The Founding Act
Rousseau does not date the founding of civil society to the first king or the first constitution. It begins earlier and more quietly — with the first fence, and the first 'This is mine.' Once human beings develop the agriculture and settled life that make permanent possession meaningful, the concept of property emerges. And with property comes inequality, envy, conflict, and all the miseries that follow.
The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.
From Possession to Comparison
The introduction of property transforms human psychology. Before property, natural man lived in the present, seeking only immediate satisfaction. Once property creates accumulated wealth, human beings learn to compare. Who has more, who has less? Who is stronger, who weaker? The first rudiments of self-esteem become pride, pride becomes vanity, vanity becomes the insatiable desire for recognition and superiority. The innocent desire for preference — for a dance partner, for applause around the fire — is the seed of all subsequent social misery.
A Development Without Return
Rousseau does not advocate returning to the woods. He explicitly says this would be impossible — human nature has been permanently altered by its social development. But the origin of property illuminates the structure of injustice. Inequality is not natural in the deep sense; it is the product of contingent historical processes that could in principle have gone otherwise. This does not restore paradise, but it prevents the false legitimation of existing hierarchies as natural or inevitable.
The origin of private property is described in Part II of the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755). G.D.H. Cole translation, 1913.
Related Concepts
