Discourse on the Origin of Inequality

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’sDiscourse on the Origin of Inequality (the Second Discourse) is one of the most important works of social philosophy of the Enlightenment. The Discourse is recognized today as a provocative and radically innovative text that anticipated anthropology, Marxist theory, the passionate rhetoric of Romanticism, and more broadly, an entire modern spirit of discontent with civilization. The debate in which Rousseau engaged himself with the Second Discourse was already well established in the mid-eighteenth century: inequality and its relation to natural law. His answers, however, were anything but familiar, and they retain a remarkable freshness and urgency for the contemporary reader.