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It is this third, or patriarchal, stage, “at equal distances from the stupidity of brutes and the fatal enlightenment of civil man” (SD, 150), that Rousseau thinks must have been the best for man. He says:

. . . although men had come to have less endurance and although natural pity had already undergone some alteration, this period of the development of human faculties, maintaining a golden mean between the indolence of the primitive state and the petulant activity of our vanity, must have been the happiest and most durable epoch . . . the least subject to revolutions, the best for man, and that he must have come out of it only by some fatal accident, which for the common good ought never to have happened. The example of savages, who have almost all been found at this point, seems to confirm that the human race was made to remain in it always; that this state is the veritable prime of the world; and that all subsequent progress has been in appearance so many steps toward the perfection of the individual, and in fact toward the decrepitude of the species. (SD, 150–151)

But this third stage was left behind with the transition to the fourth stage, with its first stage of inequality. This occurred with the development of metallurgy and agriculture, which led people more and more to need the help of others, and so to the division of labor, as well as to the establishment of private property in land and tools; and finally to the inequality among people originating at first from natural inequalities (those in strength, wit, ingenuity, etc.) (SD, 151–154).

Natural differences between us are part of the difficulty. For Rousseau suggests that a reasonably happy state might have persisted had talents been equal (SD, 154). But the stage of metallurgy and agriculture gradually develops into one of inequality, with the beginning of law and property and the distinction between rich and poor: “The stronger did more work; the cleverer turned his to better advantage; the more ingenious found ways to shorten his labor . . . working equally, the one earned a great deal while the other barely had enough to live” (SD, 154–155).

§3. The Stage of Civil Society and of Political Authority

1. For Rousseau, political authority is in part a trick of the rich. That is, it was not a case of the stronger over the weaker. Rather, the first social

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compact was, in effect, fraudulent, the rich dominating and deceiving the poor. The central evil was economic inequality, with the rich having assured possessions, the poor having little or nothing. But the poor, not foreseeing the consequences, were ready to acquiesce in law and political authority as a remedy for the conflict and insecurity of an agricultural society without government (SD, 158ff ).12

The actual form of government established reflects the greater or lesser inequalities among individuals at the time that political authority is instituted. If one person is preeminent in power and wealth, that person alone is elected magistrate and the state is a monarchy. If a number of roughly equal persons prevail over the rest, there is aristocracy; whereas if fortunes and talents of all persons are not too unequal, there is democracy. In each case, political authority added political inequality to the kinds of inequality that already existed (SD, 171f ).

The last pages of the Second Discourse sketch “the progress of inequality,” as Rousseau calls it, in three stages: “the establishment of the law and of the right of property was the first stage, the institution of the magistracy the second, and the third and last was the changing of legitimate power into arbitrary power. So that the status of rich and poor was authorized by the first epoch, that of powerful and weak by the second, and by the third that of master and slave, which is the last degree of inequality and the limit to which all the others finally lead, until new revolutions dissolve the government altogether or bring it closer to its legitimate institution” (SD, 172).

So things finally come full circle: humanity begins with the state of nature (the first of the four cultural stages before civil society) in which all are equal. It arrives finally at the ultimate stage of inequality where all become equals again because they are nothing, and there is no longer any law except the will of the master, who is ruled by his passions: “The notions of good and the principles of justice [which arose with the compact of government] vanish once again. Here everything is brought back to . . . a new state of nature different from the one with which we began, in that the one was the state of nature in its purity; and this last is the fruit of an excess of corruption” (SD, 177).

2. In the last paragraph of the Second Discourse Rousseau, referring to the vanities, vices, and miseries of contemporary civilization he has just de-

12. Other modes of origin of government—conquest, subjection to an absolute master (what Locke referred to as royal absolutism), paternal authority, subjection to tyr- anny—Rousseau rejects as very unlikely (SD, 161–168).

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scribed, states his main conclusion as follows: “. . . this [state of society and culture, described above] is not the original state of man; and . . . it is the spirit of society alone, and the inequality it engenders, which thus change and alter all our natural inclinations” (SD, 180). And again: “It follows from this exposition that inequality, being almost null in the state of nature, draws its force and growth from the development of our faculties and the progress of the human mind, and finally becomes stable and legitimate by the establishment of property and laws” (SD, 180).

We can say that, for Rousseau, there are two connected processes going on throughout history.

One is the gradual realization of our perfectibility, that is, of our capacity for progressive achievements and refinements in the arts and sciences, and in the invention of institutions and cultural forms over time.

The other process is that of our increasing alienation from one another in a society divided by growing inequalities. These inequalities arouse in us the vices of inflamed amour-propre, the vices of pride and vanity along with the will to dominate, and lead to fawning and obsequiousness among the lower orders. These two processes combine to make possible the rule of arbitrary political power and keep the vast majority in servile dependence on the rich and powerful (SD, 175).

§4. The Relevance for the Social Contract

1. It is strange, I have suggested, that Rousseau should say that man is naturally good and that it is through social institutions that we become bad. For, as we have seen, primitive human beings are indolent, thoughtless, if happy brutes, who, it seems, once social groups are formed, become more and more vain and domineering, seeking to lord it over those who have less, or else to lapse into servility and obsequiousness towards those who have more.13 Our reason expands and multiplies our desires without end; and as we come to live more and more in the opinions of others, our natural differences are occasions for vanity and shame. Why, then, isn’t it human nature that is bad at root, with social life merely bringing out how bad our nature actually is? Yes, we are perfectible: our potentialities can be developed through culture over time without apparent limit, and institutions preserv-

13. As Kant once said unkindly about his fellow Prussians, scornful of all their titles: “They are so often undecided whether to try to dominate or to grovel.”

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ing these achievements can be duly prized and maintained. But if we are perfectible only at the price of misery and vice, how can our nature be good?

There are, I think, at least two reasons why Rousseau wants to say that our nature is good.14 One is that he is rejecting certain aspects of Christian orthodoxy, and in particular, the Augustinian doctrine of original sin. One view of slavery and private property among the Patristic Fathers was that God sanctioned these institutions as remedies for our propensities to sin. These propensities began with the Fall and are now embedded in our sinful nature. Their effect can be mitigated only by God’s grace; the role of law and social institutions is merely to contain them.

To this Augustinian doctrine Rousseau wants to say: to the contrary, slavery and private property are historical developments, the result of gradual changes in human propensities under the influence of social practices under certain conditions. This long development took a particular path. It is essential for Rousseau that this development might have been different; he refers to different accidents, and to chance combinations of foreign causes (SD, 140), which, I take it, is his way of saying that it was not inevitable.15

2. There is a second view Rousseau is rejecting: that of Hobbes. He is saying that the vices of pride and vanity, and the rest, which (on his reading of Hobbes) characterize Hobbes’s state of nature, are not natural to man (SD, 128ff ). These vices and the misery to which they lead are the result of unnatural or perverted amour-propre. They are the outcome of a particular course of history. What is natural to us, our natural amour-propre, as we saw earlier, is a deep concern for a secure social standing relative to others, consistent with mutual recognition and reciprocity. This is very different from vanity and pride and the will to dominate. Human nature as Hobbes depicts it is found only in Rousseau’s last stage of culture (the state of nature in Locke’s juristic sense). Recall that this stage arises only after the development of:

(1)metallurgy and agriculture;

(2)large inequalities in private property, including property in land;

(3)division of labor, with some under the direction of, and so dependent on, others;

(4)these inequalities made greater by differences in native endowments

14.Observe that Rousseau is careful about how he does this, as seen from his comments on methodology in SD, 103, 105, 180.

15.[See Appendix A at the end of this lecture for further elaboration of the Christian doctrine of original sin, from Rawls’s 1981 lecture notes. —Ed.]

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as these are trained and educated, with some more highly trained and educated than the rest.

It is these features which, in the absence of an effective public institutional commitment to preserving equality, lead people to see their relations as antagonistic. They view society as a rivalry, as a competitive scrabble of each against all. In Rousseau’s view, Hobbes describes people whose character and aims have been fashioned by these social conditions.

A further point against Hobbes, as Rousseau reads him, is that the state of war Hobbes presents depends on the passions of pride and vanity. But for Rousseau, these passions presuppose a certain cultural and intellectual development, which in turn presupposes certain social institutions. In Rousseau, primitive man was not capable of pride and vanity and the other vices of civilization. Only amour de soi (shown in such desires as those for food, drink, and sleep [SD, 116]) and compassion are in this sense natural for Rousseau. Vanity and pride, and the vices of inflamed amour-propre, were not present in the first stages, but are found only much later.

3. The Second Discourse is one of Rousseau’s most pessimistic works. By the time of On the Social Contract (when he wrote the statement to Malesherbes from Dialogue I, quoted earlier) he no longer thinks that there is a best age anywhere in the past and he looks more to the future, or perhaps better, to what is possible. He now believes that it is at least possible to describe a legitimate form of government and its system of institutions such that it would, with good fortune, be reasonably just, happy, and stable. Its members would be free from the more serious vices of inflamed amourpropre such as vanity and pretense, insincerity and greed. It is not inevitable that we grow worse and worse; it is possible for us to get better.

If, however, the Social Contract presents the principles of political right for a just and workable, stable society, there is not much leeway. Rousseau’s belief that human nature is good, and that it is through social institutions that we become bad, comes to these two propositions:

(a)Social institutions and conditions of social life exercise a predominant influence over which human propensities will develop and express themselves over time. When realized, some of these propensities are good, some are bad.

(b)There exists at least one possible and reasonably workable scheme of legitimate political institutions that both satisfies the principles of political right and meets the requirements for institutional stability and human happiness.

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Thus, that our nature is good means that it allows a scheme of just, stable, and happy political institutions. What this society is like and how it might arise Rousseau tells us in the Social Contract. The point of Rousseau’s genealogy of vice in the Second Discourse is to show that we need not reject the idea of our natural goodness. The reason given is that the ideal of social cooperation (found in the Social Contract) is compatible with our nature if the idea of natural goodness is true. While the Social Contract modifies somewhat the pessimism of the Second Discourse, the earlier work provides the background for the problem Rousseau addresses in the later.

We conclude that human nature is good in the sense that just and stable political and social arrangements are at least possible. The remedy for our trouble consists in a social world properly arranged to cohere with our true nature and the natural state of our amour-propre. Thus the opening paragraph of Book I of the Social Contract: “I want to inquire whether there can be a legitimate and reliable rule of administration in the civil order, taking men as they are and laws as they can be. I shall try always to reconcile in this research what right permits with what interest prescribes, so that justice and utility are not at variance.”

4. Now the question arises: how good does he think human nature really is? In asking this question, I assume that human nature can be represented (for the purposes of answering this question) by the most fundamental principles of human psychology, including principles of learning of all kinds. We have these principles right when, together with the principles of common-sense political sociology, we can give at least a plausible account of the kinds of virtues and vices, aims and aspirations, final ends and desires, and much else—in short, the kind of character—we come to have under different social and historical conditions. The principles of human nature are like a function: given social and historical conditions, they assign the kinds of character that will develop and be acquired in society.

Accepting this definition, then whether human nature is good depends, it seems, on two things:

(a)on the range and variety of historical conditions under which the society of the Social Contract can be realized, and

(b)on whether those conditions can be reached from most, or from many, other different conditions.

Suppose that we cannot reach the conditions for a just, happy, and stable society from where we are: we are too far along the path of vice and corruption, and cannot cooperate to solve our problems. Too bad for us.

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