ruling and being ruled because men had no “reciprocal needs”; and without a settled society, if conflict arose men could always simply move on, a circumstance which “renders vain the Law of the stronger” as seen in human relations as distinct from simple natural survival of individuals (159).

Rousseau summarizes the results of his argument in Part I: “Inequality is scarcely perceptible in the state of Nature” (159). How then did inequality arise? “Perfectibility, the social virtues and other faculties which Natural man had received in potentiality could never develop by themselves”; they “needed the fortuitous concatenation of several foreign causes which might never have arisen” (159). What were they?

Part II begins with éclat: “The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, to whom it occurred to say this is mine and found people sufficiently simple to believe him, was the true founder of civil society” (161), the evil genius who takes the place of the Biblical serpent in Rousseau’s version of Genesis. But where could this notion of property have come from? “Man’s first sentiment was that of his existence, his first care that of its preservation” (161)—a sentiment Rousseau rediscovers for himself and his readers in Reveries of a Solitary Walker. His few appetites were fleeting, easily satisfied: thirst, hunger, sex. But as this original or primitive man needed to defend himself from predators with such “natural weapons” as stones and branches, “he learned to overcome the obstacles of Nature” (162). Because some natural conditions such as harsh winters and hot summers required men to work harder than usual, they began to invent things adapted to their environment: lines and hooks for those living along the water, bows and arrows among forest-dwellers. “Lightning, a Volcano, or some happy accident acquainted them with fire, a new resource against the rigors of winter” well worth preserving and, in time, found to make meats edible and even tasty. Human populations grew, and as they did so men interacted more with one another as well as with other species. Crucially, the repeated occurrence of such encounters “must naturally have engendered in man’s mind perceptions of certain relationships,” such as big and small, strong and weak, fast and slow, bold and fearful (162). Somehow, “almost without thinking about it,” a “mechanical prudence” developed, “suggest[ing] to him the precautions most necessary for his safety” (162). In becoming “the master of those [animals] that could be useful, and the scourge of those that could be harmful,” he experienced his first “enlightenment” (162). “Taught by experience that love of well-being is the sole spring of human actions, he was in a position to distinguish between the rare occasions when common interest should make him count on the help of his kind, and the even rarer occasions when competition should make him suspicious of them” (163); both free, transitory human associations and an inclination in everyone “to seize his own advantage”—rudimentary social and anti-social sentiments—had developed, all with no need for any more ‘language’ than that needed by crows or monkeys.

This led to “a first revolution,” in which human beings began to settle (164). Families, “a sort of property,” and lasting quarrels arose (164). Human sentiments changed, as conjugal love and love of home became “the sweetest sentiments known to man” (164). The leisure afforded by this more organized way of life led both to new inventions and to a weakening of Man’s natural self-sufficiency, as the “conveniences” of society, becoming habitual, “degenerated into true needs,” causing men to become “unhappy to lose them without being happy to possess them” (164-165). Forced to live still closer together by floods and earthquakes (Rousseau relentlessly continues his naturalized parallels to the Book of Genesis), men developed more and more elaborate language with which to describe their needs and to solemnize the dominance of some, the obedience of others. “Men, who until now had roamed in the Woods, having become more settled, gradually come together, unite in various troops, and finally in every region form a particular Nation united in morals and character, not by Rules or Laws, but by the same kind of life and of foods, and the influence of a shared Climate” (165). Living in such close quarters, they “acquire ideas of merit and of beauty which produce sentiments of preference”; “the more they see one another, the less they can do without seeing one another still more,” with the attendant sentiments of love and jealousy that such comparisons produce (165). Cain, meet Abel, but this time before some girl, not God: “the gentlest of all passions receives sacrifices of human blood” (165).

“Everyone began to look at everyone else and to wish to be looked at himself, and public esteem acquired a value” (175). Inequality and vice, vanity and contempt, shame an envy, offense and contempt: at best society might produce civility or mutual recognition of everyone else’s amour propre (“everyone claimed a right” to consideration [166])—a sentiment not natural like pity, not God-given like agape, but better than nothing in what would otherwise amount to the state of nature described by Hobbes and Locke. “This state is the genuine youth of the World, and… all subsequent progress has been so many steps in appearance toward the perfection of the individual, and in effect toward the decrepitude of the species” (167); latter-day savages are right to resist the “civilizing missions” of imperialists (Appendix XVI 219).

An identifiable ‘political economy’ now emerged. “The moment one man needed the help of another,” “equality disappeared, property appeared, work became necessary”; self-cursed, “slavery and misery” ensued for the descendants of ‘Adam’ (167). Two arts “brought about this great revolution,” metallurgy and agriculture (168). “For the Poet it is gold and silver; but for the Philosopher it is iron and wheat that civilized men, and ruined Mankind” (168), beginning in Europe. The invention of these two arts led to the first division of labor, as once some men began to melt and forge iron implements others were needed to feed them. With the invention of the plow, the two arts began to supplement and empower one another, locking men into the class divisions that require political rule to coordinate them. Meanwhile, with property stabilized, a conventional right of property supplanted the natural law.

Such settled and artisanal societies also meant that unequal natural abilities led to social inequality; hunting and gathering take less skill than farming and metallurgy, so “reason became active” along with memory, imagination, and vanity (170). Social inequality gave incentive not only to those who actually had abilities but to those skillful at appearing to have them, resulting in a society in which “to be and to appear became two entirely different things, and from this distinction arose ostentatious display, deceitful cunning, and all the vices that follow in their train” (170). Divisions between rich and poor only accentuated this Tartuffery. Social and national conflict mean war, with rich men sending ‘their’ poor men to fight the lackeys of other rich men. “Thus the usurpations of the rich, the Banditry of the Poor, the unbridled passions of all, stifling natural pity and the still weak voice of justice made men greedy, ambitious, and wicked,” men who valorized the supposed “right of the stronger” and the “right of the first occupant” (171).

This state of misery led to the first social contract, whereby men in desperation united to obtain the self-preservation they had enjoyed as self-sufficient individuals in the state of nature. “All ran toward their chains in the belief that they were securing their freedom; for while they had enough reason to sense the advantages of a political establishment, they had not enough to foresee its dangers” (173). “Such was, or must have been, the origin of Society and of Laws, which gave the weak new fetters and the rich new forces, [and] irreversibly destroyed natural freedom, forever” (173). Once one group of men had done this, all others needed to follow, in self-defense, and the era of inter-political warfare began. But contra the monarchist Hobbes, the only justifiable principle of political society is the preservation of men “from having a Master” (176). Neither patriarchy nor tyranny protect life or such liberty as might be obtainable in civil society. Hence the need for a rightly-designed social contract, “a true Contract between the People and the Chiefs it chooses for itself” (181), protecting the natural rights to life and freedom if not necessarily the conventional right to property. Here we see the emergence of what Plattner calls the attack on “bourgeois society from the Left,” an attack characterized by “both a more extreme individualism”—given the solitary condition of men in the state of nature—”and a more extreme collectivism”—given the attack on property and also the justification of a distinction between contracting peoples and their rulers, the former giving up their sovereignty and the latter taking it (Plattner, 3, 5). Rousseau thinks that the early attempts at such contracts must have failed because the contracts must have been ill-designed by inexperienced men, by nature ill-fitted for the civil societies they now lived in; “new revolutions” must come, to bring government “closer to a legitimate institution” (182). But they won’t come easily because political rule, like civil society itself, drapes itself in gaudy appearances. Considering the establishment of the spectacular courts of Europe’s popes and Sun Kings, Rousseau reasons, “There must have come a time when the eyes of the People were so dazzled that their leaders only had to said to the least of men, be Great, you and your entire race, and he at once appeared great to everyone as well as in his own eyes, and his Descendants were exalted still further” (183), all culminating in despotism and thus the effective dissolution of the original contract and its replacement with government by force. As Plattner observes, “it might be said that the very notion of the ‘state of nature’ in modern political philosophy was from its inception bound up with the denial of a natural right to rule”—a right seen in Aristotle, among othersbut denied to non-philosophers by Rousseau (Plattner, 96).

Thus “the Mankind of one age is not the Mankind of another age” (197-198). Human nature changes, and “original man gradually vanishes” (186), a claim that makes Rousseau very much the forefather of historical relativism or historicism. “Forever asking of others what we are, without ever daring to ask it of ourselves, in the midst of so much Philosophy, humanity, politeness, and Sublime maxims, we have nothing more than a deceiving and frivolous exterior, honor without virtue, reason without wisdom, and pleasure without happiness” (188). The individualist Left will therefore call for no-rule or anarchy, a return to the state of nature that Rousseau himself regards as impossible, while the collectivist Left will call for egalitarian collectivism under a powerful sovereign state which may or may not “wither away,” as Marx over-optimistically supposed. Both sides of the Left will endorse historicism, albeit much more rigorously than Rousseau, who never posits ‘iron laws’ of History, predictable by ‘social scientists’ or by ‘leaders of the People.’ For Rousseau (in Plattner’s words), “nature remains ultimately superior to convention,” the product of what will come to be called History (Plattner, 118).

The question of inequality in civil societies of course remains very much with us. Although the old, Marxist Left of the previous two centuries atrophied under a new form of the rule of ‘the few,’ and the ‘New Left’ of the 1960s (that incoherent attempt to amalgamate Rousseauian individualism with Rousseauian communitarianism) quickly migrated into the rule of ‘the few’ in academia, the entertainment industry, and some portions of governments, a sharp increase in economic inequality beginning in the 1980s has renewed interest in Marxism. In his 2013 book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the French economist Thomas Piketty argues that capital return perennially exceeds the rate of economic growth in mature capitalist societies, resulting in ever-increasing economic equality that does not self-correct. Prudently, he does not call for the violent overthrow of the international bourgeoisie by a revolutionary proletarian vanguard, contenting himself with a call for a global tax on wealth. But such a neo-Marxist analysis relies too heavily on economic forces abstracted from all others; a needed, broader view may be found in Walter Scheidel’s The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century. Scheidel finds that any lasting implementation of something like genuine economic and social equality has in the past and would in the future require cataclysmic suffering caused by mass mobilization warfare on the scale of the two world wars, thoroughgoing revolution, state failure, and/or lethal pandemics (6)—events desired by “nobody in his or her right mind” (436). And even then, the effects would only be temporary, as human societies reconstituted themselves with new hierarchies.

Scheidel’s full argument, based on substantial historical evidence, thus presents a Rousseauian theme with a Hobbesian twist. For my purposes here, I shall compare his account of the origins of inequality with Rousseau’s: How does Rousseau’s argument hold up under the weight of evidence accumulated in the two-and-a-half centuries since his discourses were published? Scheidel never mentions Rousseau at all, but he titles the first section of his book “A Brief History of Inequality,” so the comparison makes sense.

One major difference becomes visible immediately. Rousseau finally eschews historical investigation for natural philosophy, conducted by his semi-Cartesian ‘method’ of introspection; Scheidel, sticks to historical researches, even as he acknowledges its limitations. Rousseau’s inquiry centers on psychology or human nature as understood by self-examination. To some extent as a result of this divergence, Scheidel’s understanding of nature itself is historicized, an example of the theory of evolution or ‘natural history.’ In this sense Rousseau, no Christian, nonetheless follows the Biblical account more closely, positing man as originally solitary or ‘Adamic.’ For Rousseau, the primate that most resembles Man is the orangutan, the ‘Wild Man of Borneo,’ a species which eighteenth-century scientists thought might actually be human. The orangutan is a solitary species. For Scheidel, the evolutionist, Man evolved not from the Asian branch of the primate family but from its African branch; human beings share an ancestor with the social, hierarchical, and sometimes violent gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos. Thus Scheidel simply does not need to explain how men more or less duped themselves into civil-social inequality, violence, and work; we were apples which didn’t fall far from the African primate family tree.

This much noted, Scheidel’s account does track Rousseau’s in some of its main lines, allowing for the much greater detail his 500 pages afford him. Some of the earliest human inventions—throwable weapons—actually decreased the inequalities based on bodily advantages of size and strength enjoyed by males or females and by ‘alpha’ males over ‘gamma’ males. Cognitive and linguistic skills also reduced inequality because they enabled physically weaker individuals to think and talk their way out of brute domination. Further (and this begins to pick up Rousseau’s argument, and also Hobbes’s), “Groups were not yet large enough, productive capabilities not yet differentiated enough, and intergroup conflict and territoriality not yet developed enough to make submission to the few seem the least bad option for the many” (28). As in Rousseau, Scheidel’s early humans were nomadic hunters and gatherers, albeit more groupish ones than Rousseau would admit. This condition lasted a long time, as “economic growth requires some degree of inequality in income and consumption to encourage innovation and surplus production” (30). Although never entirely free of hierarchy (ancient burial sites show that some persons were buried with much more elaborate decorations than others), these early societies were more egalitarian than the strong-man societies that preceded them and the property-based societies that came later. “For all we can tell, social or economic inequality in the Paleothic remained sporadic and transient” (32). This period corresponds to what Rousseau calls “the genuine youth of the world.”

“Inequality took off only after the last Ice Age,” when “the first inter-glacial warm period for more than 100,000 years created an environment that was more favorable to economic and social development” (33). A milder climate made farming and herding more practical, and with them property; unthawed rivers and ocean coastlines also made fishing more practical, with attendant fights over fishing grounds. Scheidel identifies the “two crucial determinants of inequality” as “ownership rights to land and livestock,” along with “the ability to transmit wealth from one generation to the next” which a more settled way of life makes possible (37). Property rights solemnize inequality; inheritance makes it durable. And as in Rousseau, the cultivation of cereal grains “played a critical role in the development of more complex social hierarchies”; “unlike perennial roots, which are continuously available but rot quickly, grain crops are gathered en masse at specific harvest times and are suitable for longer-term storage” (42). Mass harvests require coordination, likely conducive to ruling hierarchies; storage makes surplus food accumulation possible, for the benefit of those hierarchies. “States first arose in those parts of the world that had first developed agriculture”; animals too were domesticated, and “sooner or later humans shared their fate” (42). With slavery established on a large scale, “inequality escalated to previously unimaginable heights”(42).  Inequality could now be civilly and politically enforced, with “government institutions in turn exacerbat[ing] existing inequalities and creat[ing] new ones”; with this the Hobbesian need to organize into formal political hierarchies in which the weak looked to the strong for protection against the strong prevailed over egalitarian sentiments, as the ancient poleis and empires alike turned for the most part to despotic regimes and an ethos of warmaking (43-44). Scheidel finds it telling that such states “appeared independently around the world wherever ecological preconditions allowed” (44); they appear to be developments of a sort of natural history, an interaction of human beings with climate.

Since “history has known only two ideal-typical modes of wealth acquisition”—”making and taking”—and ancient states did plenty of both, if without the centralized efficiency of the modern or ‘Machiavellian’ centralized state. Empires were the dominant state forms, monarchies the dominant regimes, with poleis surviving at the margins of empires, vulnerable to conquest and their rulers therefore often hoping for alliances and even empire for themselves. After acknowledging the advantages ‘modernity’ gives to rulers, Scheidel remarks the similarities that persist between China’s Han Dynasty in the first centuries of the Christian Era to the kind of rule wielded by the Standing Committee of the Politburo in the China of today. Rousseau would be appalled. But he would understand. As for the French Revolution for which Rousseau so often catches blame, regime change, expropriation of the property of aristocrats and clergy, the execution of said rulers during the Terror, and mass mobilization for war in 1793 all produced economic and social leveling, but nothing “even remotely comparable to the leveling brought by the major twentieth-century revolutions,” in which millions died (235). In his account of the mutual reinforcement of economic and political inequalities, one might add a nuance to Scheidel’s story: the most egalitarian regime could never actually fulfill its mission because the military, political, and economic power needed to level social classes itself requires the establishment of a ‘new class’ of enforcers, themselves controlling vast riches even if they do not personally own them. Only Marx’s fabled ‘withering-away of the State’ would solve that problem, and it has never happened the well-managed way Marx anticipated. And as Scheidel observes, violent state failure may lead to temporary leveling, but tribes and warlords soon move in.

While beginning with very different accounts of the origins of inequality, Rousseau and Scheidel concur regarding many of the intermediate steps up to and in the final step of the modern states. Scheidel is more Hobbesian/pessimistic than Rousseau regarding the prospects for institutional reforms that would lead to durable gains in civic egalitarianism. He would be unlikely to expect the enactment of anything like the regime described in The Social Contract, absent a major war, violent and comprehensive regime change, state failure, or devastating pestilence. For him, human beings are too social and inequality too natural for that.