Rousseau's Critique of Inequality by Fred Neuhouser | Notes & Summary
Introduction
Second discourse (SD) is about inquiring into the origin (cause) and foundations (whether it is legitimate) of inequality.
This makes SD the founding text of a long line of Genealogical works.
One peculiar thing about SD is he’s not looking for a real, historical cause but to given an account of all the conditions that create it.
What Neuhouser has to show is why these two questions are related and not independent.
One way that these things are tied together is through the concept of nature.
Plato and Aristotle both identified the origin of inequality in nature and, through that justified it.
The moderns break from Plato and Aristotle in that only what is deserved (out of your own free will and not natural gifts) can justify inequality. So nature cannot justify it because we are all equals due to freedom/reason, etc.
The commonsense view is to identify inequality as resulting from either nature (desire to be better or simply material scarcity) or free will and both seek to justify it.
Rousseau’s criteria for whether something is justified or isn’t justified won’t take the hopeless path of trying to figure out if something is deserved.
Rousseau will argue that nature has little to do with the inequalities but he does not collapse the foundations question into the origin question. That is to say, Rousseau will construct another criterion of legitimacy that is not natural law but constructed from natural law and applied to society.
Rousseau’s critique of inequality sheds a lot of the unattractive elements of similar analysis and prevents it from being utopian
He is able to show why it is such a common, persistent, and almost unavoidable fact of human existence (if you couldn’t show this, your theory is in big tension with history).
He does not attribute all of inequality to nature or human nature so that its antidote does not have to “commit violence against nature.”
Inequality is not a moral evil in itself and is sometimes justified but is dangerous for a lot of the effects it produces.
Chapter breakdown
Chapter 1: why the sorts of inequality that are most interesting to Rousseau is not the result of nature.
Chapter 2: why it does have its origin in amour-propre.
Chapter 3: Tackling the normative "foundation" question. Rousseau will suggest that most inequalities are not authorized by natural law. He gives us another standard which we can judge inequalities that is, in some way, also grounded in "nature."
Chapter 4: Is to construct this new standard of judgement whether something is to be legitimate inequality in society.
Chapter 5: Applying this to contemporary political theory
Chapter 1
This chapter is a reconstruction of Rousseau’s argument of why nature is not the origin of inequality
Natural vs. Social/Artificial
Nature on one hand is contrasted against perverse. It is in this sense normative.
Nature on the other hand is contrasted against artificial what is the result of free will. It is in this sense descriptive.
Note that artificial/social when contrasted against nature in this second sense is not bad at all. Social implies it being malleable which is key, natural is what is given. The natural is going to circumscribe the realm of the possible outside of which all proposals are Utopian.
ONE: Natural inequalities are not the origin of social inequalities
Social inequalities are ones that are maintained by consent/opinion/free will (e.g. the serf believing the lord to have special privileges) and are relative. Natural inequalities are given by nature (height, strength, etc.) and absolute (in the sense that they are non-relative).
He kinda gives an empirical argument here (just look around how social inequality is not linked to natural inequalities at all). But I think there is a deeper point that social inequalities come from a different source (ie. Freedom/consent) and are fundamentally authorized in a different way (natural inequalities are not authorized at all) such that even if you were to disagree about the empirical observation it’s still worth asking where it comes from.
TWO: Human nature is not the origin of social inequalities
TWO DISPOSITIONS in the state of nature is amour de-soi (ADS) and pity. Both are mechanical. ADS is stronger than pity. We share the same with animals.
What separates us from animals are TWO CAPACITIES. Freedom functions without reason; ie. It’s a thin conception that chooses spontaneously and does not choose in accordance with reason. Perfectibility is not moral perfectibility but that we have latent faculties that can but not necessarily are developed e.g. language.
What makes these part of human nature and not amour propre (AP)?
These faculties are pre-reason, pre-consent, pre-freedom (in the stronger sense of acting in accordance with one’s opinion).
ADS is largely determined already by nature even if it can be malleable (tastes in food) whereas AP is solely determined by sociality.`
ADS can be satisfied by one lone person whereas AP can only be satisfied in the group.
Rousseau wants to put into his state of nature the minimal conditions, what is the bare minimum. What he must have in his sight is Hobbes who thinks not only do we desire glory in the state of nature but we also have ability to reason and communicate and enter into the social contract.
Rousseau wants to LIMIT the realm of the natural because he doesn’t want to smuggle things that belong in society. He wants to make sure he doesn’t paint human society as overly determined.
THREE: Natural scarcity (state of the natural world) is not the origin of social inequalities
Nothing about ADS and pity make us pursue social inequality as an end in itself.
However, ADS can lead us to fight for inequality out of scarcity. But Rousseau’s point is that so much of what we consider to be scarce is socially scarce… it’s to satisfy the social rather than natural part of ourselves.
The nature of Rousseau’s argument
Is hypothetical not real.
It is close to explaining the source of the Hudson River where you trace out the supporting conditions (the streams that flow into it), and not give a historical account it came to be.
Modeled after physics in that 1. It is modeled off of Descartes treatise about how our world can emerge out of initial conditions of chaos from a few mechanical laws of motion. 2. It can be falsified by empirical evidence ie. It is testable even if the account of the theory cannot be.
Chapter 2
The aim of this chapter is to reconstruct Rousseau’s answer to SD’s central question of where social inequality comes from. The answer will be that it comes from Amour-Propre (AP) in combination with a host of auxiliary conditions.
AP provides the force that creates inequality.
AP is relative in that what it seeks is comparative standing. Comparative standing is not necessarily superior even if tends to be because the way Romance forces us to become the best.
AP is first awakened in our comparison with animals and then assumes the desire for superior standing with romance.
AP is artificial whereas ADS is natural
It’s a sentiment that makes us human (whereas we share ADS with animals)
It’s a sentiment that is responsible for all the ills (contrasted against the positive normative conception of “natural”)
Sentiment that is ONLY made possible by society (because of the ways in which it is relative)
The right pushback would be, what do we gain out of this if AP is always necessary in society. The answer is that how AP can be directed will be shown to be incredibly malleable. They may all have bad consequences but there’s a meaningful difference in how it can be directed. In other words, inequality will always be a permanent feature of the social world because he gives us fundamental pillars of civilization as its cause. But that does not mean we still don’t have a lot of control over how that AP and, thus, inequality is directed.
But AP alone cannot be the sole answer to inequality. The first appearance of AP marks the happiest and most durable epoch where AP is directed at personal qualities.
They need a set of auxiliary conditions in order to inflame it. The order in which the conditions are presented historically are perhaps better read as the order of explanatory priority.
Leisure precedes AP, implying that people only have time to focus on AP when they have a certain baseline of needs met.
Leisure (free time after doing what one needs to do to address one’s base needs) by definition means that there is now time to create luxuries. He defines luxuries as objects which are not needs but start appearing to be needs.
Division of labor starts forming 1. Distinct “types” of people (which will be later solidified to classes or guilds that are enforced by the state and 2. Increases the dependence of people.
All to this creates differentiation among people.
Private property is next.
It is reliant on leisure, luxury, division of labor, and differentiation.
He focuses on the owning of land in particular because it is one that exaggerates dependence. It is what the later Marx would call means of production.
Rousseau thinks that the continued use of a land leads to its ownership NOT as a normative point but as a descriptive phenomena. In fact he rejects the idea that use can lead to ownership and uses this as an attack of the state.
Rousseau does believe natural law indicates that what we create is our private property. But, unlike Locke he isn’t going to justify or condemn social institutions based only on how they conform to natural law, there will be another standard used to evaluate things like what type of private property of legitimate. But the fact that natural law prescribes private property should make us give up the idea that he was for the abolishment of all private property.
The state is what legitimizes all of this. Backs it up not just with force but even more importantly with authority.
Chapter 3 The Normative Resources of Nature
The first two chapters deal with the question of “origin,” the next two chapters deal with the question of “foundation.”
Most social inequality is not authorized by natural law
Natural inequalities do not need to be justified, they just are.
Some social inequalities are justified by natural inequalities such as authority of parent over child.
To ask what social inequalities are legitimate is to ask 1. Which ones are unobjectable 2. only a subset of these will also generate obligations for those who recognize it as legitimate.
Rousseau suggests in the very end that social inequalities are only justified when they track natural inequalities. This clearly can’t be right because 1. He talks about legitimate ownership of property through labor that won’t track perfectly natural inequalities 2. “Natural law” only partially answers the question of “foundations.” That is to say, there is another standard, that of the “true contract,” which is going to be the standard.
Rousseau presents a very thin view of nature.
Nature is going to be very “silent” in that we can’t look to if for answers. For many societal issues 1. Does not have the resources to mediate 2. Even if it does, it’s not clear what content it prescribes 3. Even when it is there may be additional, artificial reinforcement necessary.
Conversely moral law does not hold in the state of nature either, inhabitants aren’t moral beings who can act in accordance with prescriptions. They have natural virtue (which is to maximize one’s own wellbeing at minimum harm to others, which naturally follows from following ADS and pity in their exact proportions, and does lead to collective flourishing of the group).
Another way to say it is that Nature is teleologically insufficient. Nature following its own mechanisms its own logic (be it evolution, or Hegel’s spirit) is not sufficient. Conscious, artificial intervention is necessary.
Rousseau’s normative conception of human nature is going to help us arbitrate what inequalities are acceptable and what aren’t. The basic intuition is a teleological one that because humans are given certain capacities/dispositions it is good to exercise them. So the descriptive will be the basis of the normative. After Darwin, we might not be able to go as far as Rousseau in looking for something teleological but we can still retreat to the (quite strong) position that development of key capacities is a good. There are five constituent parts: Life, Well-Being, Freedom, Amour-Propre, and Perfectibility.
Life
Life is a higher form of good than well-being (almost always bar extreme conditions) because the latter rests on the foundation of the former.
Life and freedom cannot be arbitrated (moral philosophy has nothing to help someone deciding between the two arbitrate that decision). Both are non-fungible and constitutive of a good life. (Presumably both are higher than well-being and perfectibility)
What this implies is that no contract where life or freedom is bargained away with can be legitimate.
Freedom
There are two senses of freedom 1. The basic metaphysical freedom, the ability to choose (this can’t be taken away from us 2. The more important sense that will serve as normative criterion is social freedom, not being subject to the wills of others.
For Rousseau, to be free is to be freed from domination, from acting in accordance with a will that goes against one’s own even if one consents to it in a contract out of necessity.
This seems to be a classical Republican move but Rousseau significantly alters this conception. Because for the republicans a foreign will is a will that goes against one’s interests, even if one does not recognize those interests (paternalism is permitted). For Rousseau, a will can be foreign in two ways 1. Goes against one’s current will (even if it is wrong) 2. Goes against one’s interest. The former criterion is sufficient for domination the latter is neither sufficient nor dominant (presumably the Republicans need both to count as domination). So Rousseau is much more stringent because he does not see paternalism as free.
A child obeying a parent is not domination because it conforms to natural inequalities.
General will, when it goes against your will, is also not domination because you participate in its formation to such a significant degree that you recognize it as “mine” (not foreign in the first sense, and not supposed to be foreign in the second)
Rousseau also rightly thinks that it’s very difficult to get paternalism. That a will’s being foreign in the first sense means it will be foreign in the second sense.
Wellbeing has two components happiness and need satisfaction
Need satisfaction is meeting our genuine needs (food, sleep, sex, shelter). Rousseau is going to claim that not only do our artificial needs balloon, but that our genuine needs are often being ignored by civilization.
Happiness is the absence of pain and frustrated desires.
In the state of nature, there is neither. Civilization, Rousseau is going to show, systematically encourages desires that cannot be met universally.
The next two are going to be expanded conceptions of human nature (more so reading SC and E into SD)
Perfectibility
In both Emile and second discourse, Rousseau rejects the path of not having frustrated desires by not encouraging any desires around development of capacities. Because that would leave a key human good out.
In fact, it seems like civilization is fantastic at encouraging the development of human capacities and that is the saving grace for Rousseau, why, even if we could, we should not return.
AP is also a key good because
It is pervasive and unavoidable
It is permissible (satisfiable by all)
And it is essential and important for a good life
Chapter 4 Judging the Legitimacy of Social Inequalities
In the previous chapter we’ve identified the normative resources within human nature. In this chapter, we are going to transfer those normative resources into something resembling laws against which we can test whether certain inequalities are permissible or not.
The first step is to investigate the causal connection between inequality and those normative components within human nature. In other words, we are going to be judging inequality based on its consequences.
For Rousseau equality is not a good in itself. In SC, equality is instrumental for freedom.
Inequality damages freedom in these ways
It makes the lesser off dependent on the better off. What is compelling here isn’t material needs — it is clear POVERTY is more threatening to freedom than INEQUALITY. A google engineer is more unequal with google’s CEO than a migrant worker is to the family-farm owner, but because the latter is more in poverty he is also less free. In other words, if what you are really worried about is dependence (and you take the position that inequality and poverty present a choice) then I would be much worried about alleviating poverty even if that means creating more inequality.
The much more compelling version of this concern is the ability for inequality to create artificial needs that coerce the lesser off into doing things they don’t want, that is what hits home.
If someone is able to leverage their wealth into altering the law.
Inequality damages wellbeing in the following ways (this I think to be the much more compelling critique) and it has to do with how it thwarts AP
The key argument is that it hurts people on both ends of the spectrum. It hurts the lesser off by making them insecure and humiliated, it hurts the better off by giving them pride — confusing the value of things with the value of people.
Societies with great chasms of inequality tend to inflame AP, a whole host of ills come with that: alienation, domination, triviality, you lose interest in the thing itself, etc.
It’s not satisfiable by all, you guarantee that a large part of your population is chronically dissatisfied.
People feel insecure in their relative positions.
The second step is to generate a “criterion of right” by which we can judge different types of inequalities
This is the key passage where Neuhouser identifies Rousseau as suggesting there needs to be a new standard of right: “Perhaps his most important remarks are these: “it is the fundamental maxim of all political right that peoples [give] themselves chiefs to defend their freedom and not to be enslaved by them”; and, somewhat more informatively: why should individuals “give themselves superiors if not to defend them- selves against oppression, and to protect their goods, their freedoms, and their lives, which are, so to speak, the constitutive elements of their being?” (DI, 176/OC III, 180–1)”
The criterion of right is essentially whether an inequality or a system is, in principle, in conflict with the satisfaction of each citizens’ fundamental interests as identified in the state of nature: freedom, AP, well-being, life, and perfectibility.
This is a criterion that stems from nature but pushes beyond it (this universalizability criterion).
This is not consequentialist (maximize good of all) but fits squarely within social contract tradition (protect the good of each).
This criterion does not fully spell out what the tipping point is from benign to harmful inequality but provides a loose framework.
Now that we have our answer, what can we say about the relationship between “origin” and “foundation”?
Inequality is to be evaluated not on its foundation but its consequences.
However, the investigation of inequalities origins helps us to 1. Highlight the constitutive components of mankind through which we construct a criterion of right, a foundation (this is uncovering what has been obscured) 2. It reveals that inequality is not necessary, even if it is very likely 3. It helps delineate what conditions exacerbate inequality.