On the Origins of Property and Inequality in Society, Part 1

One of my favorite writings in social and political philosophy is The Second Discourse by philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau was born June 28, 1712 in Geneva, Switzerland and his writings have been considered by historians to be crucially important to the events leading up to the French Revolution.

Rousseau claimed that the very notion of property is not natural to the human condition, and famously declared that most of the social ills and political strife throughout human history stems from the notion of property ownership. in The Second Discourse he declared,

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 how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.

Rousseau is thought to have been a major influence on German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and the development of the Communist Manifesto. I do not doubt this could be the case, however Rousseau never envisioned nor declared the desire of a violent revolution to distribute the means of production. Inequality was the symptom of the problem, not the problem in and of itself. According to Rousseau, all scientific and technological progress is at the expense of happiness, and a true primitive and natural state of blissful ignorance is far more desirable than a corrupt implied social contract between the proletariat and bourgeoisie, unavoidable from birth and enforced through brutish means.

Now this is likely a strange perspective for a modern audience to consider, however I find the philosophical underpinnings of the concept of property to be something lost on modern intellectuals and no longer properly analyzed in the education system. I find that there are some assumptions we make in modern life which I find should be more often challenged, at least on an intellectual level.

The very notion of ownership indicates a governing force to protect rights of use, whether this be the owner himself (such as the days of the American "Wild West") or an entity such as the federal government. I believe Rousseau was on to something when he declared property rights as the birth of social contract, however his views on inequality were, like Marx, lacking proper distinction between pure wealth and the corrupt use of wealth to maintain a power structure.

I believe the issue is far more nuanced than Rousseau or Marx dared to venture, and in order to hash out a proper solution we must not simply consider wealth and power structures, but also less physical properties of social contract and value, such as duty, honor, and family; we should additionally attempt to isolate hedonistic causes of unhappiness while also respecting individual autonomy and agency. There must be social values placed above the acquisition of wealth or power before any of the social ills stemming from the conceptual birth of property can be addressed. While wealth and power inequality is a symptom causing much of today's social strife, the disease must first be diagnosed and analyzed before any "medicine" should be administered.

In my next post I will elaborate on esoteric social values and analyze some ideas on capital theory by modern French economist Thomas Piketty, and how they relate to toxic post-modern thought and ill-formed communist ideals.