Transcript for Rousseau's Second Discourse Lecture

0. Introduction

For Rousseau, the poor welcome inequality, because it gives them the opportunity to dominate the even poorer. I quote to you Rousseau:

Citizens consent to bear chains, so they may impose chains on others in turn.

Inequality for Rousseau isn’t sustained by just the materialistic greed of a small elite, but by the social vanity of everyone, even those at the bottom. As you can already tell, Rousseau’s Second Discourse is going to challenge your understanding of inequality in all directions. On one hand, Rousseau is going to show inequality to be a lot worse than you’d thought. It’s an existential threat to society that hurts not just the poor, but also the rich. On the other hand, Rousseau will show you that even radical inequality has its benefits, that the competitive frenzy it incites gives birth to rare moments of greatness that we wouldn’t want to live without.

Rousseau’s project in this book is to discover where inequality really comes from. And answering that question isn’t just going to take us through the entire history of civilization, but to the very depths of the human soul.

In this lecture, you aren’t just going to be learning about inequality out there, you’re going to be learning about inequality in yourself. The desire for superiority, for status, for vanity that is in every human heart. That is the real subject of the Second Discourse.

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Let's say in the next half century we find a way to reverse climate change. Let's say we develop defense capacity so strong that we can stop any nuclear attack in any nation. Let's say on top of all that, we get our birth rates back up, we get obesity down, we wean everyone off all the addictive drugs. That'll probably be the best 50 years in human history. It'll also just be us barely covering our ass because all those issues, all those existential issues: Nuclear war, climate change, they're created by us. And that's one of the central messages in the Second Discourse.

Rousseau thinks that civilization is responsible for many more problems than it can resolve. But I need to make this clear in the outset. The Second Discourse, this book right here, is not an anti-civilizational text because if you read Rousseau carefully—I’m thinking of endnote 9 here—you'll learn that it's neither desirable nor possible to return to some state of nature. It's not desirable because despite its many, many errors, civilization's many errors, it is what makes the development of our faculties possible: Philosophy, art, technology, history itself, none of this would be possible without civilization.

Rousseau's going to spend his book critiquing civilization then, pointing out all the ways that it goes wrong, so that we have the opportunity to do it right. The Second Discourse purports to have identified the fundamental first principles of human nature, the very laws of motion of the human soul, and the seductive promises.

If we understand what Rousseau is trying to teach us, then we can build lives and create societies with all the goods of civilization and very few of the bad. It's because our desire for prestige, for recognition, is so often damaging, it so often leads us astray, that Rousseau is going to teach us how to redirect those forces into living nourishing lives. It's because technologies like metallurgy, agriculture, we can add on to that, maybe social media, can seem so inviting initially, but come back to bite us in the most unsuspecting of ways, that Rousseau is going to rescue a specific conception of technological development.

The Second Discourse is more relevant than ever, but there's an even stronger reason to read it, which is Rousseau's all-encompassing influence on all strands of modern thought. Rousseau would go on to influence Marx on the left, Nietzsche on the right, he'd go on to influence everyone in the French Revolution. As a father of the French Revolution, I think, properly conceived, he'd be both what Robespierre, as well as what Robespierre's opponents cited for justification. Rousseau would also be the progenitor of the Romantic Movement that held sentiment, intuition, emotion up so high. At the same time, he would be the greatest influence on that champion of reason, Immanuel Kant, who honored Rousseau so much that he said that Rousseau set me straight and taught me how to honor mankind. After Rousseau, we're either with him or we're against him, but we're always, in some sense, responding to him.