Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Basic Political Writings

Jean Jacques Rousseau takes a leftist view on civilized society that is also inherently ultra-conservative in nature. Rousseau argues that natural man, in his completely independent and ignorant state, is the best state of humanity because it lacks all the vices of civilization. He argues that humanity should never have changed from its original state of nature, an ultra-conservative stance against human progress. Whereas other philosophers debated and wrote about the natural state of law, Rousseau describes the natural state of man and shows that "natural laws" are inherently unnatural and therefore a product of society.

Rousseau believes that most philosophers are talking about civilized man when they mean to talk about natural man. According to him, "all of them, speaking continually of need, avarice, oppression, desires, and pride, have transferred to the state of nature the ideas they acquired in society. They spoke about savage man, and it was civil man they depicted." According to Rousseau, the traits that they have depicted as natural are actually unnatural. Rousseau believes that their are only two natural traits of man; our interest in our own self-preservation and self-being, and "a natural repugnance to seeing any sentient being, especially out fellow man, perish or suffer", or pity. By arguing that most vices are the product of civil society, Rousseau is able to present civilized society as a corrupter to the natural state of man.

Rousseau further undermines civilized society by painting all the vices of man as products of society. Rousseau makes the claim that most diseases are the creation of society, and that animals in nature are relatively immune to disease. He backs his statements up by comparing the state of humans in society to animals in the forest, and how animals can heal themselves quickly and rarely get sick. He also makes comparisons to the relative lack of a difference in the average life expectancy of people in societies where medicine is readily available and where it is not. According to Rousseau "these are the fatal proofs that most of our ills are of our own making, and that we could have avoided nearly all of them by preserving the simple, regular and solitary lifestyle prescribed to us by nature." Rousseau paints disease as a human vice that, according to him, is less existent in nature than it is in society.

To create an analogy that even the moderate reader can understand, Rousseau compares and contrasts civilized humans with the most natural creatures of the world, animals. Domesticated animals are akin to civilized animals, taken out of their natural setting and placed into society. Rousseau claims that wild animals are more robust, have more vigor, strength, and courage, but when they are domesticated "they lose half of these advantages...it might be said that all out efforts and feeding them and treating them well only end in their degeneration." This applies to natural man as well, except on a larger scale, because "man gives more comforts to himself than to the animals he tames, and all of these comforts are so many specific causes that make him degenerate more quickly." This may have been true in Rousseau's time, but in the present domesticated animals can be trained and bred to be among the strongest animals around, proving no match for their undomesticated wild brethren. The same applies to athletes, who become, through training and science, stronger, faster and healthier every year. But this only applies to a small minority of both domesticated animals and civilized humans, and Rousseau is talking about the more general population. Rousseau, the comforts that humans provide themselves make them lazy and weak. By explaining how animals are brought down when they are "civilized" by domestication, Rousseau alludes toward how much humanity had been brought down by forming civilized societies.

According to Rousseau, man in his natural state had more equality and freedom from other men than did man in civilized society. To him, power, slavery, and inequality are all aspects of civilized society. Slavery could not have existed in the state of nature because "it is impossible to enslave a man without first having put him in the position of doing without another." Man in the state of nature did not need others to survive, he was truly independent and therefore slavery was unnecessary and unheard of. It was not until civilized society and the division of people into rich and poor did true inequality emerge. Whereas other philosophers saw inequality as inherently natural, Rousseau saw it as another creation of civilized society, completely unnatural and nonexistent in the state of nature.

John Locke has a drastically different view on society and on the state of nature. Locke's state of nature is a state of equality in which no one has power over another, all in the qualms of natural law. Locke's natural law demands that the punishment fit the crime, and that anyone in the state of nature can redress any crime to discourage the offender from committing it again. People enter into civilized society and give up some of their natural rights in order to gain protection of property, known laws and orders, and a form of a judicial system that can hand out sentences. To Locke, civilized society is something that people must want to enter into knowingly, via consent to join the commonwealth, and therefore must have benefits above those of the state of nature. Locke's state of nature is similar to that of Rousseau in that it allows people to be independent and free. But Locke's natural man can amass property, and had the power to execute natural law. Locke perceives civilized society to be beneficial to humans in the state of nature and perceives it as something that is for the good of humanity rather than and unnecessary evil.

To the modern day reader, Rousseau's text may sound more scientifically and ethically sound than Locke's due partially to its more modern style and its unique leftist perspective. But even Rousseau's argument has some major faults. Never in his discourse does Rousseau consider the possibility of humanity transgressing from its civilized state into another more truly civilized state of equality (like Marxism)? Nor does it account for human knowledge and advancement. Rousseau champions a stagnant human race, one that never changes, and, while it may be happy, never attains anything. What about human destiny? Rousseau writes his discourse in a scientific style, but his writing has little scientific basis and is still just as philosophical as Locke's Second Treatise. But in the midst of all this Rousseau still brought in a new form of political thinking and contradicted the views of many generations of previous philosophers. Whereas other philosophers debated and wrote about the natural state of law, Rousseau describes the natural state of man and shows that "natural laws" are inherently unnatural and therefore a product of society.