“It seems, in effect, that if I am obliged to do no harm to my fellow man, it is less because he is a reasonable being than because he is a sensitive being: a quality that, being common to beast and man, ought at least to give one the right not to be uselessly mistreated by the other.”

Rousseau rejects any essential moral difference between humans and animals. They are alike in wanting to preserve themselves and having the capacity to suffer. All the complex moral systems that humans have developed have taken them further from the natural law and resulted in people being less moral than animals.

“O man, whatever country you may come from, whatever your opinions may be, listen: here is your history as I believed it to read, not in the books of your fellow-men, which are liars, but in nature, which never lies.”

Most accounts of human origins are based on myth rather than a genuine inquiry into the truth. Rousseau makes this observation shortly after discussing the biblical account, and he seems to offer his account as an alternative to scripture. Among existing accounts of human origins, the Bible is by far the most significant for his audience. Yet, Rousseau implies it is false and that he found the truth by looking to nature rather than revelation.

“Most of our ills are our own work, and we would have avoided almost all of them by preserving the simple, uniform, and solitary way of life prescribed to us by nature.”

Rousseau’s view of nature assumes an essential harmony between a subject and its environment. While someone might have an accident or eat a poisoned berry, Rousseau assumes that a person in nature would generally be healthy, or else the species could not survive. To the extent that human beings have developed forms of extreme discomfort and illness, it is because they alienated themselves from their natural condition. This serves as Rousseau’s proof that natural human beings are superior to their modern counterparts.

“Nakedness, lack of habitation, and deprivation of all those useless things we believe so necessary are not, then, such a great misfortune for these first men; nor, above all, are they such a great obstacle to their preservation.”

This is the clearest expression of Rousseau’s argument that human beings did not need to control nature to survive and be satisfied. Much of what human beings regard as essential for survival, such as clothing and shelter, has only become necessary because modern society has taken people so far from their natural condition that they can no longer endure climate, wild animals, and other hazards. Given the amount of time that must have passed between the first generations of human beings and the development of clothing, shelter, and other technologies, it stands to reason that these were not necessary for survival.

“The passions in turn derive their origin from our needs, and their progress from our knowledge. For one can desire or fear things only through the ideas one can have of them or by the simple impulsion of nature.”

Much of Western philosophy has focused on how reason can moderate the passions and direct them in accordance with someone’s true interest. Rousseau rejects this idea by stating that reason is at the mercy of the passions and exists only to satisfy them. The history of human civilization is one of people building the infrastructure to suit their wants only to have their wants expand so that they either innovate more or suffer from not having what they desire regardless of whether they actually need it.

“In fact, it is impossible to imagine why, in that primitive state, a man would sooner have need of another man than a monkey or a wolf of its fellow creature; nor, supposing this need, what motive could induce the other to provide for it.”

People regard their sentimental attachments to friends and family as something that makes them nobler than animals with a solitary existence. Rousseau argues humans were solitary, except for the time that children take to become self-sufficient, at which point they leave their parents and never think of them again. Rousseau believes that with no knowledge of such attachments, people would not miss them, and would in fact benefit from being independent.

“Although it may behoove Socrates and minds of his stamp to acquire virtue through reason, the human race would have perished long ago if its preservation had depended only on the reasonings of its members.”

Rousseau aims at the idea, common to ancient, medieval, and modern philosophy, that the cultivation of reason is necessary for moral excellence. Rousseau denies this on the grounds that reason itself is subject to passions and is therefore more of a tool for getting what one wants rather than an objective way of viewing the world. One can just as easily reason that it is in their interest to harm someone as to help them. Sentiment, particularly the sentiment of pity, is a far surer guide to moral behavior, and it operates on instinct rather than calculation.

“The first person who, having fenced off a plot of ground, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared by someone who, uprooting the stakes or filling in the ditch, had shouted to modern society as his fellow-men: Beware of listening to this imposter; you are lost if you forget that the fruits belong to all and the earth to no one!”

Other Enlightenment philosophers viewed property as essential for human freedom, arguing that people are best off when they can reliably enjoy what they have worked for and that governments should protect them from violence and enforce contracts. Rousseau takes the opposite position, proposing that the institution of property ruined humanity’s best chance for freedom because once people develop an idea of possession, they endlessly compare themselves with others and seek to gain more, forgetting that nature provides for everyone’s needs.

“People grew accustomed to assembling in front of the huts or around a large tree; song and dance, true children of love and leisure, became the amusement or rather the occupation of idle and assembled men and women. Each one began to look at the others and want to be looked at himself, and public esteem had a value.”

According to Rousseau, leisure was one of the worst things to happen to humanity. While nature kept them busy, they had time only to think about their immediate needs and would only briefly engage with others. Once settled, people had the time to compare one another, even in ways that had absolutely no bearing on the common interest, such as one’s skill in song and dance. For Rousseau, the ability to enjoy amusements is more than offset by the misery that comes with the constant need for affirmation in the eyes of others.

“To be and to seem to be became two altogether different things, and from this distinction came conspicuous ostentation, deceptive cunning, and all the vices that follow from them.”

The primary separation between natural and socialized human beings is their consciousness of others. Human beings in nature could of course see others, recognize them as fellow human beings, and in some respects work together, but they lacked a bundle of characteristics by which they compare themselves to others. Rousseau regards comparison as the psychological prerequisite for inequality, and therefore finds the ability to perceive a distinct self and other as the moment when humanity began its long march away from freedom.

“If the magistrate who has all the power in his hands and who appropriates to himself all the advantages of the [social] contract, nonetheless had the right to renounce his authority, there is all the more reason that the people, who pay for all the faults of the chiefs, ought to have the right to renounce their dependence.”

Rousseau remains adamant that once inequality has progressed far enough to render nature moot and to require political society, the freedom of the individual takes precedence over the conventions of social order. If it is necessary that someone accept the power to execute the laws, that cannot mean that they have achieved some sort of superiority over the subjects of the law. Rousseau is thus quick to assert a right of revolution, supplying a much broader criteria than John Locke did in his Second Treatise on Government.

“We shall find that the establishment 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.”

This is Rousseau’s most concise statement on the development of civil society and its exact correspondence with the degeneration of humanity. Economic concepts took human beings out of nature and so the rich used property to ensconce their position. They then developed a system of laws and authority to defend their property. From there, it was only a matter of time before those with power realized that they need not bind themselves to their own laws and could simply extract from the powerless whatever they wished.

“Savage man and civilized man differ so much in the bottom of their hearts and inclinations that what constitutes the supreme happiness of one would reduce the other to despair.”

Rousseau is aware that readers of this account will likely be horrified to contemplate human beings in their natural state and would at least regard them with immense pity. Rousseau wants them to understand that natural human beings would regard modern people the same way. Where modern people despise the lack of comforts and attachments, natural human beings would find the dependence on others for even basic sustenance, as well as the infinite sources of mental stress and social oppression, to be the most regrettable condition.