In the Discourse on The Origin Inequality, Jean-Jacques Rousseau addresses the origin of social inequality by unraveling a historical account that charts the development of man in the state of nature to the bourgeoning of civil man.

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Social inequality is one of the fundamental injustices that all human beings experience; every person partakes in this deep-rooted train of inequality as either perpetrators and beneficiaries or victims and sufferers.  In the Discourse on The Origin Inequality, Jean-Jacques Rousseau addresses the origin of social inequality by unraveling a historical account that charts the development of man in the state of nature to the bourgeoning of civil man. The account that Rousseau gives is one that is compelling, consistent, and based on reasonable conclusions drawn from conjectured premises. Such a narrative includes the discussion of the savage man, familial life, natural talents, and the emergence of property and law. The study of such effects is done to depict Rousseau’s nostalgia for a time gone by, dissatisfaction with the modernity, and a call for a future that neither precisely mirrors the past nor the present. However, the true value of this document today, lies not in its conclusions but in the way his argument redefines our approach delegitimize claims to authority.

Rousseau begins his account of the origin of social inequality by hypothesizing how man must have been before the introduction of social inequality: savage man was independent, happy and socially equal given that, in this primitive state, man was simple. The only inequality he faced was one established by nature, which consisted in a difference of age, health, and bodily strength. His desires did not exceed his capacity to fulfill them and he lacked imaginative desires to dangle in front of him anything not immediately attainable. Lacking continuous human interaction, he suffered from none of the harms that arise from human dependency.  Based on Rousseau’s narrative, man only had an, “...[interest] in [his] well-being and [his] self-preservation and [pity inspired] in [him] a natural repugnance to seeing any creature suffer ” (137).  The balance of self-preservation and pity and the simplicity of life were essential to savage man’s freedom from the reigns of social inequality. Thus, Rousseau’s tone of reminiscence for the natural state is justified in his belief that “…we would have avoided [the ills of our own making] if we had retained the simple, uniform and solitary way of life prescribed to us by Nature” (138). Rousseau proceeds to explore such ills that birth the transition to modernity and his disdain for it.

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The ills in the institution of repeated human interaction, familial ties, property, and law are obvious to Rousseau for it sets the foundation for man to compare their talents and highlight their differences.  The combination of “this repeated interaction of various beings with himself as well as with one another ”, and the “…habit of living together… [having each] family [become] a small society…must naturally have engendered in man’s mind perceptions of certain relations” (162). As a result, man came in a situation to judge similarities and differences between him and others. The consequences of family co-habitation span farther than ...

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