Rousseau on Inequality

Hello, I'm Catherine Carr, producer of Talking Politics. This is the first episode in our new series of the history of ideas brought to you in partnership with the London Review of Books. In it, David explores the thinking behind some of the most important books in the history of political thought. Today, he looks at Jean-Jacques Rousseau's arguments in his second discourse about the origins of inequality. If human beings were once at peace with one another, how did we end up with so much misery and so much strife? When we think about some of the deepest puzzles of politics, we often start with a what question, so for instance, we could start by asking what is politics. Or the question that I started the last series of history of ideas with Thomas Hobbes's question, what is the state and then the extension of that question with Hobbes, what is peace, what counts as peace, what counts as order or security, what makes us safe. But those aren't the only what questions by any means. And later in this series, I'm going to talk about a 20th century political philosopher, John Rawls, who said explicitly that the starting point for thinking philosophically about politics, the first question, as he said, is what is justice or his extension of that question, what is fairness, what counts as a fair society, and sometimes rules his question and Hobbes' questions that set against each other. So sometimes it's presented as a sort of choice either you're a what is justice, kind of philosopher, or you're a what is peace or what is order, kind of philosopher. But there are very different kinds of fundamental questions that we could ask about politics. And in this series of history of ideas, I want to start with and focus on these other kinds of questions. And I'd characterize them as not the what questions, but the why questions, not what is politics, but why the hell do we have this as politics, why is this our politics, or sometimes even more cutely than why they're how questions, how did we end up here, how did we end up ruling ourselves or being ruled like this by these people and often by implication, how did we end up with these idiots in charge, that's the question. And sometimes it's also a where question to where did we go wrong, if this is where we ended up, where the hell did we get it wrong, where did we get it wrong, how did we get it wrong, why is it so wrong? I think I'm pretty sure we all recognize that sometimes that feels like the fundamental question of politics and it kind of has felt like the fundamental question of politics quite a lot in recent years. But I'm going to start this series with someone who posed that question in a kind of definitive form in the middle of the 18th century. So in a book that was published in 1755 by the Swiss, not French, he's often thought of as French, but he was born in Geneva, the Swiss philosopher, thinker, writer, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. And the book is sometimes called the second discourse, Rousseau's second discourse or the discourse on inequality. And in that book, this is how he poses the why or the how question. And I'm just going to quote this briefly, this is what Rousseau says, how did we end up in a world where a child should govern an old man and imbecile, an idiot, should lead a wise man and a handful of people should gorge themselves with superfluities while the hungry multitude goes in want of necessities. And it's that last bit that really speaks to people across the ages, I think, although what it is to be led by an idiot speaks to people too. But how the hell did we end up in a world where the rich stuff their faces and the poor lack the basic necessities? That in the second discourse is Rousseau's question. Why, not what? So one of the interesting things about that question in that book is it's not where Rousseau starts. So what I have just read to you are the very last lines of the book. It ends with that puzzle. It doesn't actually end there if you read it and it is definitely worth reading. The book has this whole series of slightly crazy footnotes as well in which all the stuff that Rousseau couldn't stuff into the main argument he has in these disquisitions and assides about all sorts of things, vegetarianism, the sex life of animals, some pretty weird anthropology too. It's worth reading, but the book ends, the argument ends with that puzzle. And the reason it comes at the end is that the why question does kind of start at the end. If the why or the how question is how did we end up here? You start where we are and you kind of have to work back, particularly if you want to know where did we go wrong. You have to retrace your steps or we have to retrace our steps as a society or even as Rousseau does in this book as a species. So that's the question at the end. Actually the question at the beginning of Rousseau's second discourse is a different question because it was written in response to an essay competition of the kind they used to have in 18th century France where the academy poses a question and people are invited to answer it. And the question for this competition and again I'll read it out, it's different kind of question. So this was the question that Rousseau was ostensibly answering and it starts with a what? What is the origin of inequality among people and is it authorised by natural law? Second half of that question is yes no question which is always a bit dangerous for an essay prize because someone could just say no and indeed Rousseau did say no but he went on some length as to why the answer was no. It's called Rousseau's second discourse because five years earlier the first discourse was an answer to another essay competition question. This is a really pompous question that Rousseau answered and that answer was published in 1750 so first time round the question for the prize was has the restoration of the sciences and the arts contributed to the purification of morals. So that just is a yes or no question and Rousseau's answer was emphatically no. That question was basically saying has art and science made us better off better more decent more honorable people leading better and pure lives and Rousseau said no no no no. The first discourse is more important in Rousseau's story certainly in his life story than the second discourse for a couple of reasons. First of all he said explicitly in his own account of his life that when he was thinking about that question and thinking about possibly entering the competition the answer came to him as a kind of revelation so there was a sort of conventional wisdom the wisdom of enlightenment progress that the arts and the sciences even if they don't quite lead to the purification of morals certainly lead to the betterment of the human condition but when Rousseau really thought about it and he was walking along the road and thinking he suddenly came to the conclusion that the answer is obviously no that actually as he concluded human beings were once much better off indeed he says they were once good and what has happened to morals among other things is that what we call civilization has corrupted them and us we are worse off because of what is conventionally called progress and once he'd come to that conclusion that civilization was a kind of trap he never budged from it he varied it and he varied the emphasis of it in his many writings but it was a genuine life-changing revelation for him at least in his version of his own life the other reason why it matters is he won the prize somewhat surprisingly given the pomposity of the question and the clarity of Rousseau's answer basically telling them it was nonsense but he won sometimes those prize juries like to be told that they've asked the wrong question and in winning the prize Rousseau's life was also changed because it made him famous it didn't make him as famous as he was to become he was to become in a sense given the shape of the world back then world famous one of the most famous people in Europe a genuine international celebrity but winning the prize set him on the road to that and it introduced him to French enlightenment society particularly in Paris he met the great men and indeed women of the day it changed his life but the second discourse outside of Rousseau's life story is the more important book partly because it's just a better book it's a much more interesting book in a way the first essay question that Rousseau had to answer it was a bit easy to be shocking because he was being invited to attack the arts and the sciences and even artists and scientists sometimes wonder whether they got a slightly inflated impression of themselves or more often whether they're fellow artists and scientists are a bit over keen on their own importance but in the second discourse the line of attack is much broader because he's talking about everyone the second discourse is an argument about humanity about what it is to be human and that includes the non-artists and the non-scientists as well it includes everyone it's an incredibly wide-ranging indeed sweeping book it was clearly too sweeping for the prize jury because he didn't win the prize second time round it's also true that Rousseau was a pretty annoying person and it may be by making himself famous he allowed people to decide they didn't much like him. Anyway, it is nonetheless the better book. It's the more interesting book. It's a completely remarkable book. It's more widely read now than the first discourse, but it's not the book on which Rousseau's almost eternal fame, fame that has lasted to this day rests. There are other later things that he wrote for which he is still better known. He's writing on education in Emil. He more or less invented the genre of the tell-all, self-exposing autobiography in his book, The Confessions, which is still a pretty painful, an awkward read, and his great work of political philosophy, the social contract. But I've decided not to talk about the social contract here, to talk about the second discourse partly because I just prefer the second discourse. I think it's a more interesting book. The social contract is also an interesting book, but it's difficult in ways I'll come on to. Actually, it has a narrower remit, I think. The second discourse contains some of the other stuff in it, too. It has things about education. It certainly has things about looking into yourself and trying to work out who you really are. It's partly an account of what it is for human beings to know themselves, self-knowledge, and indeed self-revelation. It's certainly about politics, too. It's also a book about social psychology in a way. If you had to characterize it in more 21st century terms, that why or how question for Russo is a question about social self-harm. He thought, in the middle of the 18th century, he was living in a society, particularly by the time he'd moved to France, that was harming itself, doing itself extraordinary damage that the human beings who made up this society were trapped in patterns of behaviour that were clearly bad for them. How did they get there? And why? Why are they doing that? So what's his answer in the second discourse? Well, one thing to say about it is that for Russo isn't really a choice as such in the sense that he's not trying to identify the moment when we embrace this way of life, when we picked it out of a range of options, and there isn't a kind of revelatory moment for human beings comparable to his one thinking about the first question. Were human societies or human beings in societies decided that this was the way they were going to go? It's not a fork in the road story as such. It's much more gradual than that. If anything, it's an accident rather than a choice, or rather it's a series of unfortunate events. It's missteps along the way, and it's a long story, and Russo treats it as a story of many thousands of generations of human experience. It's a long story, and when I was reading it for this talk, it brought to mind a line from a very different writer, very different writer, Ernest Hemingway, in his novel The Sun also rises. So in that novel, one character asks another famously, how did you go bankrupt and gets the reply two ways, gradually, then suddenly. Russo's story of how humanity went morally bankrupt in the second discourse is that, gradually, then suddenly, in the sense that Hemingway is trying to convey about bankruptcy. A lot of the story is small early steps that aren't even conscious at the time, the little things that we do, the little corners that we cut, the decisions that we make that don't seem important, that us maybe slightly self-indulgent or haven't properly been thought through, but aren't in their own terms and in real time of any great consequence. But they build up, they accumulate little debts or little deceptions, and then the moment comes when there is a choice, when things have to be done, when the resources look too spare, and then we discover that we don't actually have options, that when the bankruptcy comes suddenly, it's because it's too late, and then we ask ourselves, how did we get here, how did we get to the point where we no longer have a choice that we lack the resources to resist what's coming, and we realize that the story goes back to the beginning again, and it started with the early missteps. That's the kind of story that Russo tells about all of us and for all of us in the second discourse. So where does he think it actually begins? So it begins in a version of what, also for Hobbes, we have come to call state of nature theory, that is an argument about what it is to be human in a pre-social setting. So Russo also flirting with 18th century, anthropology and using language that many of us now find uncomfortable, is also talking about what he calls primitive societies, but primitive here really means first, what comes first, the thing at the beginning. Primitive pre-social, certainly in his terms, pre-civilized, and you have to remember when he says pre-civilized, he does not think civilization is a good thing, so at least it doesn't come with that kind of sneering connotation. What was it like to be a natural human being? And Russo says explicitly that it was a time of peace, that we were able, peacefully, and successfully, to coexist. In that revelation, he thought it meant that we were in some sense good, naturally good, but certainly he thought we were not naturally inclined to harm each other. It is partly an argument about equality and inequality, that was the question he was posed by the prize committee, what is the origin of inequality among people, and he doesn't say that the natural condition of human beings is inherently equal, we weren't once all the same, we're different. Some of us are stronger, some of us are weaker, some of us are healthier, and some of us are much less healthy, and in natural societies, if you get sick you will probably die, so it really matters, but there is a kind of deeper equality there for Russo, which is we are relatively speaking if we are healthy, and if we're not healthy there's not a lot we can do about it pre-meds them, but if we are healthy we are relatively speaking self-sufficient. The reason we can co-exist is we are not codependent, he thought. We could do our own thing, and he says explicitly of the possibility of conflict in the state of nature, that if we do get into conflict with other human beings we have an option which is to walk away, he actually says you just disappear into the woods, and you'll be fine, he's thinking of forager or hunter-gatherer societies, if you are a forager, just go and forage somewhere else if you don't like the people who are foraging around you, there is a means of escape, but the fact is an argument for natural peace stands in obvious contrast and Russo makes this point absolutely explicitly that part of what he is arguing against is the vision of Thomas Hobbes, so Hobbes, as I talked about in the last series, is the philosopher who said that the state of nature is a state of war, the war of all against all life is nasty, brutish and short, we cannot help but fight each other, and Russo says not only can we help it, we don't, we have no need to fight each other, and so that contrast is absolutely explicit, and one way to frame it is in that language of equality and inequality, because if what equalizes us for Russo in the state of nature is that anyone can simply walk away, what equalizes us for Hobbes in the state of nature is that anyone can attack anyone else, and one way to think about this is actually in the language of what happens when we're asleep, so for Hobbes in the state of nature, when you are asleep, you don't know whether someone's going to attack you, and for Russo in the state of nature, if you don't like someone, just wait for that person to go to sleep, and then disappear, don't attack them, you can just go, sleep is an escape for Russo, the other person's sleep, our sleep for Hobbes is our natural vulnerability, so that contrast is real and it's stark, but it does sometimes get really overblown, for Hobbes versus Russo contrast, so let me just give one example of a place where I think it's overblown, so it's a book that was published last year by Rutger Breggman called Human Kind, an argument about whether we are naturally conflictual or cooperative species, are humans prone to fight, or are they prone to be friends, and Breggman wants to say that in the modern world we've bought Hobbes' propaganda and we think that we need states because otherwise we'll be at each other's throat, and it's nonsense, he says, naturally we cooperate and actually states make us more likely to fight, and he says there's a choice in modern thought, you're either on the side of Hobbes or you go with Russo, Hobbes is the philosopher of human beings as nasty, Russo is the philosopher of human beings as nice, for Hobbes we fight, for Russo we are naturally friends, Russo is on this account explicitly the friendly philosopher, that's too much, that is pushing it too far, that is too schematic, but from anything else it's kind of odd to think that Russo is the philosopher of friendship given that his argument in the second discourse is quite explicitly about solitaryness and self-sufficiency, the fact we can be at peace in nature because we don't depend on other people, because we can walk away, we are among other things indifferent to other human beings, that's what allows for peace, relatively indifferent, that is we don't much care what they think of us, we don't need much to care what we think of them, we do a bit and I'll come onto that, but on the whole we can just think about ourselves, in some ways Hobbes is the philosopher of futile attempts at friendship, Hobbes is state of nature is where people want to be friends but they can't because they can't trust each other, Russo isn't even sure they want to be, so it's not that, I would put the contrast differently, the fundamental difference between Russo and Hobbes is account of the state of nature is that Russo thinks in the state of nature we are not self-conscious. In the sense, we don't really compare ourselves to other human beings. We are not naturally a comparative species. So we do make comparisons, so we will compare ourselves. He says in the state of nature to wild beasts and we will know that they are stronger than us. So if you meet a lion or a tiger, it's not just you have the option to run away. You really should. But that doesn't trigger in us feelings of inadequacy or make us worry about, broadly speaking, are we better or worse than the lion? It's a kind of fact of the world and indeed it's a fate that will befall some people. But it doesn't affect our pride. Whereas for Hobbes, pride is hardwired there from the beginning. Hobbes is among other things, the philosopher of vain glory, of vanity, of human preening, of our desire to look better than other people to be thought well of. He thinks that's part of what makes us human. And Russo, to a large extent, doesn't. What Russo does have in common with Hobbes, is he thinks that naturally we have a kind of selfishness, which he calls Amord de Soire, Love of Self. But it really means a desire to preserve ourselves. It's that Hobbesian notion that we are hardwired for self-preservation. In the state of nature, all human beings, indeed, all animals, are going to try to avoid death. It's only natural. But to call that selfishness is going a bit far. It is just part of what it means to be alive. For Russo, that kind of drive for self-preservation in the state of nature goes with another quality, which is very different and which he calls, as we might call it, pity. That is the ability to pity other human beings. So the way in which we do connect with other human beings is we do not like to see them suffer. And Russo thinks this is just a fact of human makeup, true then, true now, true in his day, true in our day, he would say, just look at us, look into ourselves. When we see another human being suffering, if you watch the news and you see a child starving in some other part of the world, unless you are in human, unless you are some kind of psychopath, you will be moved by it. You may well cry. We are programmed to feel the suffering of others. We have in us the natural capacity for pity. Pity rather than pride. So Russo contrasts two different kinds of self-love, the kind of self-love that just drives us to seek to keep ourselves alive. We will protect ourselves if we need to, by walking away. But then there is what he calls amor propra, which is much closer to what we mean by pride, a kind of prideful self-consciousness in which we value our own value by what other people think of us. We want to be thought well of. It's much, much closer to that Hobbesian notion of vanity and vain glory, much closer to that than self-preservation. That's the difference between Hobbes and Russo. For Hobbes, that vanity is there right at the beginning. For Russo, it's not. But again, it's not as simple as saying that the Russo story, the why that he wants to answer is how and why did we go from being a species capable of pity to being a civilized species, weighed down with pride, with vanity, with self-consciousness. That is part of his story, but it's more complicated than that. Partly because we never abandoned pity, we still have it. So even in civilized societies like ours, like his, like France then, which he thought was civilized, not just for better or for worse, for worse. In civilized societies, we feel pity. We don't like to see other human beings suffer. We cry. He thinks pity under civilization is different from pity under conditions of, as he would call it, primitive human existence. There, he says, pity is obscure but strong. What he means is there isn't a lot of weeping and wailing. There isn't a lot of emoting, but there is real feeling. Naturally, people won't cry, but if they see someone else suffering, they will do something about it. He thinks under civilized civilization what you get is prominent displays of pity, but the actual feeling is weak. It becomes visible but weak. We cry when we see a child starving on the news. On the whole, we don't do much about it. In contrast, he thinks to the primitive condition of humankind, where we might not cry, but we would actually try and stop it. So the character of pity changes, but it's also not the case that he thinks there's no pride at the beginning. A more proper pride is kind of dormant in humanity from the start. It's there. It's not something that someone brings in from the outside. It's not some sort of infection that arrives halfway through the story. It's latent and something brings it to life. What brings it to life for Russo? Well, it is a long story. It is a gradual story. It is not sudden. Even in the state of nature, he thinks we will occasionally compare ourselves to others. There are all sorts of puzzles that he finds hard to resolve. There's the puzzle of language, a deep puzzle, in human evolution. How did language emerge? And he says what makes it so baffling for him is that it almost looks like the cooperation that you need to have language requires you to have language. How do you agree what words mean, unless you can talk about what words mean? It is a deep puzzle and it takes a couple of centuries of study of human evolution to resolve it. And if it has been resolved, Russo can't answer that question. But he recognizes that, therefore, that even in the long story of how humanity got from what it was to what it is, there are these very slow incremental steps of cooperation and codependence. Language is a form of codependence. We will compare. We will occasionally wonder if we can trust other people. But then something not sudden, but more significant happens. The two stages in human evolution that start the big change are in Russo's terms, agriculture and metallurgy. Or as he says, it's not about gold and silver. It's about wheat and iron. When human beings move from hunter-gatherer or forager societies to agricultural or settled societies, when they till the land, when they plant and grow, when they work out how to use the tools, iron, to plow the land, the same tools also become the tools of warfare from swords into plowshairs and from plowshairs into swords. Settle the land, till the land, have the tools to do it. It starts to change. So one thing that changes is that's the beginning of a kind of division of labor. If some people are making the tools, then presumably some other people are going to have to feed them. And there's going to be codependency there. The toolmakers need to be fed. The people who are creating or producing the food need the toolmakers to supply the tools. But it's more fundamental than that for Russo. It's a kind of transformation of space and time. In the natural state of humanity, we live day to day. He says it over and over again. You get up in the morning, you go to bed at the night, and that's your life. And you don't have to think beyond it because you know you can walk away. But once you are settled in one place and particularly, once you are planting, and then waiting for what you plant to turn into food, you have to plan and think ahead. And planning and thinking ahead requires human beings to worry about other human beings. Can they be relied on? Will they wait? Can you trust that other human beings won't become impatient? Space changes too because now you are in one place. A life where human beings are always on the move, it's easy to walk away. It becomes harder to walk away when your community is settled. And can you be sure that there will be somewhere you can walk away too? What if the next piece of land has been settled as well? What if the space gets squeezed? It becomes harder, again, to use a very 21st century term to go off the grid once there's wheat and iron, by no means impossible, by no means impossible, but harder. And then you are on the slippery slope to the next stage. And the next stage, Rousseau says at the beginning of the second part of the second discourse, is his moment where it really starts to go wrong. And that's the invention of private property. He says the point where the first human being said of a particular piece of land, this is mine and staked it out and marked it out and gave it a boundary was the beginning of the end or at least the end of the beginning. It was a very bad moment for Rousseau in the human story. And part of the reason it's so bad is it starts what he thinks ultimately is the worst effect of progress and civilization so called. It's what he characterizes as the dominance of how things appear over how they really are. And he connects it back to the invention of private property because if you're going to stake a claim to the land, you're going to need a reason for it, you're going to need a justification for it. And by definition for Rousseau, the justification will be spurious. Naturally, it isn't yours rather than mine or mine rather than yours. So you're going to have to come up with an artificial argument, an argument which is essentially about entitlement, you have some right to it, you have some entitlement to it, and that argument will be fake. And so you are on the road to fake arguments being what matters. And actually the more skill for you are at a fake argument, the better off you will be. Seeming will matter more than reality, appearance will be the currency that we trade in. And once that happens, Rousseau thinks we are really in trouble. So one way he characterizes what comes next is he says, you go not quickly, but much more quickly than the story has been moving so far from the division between rich and poor, the people who have and the people who don't, to the division between strong and weak. the rich justify what they do by saying that they're stronger. They have a right to it and entitlement to it and from strong and weak to masters and slaves, masters and essentially people in a state of servitude. Property produces divisions which become entrenched and then get backed up by law and by states and by coercion and by force and then you are trapped. We're another way to put it this isn't Rousseau's, we're putting it but it's a simpler way of making the same argument. It's the move from gateposts to guards to laws, that is the first person stakes out the ground by simply marking it but then realizes to protect it it needs to be guarded and then realizes that to justify the guards and their use of force you need laws and politics and then the politics becomes the means of coercion. At that point Rousseau thinks we really are in trouble. Why is it allowed to happen? So one person says this is mine, why do the others let that person get away with it? Part of the answer is because of the way that Rousseau characterises the state of nature after all you might think well if the few are staking out their ground why don't the many stop them? Because for Rousseau in a way like Hobbes, in the state of nature the many are not coordinated we are not a community or a group it is a kind of solitary existence we don't have the means to organize ourselves to resist and the temptation is there for many of the many to succumb to what the few have offered them which is a set of rules a set of protections maybe even a set of rights, spurious Rousseau things but possibly persuades it particularly if skillfully presented and so he says we rush into the trap because we feel we have no choice and there is again to use another anachronistic 21st century term a sort of network effect at work here the more people who sign up to appearance of reality the harder it is to insist on reality indeed if that's where the food is if that's where the security is you really have to be brave to walk away but Rousseau thinks it's not just a trap for the poor it's a trap for everyone it's a trap for the rich too even the person who says this is mine is falling into a trap and Rousseau makes the argument as he brings the story up to his present day of societies in which the rich have so much and the poor have so little the rich have too much and the poor have nowhere near enough that it's bad for the rich too 18th century civilized society is a society in which even the people who are the halves not the have knots suffer from terrible ill health they have too much food they are diseased they are corrupted he thought by medicine they are corrupted by luxury they spend all of their time and their attention on looking good and they forget about what really matters it's that kind of argument it is an argument against the hypocrisy of civilization it's an argument against the corrupting effects of luxury in that sense it's a relatively familiar argument Rousseau certainly wasn't the only person making it though he made it as forcefully as anyone but i think it's really important to say that Rousseau's argument goes beyond that part of what makes it both bracing and really shocking he doesn't just reject the hypocrisy of luxurious civilized selfish modern life he rejects all of it and he says even the things that we think are natural in the unnatural world of 18th century civilized life are not natural it's all a construct it's all an invention even the family itself one of his most radical arguments and for many people most shocking arguments is to say that the thing that we think connects us all the way back to the start of the story the one thing that was necessary even in the natural primitive state of humankind the one inevitable codependency fathers mothers and children is not natural here he's not arguing against hob so much he explicitly makes this argument against another 17th century English philosopher John Locke the argument being that because of the way human beings are naturally constructed certain features of our existence pregnancy is long childhood is vulnerable and weak human beings take a long time relative to other animals to become self-sufficient we need a lot of protecting mothers need looking after at least protecting during pregnancy children need protecting during early childhood inevitably there is a natural division of labor men women and children and there is a natural codependency fathers will look after mothers mothers will look after babies that's the only way that the human species can preserve itself and Russo says no he rejects that he doesn't think in the state of nature there is a reason for fathers to wait around for the babies to be born some babies will live some babies will die he doesn't actually think even pity is enough to cement family ties he thinks even from those relationships naturally human beings are both capable of an entitled to walk away and he didn't just think it he lived it Russo had five children with a woman who's often described as a semi literate laundry maid he married her eventually eventually but he did not race his children they were given away they were taken to the fondling home it's not quite as bad as leaving them out on the hillside to die but it's closer to that than the idea that we might have of leaving them in a knife warm safe place where someone else will look after them Russo effectively abandoned his children and maybe he thought and he writes about this in the confessions and it's pretty repugnant maybe he thought he was being true to himself who knows but that's one of the reasons why I don't think it's plausible to say of Russo that he's the nice philosopher he really wasn't nice Hobbes was a much much nicer person than Russo Russo wasn't nice but he also wasn't nostalgic so he didn't think that it was possible to go back he didn't think that human societies could be rescued from these slow incremental and then much quicker and ultimately fatal missteps through wheat and iron through property to law to the state to luxury to privilege to the fascicle and absurd setup of 18th century not just France but Europe although he does sort of exemption either that's another story he doesn't think that there's a way of telling that story in reverse the Benjamin button version where you go back to the beginning it is now who we are we were once something naturally but we are not natural anymore so we could do with more nature in our lives Russo certainly the philosopher of that as individuals he would definitely encourage us all to get out into the countryside even if we can't quite fold ourselves away into the woods and forage and just live like that he definitely thinks we could do with more of what we once were in our lives we have way too much civilization and not enough nature but he didn't think that as societies we could re-naturalize ourselves societies are not natural and we have become to some extent to a deep extent social animals so if there's no going back what can we do so this is where the political philosophy comes in indeed this is where his later work the social contract comes in so another thing that he shares with Hobbes and he shares at least as much with Hobbes as he rejects is the idea that politics is artificial so politics is not natural it can't be natural because we aren't naturally political we have to invent it we created we could do it more consciously than we have done there is an alternative to that stumbling path where we keep making non-choices and then we finally end up in a place which is a nightmare we could try and at least rescue ourselves by making the artificiality of politics more a conscious or deliberate act but that's Hobbes too Hobbes thinks that we need to think about the artificiality of politics and we need to think about how we make it work the difference here between Russo and Hobbes is that Russo explicitly rejects the main Hobbian mechanism of artificiality which is political representation so the idea that the only way we can really do this Hobbes says is to franchise out or to give away decision making to someone or something else let someone or something else decide for us for the sake of peace Russo rejects that because that for him is the problem not the solution that is part of what's wrong with modern or civilized life it is seeming or appearance over reality because we end up living under laws that we haven't created for ourselves that we haven't been involved in they aren't our laws there's someone else's laws someone else's justification someone else's entitlements and we just live under them and that will reinforce rather than remedy the problem which is again to use a slightly later term alienation we are alienated from our true selves under the conditions of modern society and so the base political rule on representation is to entrench alienation because we have given it away Russo wants us to reclaim it not reclaim nature in politics but reclaim the artificiality for ourselves and in the social contract he comes up with a complicated in some ways in other ways simple argument based around what he calls the general will which is the possible reality that we can reclaim it for ourselves by doing it collectively, that we can amalgamate our wills into something which means that we as a people in a political society can say that we rule ourselves. But the social contract does not make it sound easy because Rousseau was clear, it is really, really hard. Given what we have become, given who we are to do that is incredibly difficult. It takes quite a lot of contingencies and it won't be for everyone. It can probably only happen on a relatively small scale, the city-state, Geneva. It requires a certain way of life. It is what he calls a kind of austere democracy. There is not a nostalgia, but at least a looking back to a more spartan way of life. Less luxury, less commerce, less trade, more not natural life, but paired down life, fewer distractions, fewer comparisons, less vain glory, less pride. That is really demanding. It was demanding in the 18th century. God knows it is demanding now. The social contract version of politics is not for everyone. Rousseau is not suggesting some kind of solution. He is almost suggesting a kind of test against which we can compare just how far we are away from a politics that might make sense for us, not in natural terms, but in terms that allow the artificiality to be real. Where does it lead that argument? So the social contract argument for some people leads to the French Revolution. And all I talked about in the last series Benjamin Constant looking back in 1819, partly blamed Rousseau for the catastrophe as he saw it of the French Revolution because he thought that the social contract argument was just too demanding. Demanding that kind of austere collective self-rule was impossible. In France, a society of 20 plus million people by that point committed not simply to luxury, but to trade and commerce and progress and the arts and the sciences and forms of personal freedom. A society made up of modern people. You can't do it, Constant thought. And if you try and do it, if you fall for Rousseau's trick or Rousseau's trap, believing that it's possible in a society like France, you will end up in disaster. I'm not sure Rousseau thought it was possible in a society like France. I think he held it up deliberately as an absurdly demanding standard for politics to let us know who we are. Maybe we're not those people. But that's one way it goes. And for Rousseau supporters, it isn't the path that leads from the social contract to the French Revolution to tyranny. The people who still believe in it, it's the path that leads from the social contract to the French Revolution to freedom. And there's a line from there to future revolutions, including the Russian revolution. But that's not I think the story that comes out of the second discourse and it's quite a twisting of the social contract. The second discourse leads in other directions. It leads towards 19th century theories of evolution because it's an evolutionary account of who we are. We somehow have become something without either choosing it or knowing it. There are forces at work that have shaped us, which are in us and make us who we are, but which we are not consciously in control of. So Rousseau's version of evolution was not Darwin's because he had no idea what was coming. But it foreshadows some of the arguments about what it is to understand the past in evolutionary terms to think about the ways in which we are free and the ways in which we are trapped. I think the argument of the second discourse also leads towards the 20th century revolution in therapy, psychotherapy, psychology, because it is in part an argument about self-knowledge. What would it mean truly to understand our origins truly to know who we are? What would it mean to think about the ways in which we are shaped not just by the big choices, not even always by the little choices, but by the decisions we're not even aware of, some of which we don't even know that we've made. And what would it then mean to analyse ourselves and try and understand what choices we still have left? As that Rousseau too, finally if I had to say what the difference was between Rousseau and Hobbes and there are many, though I think we should also recognise there are many overlaps. Hobbes wants us to be reconciled to the doubleness of modern life. That, in a sense, for Hobbes is the background condition of being alive then and now, post-17th century certainly. That we are going to be alienated, that we are going to be alienated in politics, that we are going to have to let others decide that's the price we pay, ultimately not just for peace, Hobbes thinks but for a kind of freedom, even potentially a kind of liberal freedom. We accept that part of us will not make sense to the other part of us, but even on that basis he thinks we can flourish. And Rousseau says no, we can't flourish under those conditions. He doesn't necessarily think we can make sense to ourselves as whole creatures, and telling the story that takes us back to the natural origins of human inequality doesn't make us whole, if anything it might make us profoundly depressed. But he thinks we shouldn't give up trying even under the artificial conditions of modernity to be more whole. That is at least to own the artificiality, not to accept that it's going to be something that comes to us from the outside, that it is going to at some level be alienating. We should continue to fight to make it less alienating than it would otherwise be, particularly given what we have become. We have become self-conscious creatures, we have become human beings who spend a ridiculous amount of our time, not pitting each other, but comparing ourselves to each other, wondering are we better or worse than that person, wondering whether we can survive or not without that person, entering willingly and sometimes unwillingly into relationships of codependency, given that that's who we are, that we are no longer natural human beings, there is something unnatural about us, there is definitely something artificial about us, given that's who we are, we shouldn't give up on trying to own it to make the artificiality hours, given we are so obsessed with appearance, we shouldn't give up on the project of trying to make the appearance more real, and who's to say that he's wrong about that. If you'd like to sign up to receive good quality editions of all the books David's going to be discussing, along with biographies, an anthology of LRB writing, reading guides and access to exclusive webinars, please go to the London Review of Books website, just visit lrb.me/idearsplusspeltplus. Next week, David talks about Jeremy Bentham and the pleasure principle. If we focus on our happiness, do we really end up happier? To hear that, please make sure you've subscribed to history of ideas, as that's where all 11 remaining episodes in this series will be available. [Music]