The Rich Man's Proposition
Once property and inequality have created a precarious social order — in which the rich fear the poor and the poor have nothing to lose — someone must propose a solution. Rousseau imagines that it is the rich themselves who invent the social compact. They propose laws and government as if in everyone's interest, appealing to the desire for security. The poor, exhausted by insecurity and unable to see through the rhetoric, agree.
Such was, or may well have been, the origin of society and law, which bound new fetters on the poor, and gave new powers to the rich; which irretrievably destroyed natural liberty, eternally fixed the law of property and inequality, converted clever usurpation into unalterable right, and, for the advantage of a few ambitious individuals, subjected all mankind to perpetual labour, slavery and wretchedness.
Law as Frozen Usurpation
The result of this deceptive founding is that the existing distribution of property — however unjust its origins — becomes legally sanctified. Usurpation is converted into right; contingent advantage is converted into permanent privilege. Law does not correct the inequality that preceded it; it immortalises it. This is one of the most important arguments in the tradition of radical social criticism, and it anticipates Marx's analysis of ideology by a century.
The Contrast with the Social Contract
The Discourse on Inequality is often read as the dark mirror of The Social Contract. In the Discourse, Rousseau shows how political societies actually formed — through deception and force. In the Social Contract, he describes how a legitimate political order could be formed — through genuine consent and the general will. The distance between the two is the measure of the work that political philosophy has to do.
The social bond as deception is developed in Part II of the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755). G.D.H. Cole translation, 1913.
Related Concepts
