Rawls J. Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy

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the philosopher and tear him from his bed....Savagemandoes not have

this admirable talent, and for want of wisdom and reason he is always seen

heedlessly yielding to the ﬁrst sentiment of humanity.” And somewhat later

(SD, 133): “. . . the human race would have perished long ago if its preserva-

tion had depended only on the reasonings of its members.”

Here Rousseau is commenting on the effect of the development of cul-

ture and reason on the sentiment of humanity that moves simpler people.

But this is just an example of a general tendency as human beings evolved

from the:

First stage, of the lazy, unreﬂective, but free and potentially perfectible

and happy animal who lives alone and is moved only by amour de soi and

compassion. Here there are no moral problems and the passions are few

and calm (SD, 142),

to the:

Second stage, of nascent society, a period covering centuries in the

course of which we learned to use the simpler tools and weapons, devel-

oped crude language, united in groups for mutual protection, and devel-

oped the permanent family with very limited institutions of property; indi-

viduals owned their own weapons, each family had its own shelter; a sense

of self develops, and sentiments of preference lead to love, which in turn

brings jealousy in its train (SD, 142–148).

to the:

Third stage, which is the patriarchal stage of human society where the

only government is that of the family. People live in loose village groups

and gain their subsistence by hunting, ﬁshing, and gathering from the

bounty of nature; and amusement is found in spontaneous gatherings of

song and dance, and so on. Men begin to appreciate one another and duties

of civility follow. Public esteem has a value (SD, 149).

If we ask why these transitions to the next stage occur, Rousseau sug-

gests the reasons are economic. Under the pressure of increasing numbers

it became more effective to join together and hunt in groups and to engage

in various cooperative activities. But already in this simple pastoral world

the setting of inﬂamed amour-propre is in place. Permanent proximity gener-

ates enduring ties; the sentiments of love and jealousy (unknown to simpler

beings) are now aroused. Rousseau says: “The one who sang or danced the

best, the handsomest, the most adroit, or the most eloquent became the

most highly considered; and that was the ﬁrst step toward inequality and, at

the same time, toward vice” (SD, 149).

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It is this third, or patriarchal, stage, “at equal distances from the stupid-

ity of brutes and the fatal enlightenment of civil man” (SD, 150), that Rous-

seau thinks must have been the best for man. He says:

. . . although men had come to have less endurance and although natu-

ral pity had already undergone some alteration, this period of the de-

velopment of human faculties, maintaining a golden mean between

the indolence of the primitive state and the petulant activity of our

vanity, must have been the happiest and most durable epoch...the

least subject to revolutions, the best for man, and that he must have

come out of it only by some fatal accident, which for the common

good ought never to have happened. The example of savages, who

have almost all been found at this point, seems to conﬁrm that the hu-

man race was made to remain in it always; that this state is the verita-

ble prime of the world; and that all subsequent progress has been in

appearance so many steps toward the perfection of the individual, and

in fact toward the decrepitude of the species. (SD, 150–151)

But this third stage was left behind with the transition to the fourth

stage, with its ﬁrst stage of inequality. This occurred with the development

of metallurgy and agriculture, which led people more and more to need

the help of others, and so to the division of labor, as well as to the establish-

ment of private property in land and tools; and ﬁnally to the inequality

among people originating at ﬁrst from natural inequalities (those in

strength, wit, ingenuity, etc.) (SD, 151–154).

Natural differences between us are part of the difﬁculty. For Rousseau

suggests that a reasonably happy state might have persisted had talents been

equal (SD, 154). But the stage of metallurgy and agriculture gradually de-

velops into one of inequality, with the beginning of law and property and

the distinction between rich and poor: “The stronger did more work; the

cleverer turned his to better advantage; the more ingenious found ways to

shorten his labor ...workingequally, the one earned a great deal while the

other barely had enough to live” (SD, 154–155).

§3. The Stage of Civil Society and of Political Authority

1. For Rousseau, political authority is in part a trick of the rich. That is,

it was not a case of the stronger over the weaker. Rather, the ﬁrst social

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compact was, in effect, fraudulent, the rich dominating and deceiving the

poor. The central evil was economic inequality, with the rich having as-

sured possessions, the poor having little or nothing. But the poor, not fore-

seeing the consequences, were ready to acquiesce in law and political au-

thority as a remedy for the conﬂict and insecurity of an agricultural society

without government (SD, 158ff ).

The actual form of government established reﬂects the greater or lesser

inequalities among individuals at the time that political authority is insti-

tuted. If one person is preeminent in power and wealth, that person alone

is elected magistrate and the state is a monarchy. If a number of roughly

equal persons prevail over the rest, there is aristocracy; whereas if fortunes

and talents of all persons are not too unequal, there is democracy. In each

case, political authority added political inequality to the kinds of inequality

that already existed (SD, 171f ).

The last pages of the Second Discourse sketch “the progress of inequal-

ity,” as Rousseau calls it, in three stages: “the establishment of the law and

of the right 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, which is the last degree of inequality and the limit

to which all the others ﬁnally lead, until new revolutions dissolve the gov-

ernment altogether or bring it closer to its legitimate institution” (SD, 172).

So things ﬁnally come full circle: humanity begins with the state of na-

ture (the ﬁrst of the four cultural stages before civil society) in which all are

equal. It arrives ﬁnally at the ultimate stage of inequality where all become

equals again because they are nothing, and there is no longer any law except

the will of the master, who is ruled by his passions: “The notions of good and

the principles of justice [which arose with the compact of government] van-

ish once again. Here everything is brought back to...anewstate of nature

different from the one with which we began, in that the one was the state

of nature in its purity; and this last is the fruit of an excess of corruption”

(SD, 177).

2. In the last paragraph of the Second Discourse Rousseau, referring to

the vanities, vices, and miseries of contemporary civilization he has just de-

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12. Other modes of origin of government—conquest, subjection to an absolute mas-

ter (what Locke referred to as royal absolutism), paternal authority, subjection to tyr-

anny—Rousseau rejects as very unlikely (SD, 161–168).

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scribed, states his main conclusion as follows: “. . . this [state of society and

culture, described above] is not the original state of man; and...itisthe

spirit of society alone, and the inequality it engenders, which thus change

and alter all our natural inclinations” (SD, 180). And again: “It follows from

this exposition that inequality, being almost null in the state of nature,

draws its force and growth from the development of our faculties and the

progress of the human mind, and ﬁnally becomes stable and legitimate by

the establishment of property and laws” (SD, 180).

We can say that, for Rousseau, there are two connected processes going

on throughout history.

One is the gradual realization of our perfectibility, that is, of our capac-

ity for progressive achievements and reﬁnements in the arts and sciences,

and in the invention of institutions and cultural forms over time.

The other process is that of our increasing alienation from one another

in a society divided by growing inequalities. These inequalities arouse in us

the vices of inﬂamed amour-propre, the vices of pride and vanity along with

the will to dominate, and lead to fawning and obsequiousness among the

lower orders. These two processes combine to make possible the rule of ar-

bitrary political power and keep the vast majority in servile dependence on

the rich and powerful (SD, 175).

§4. The Relevance for the Social Contract

1. It is strange, I have suggested, that Rousseau should say that man is

naturally good and that it is through social institutions that we become bad.

For, as we have seen, primitive human beings are indolent, thoughtless, if

happy brutes, who, it seems, once social groups are formed, become more

and more vain and domineering, seeking to lord it over those who have less, or

else to lapse into servility and obsequiousness towards those who have more.

Our reason expands and multiplies our desires without end; and as we

come to live more and more in the opinions of others, our natural differ-

ences are occasions for vanity and shame. Why, then, isn’t it human nature

that is bad at root, with social life merely bringing out how bad our nature

actually is? Yes, we are perfectible: our potentialities can be developed

through culture over time without apparent limit, and institutions preserv-

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13. As Kant once said unkindly about his fellow Prussians, scornful of all their titles:

“They are so often undecided whether to try to dominate or to grovel.”

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ing these achievements can be duly prized and maintained. But if we are

perfectible only at the price of misery and vice, how can our nature be good?

There are, I think, at least two reasons why Rousseau wants to say that

our nature is good.

One is that he is rejecting certain aspects of Christian

orthodoxy, and in particular, the Augustinian doctrine of original sin. One

view of slavery and private property among the Patristic Fathers was that

God sanctioned these institutions as remedies for our propensities to sin.

These propensities began with the Fall and are now embedded in our sinful

nature. Their effect can be mitigated only by God’s grace; the role of law

and social institutions is merely to contain them.

To this Augustinian doctrine Rousseau wants to say: to the contrary,

slavery and private property are historical developments, the result of grad-

ual changes in human propensities under the inﬂuence of social practices

under certain conditions. This long development took a particular path. It is

essential for Rousseau that this development might have been different; he

refers to different accidents, and to chance combinations of foreign causes

(SD, 140), which, I take it, is his way of saying that it was not inevitable.

2. There is a second view Rousseau is rejecting: that of Hobbes. He is

saying that the vices of pride and vanity, and the rest, which (on his reading

of Hobbes) characterize Hobbes’s state of nature, are not natural to man

(SD, 128ff ). These vices and the misery to which they lead are the result of

unnatural or perverted amour-propre. They are the outcome of a particular

course of history. What is natural to us, our natural amour-propre, as we saw

earlier, is a deep concern for a secure social standing relative to others, con-

sistent with mutual recognition and reciprocity. This is very different from

vanity and pride and the will to dominate. Human nature as Hobbes depicts

it is found only in Rousseau’s last stage of culture (the state of nature in

Locke’s juristic sense). Recall that this stage arises only after the develop-

ment of:

(1) metallurgy and agriculture;

(2) large inequalities in private property, including property in land;

(3) division of labor, with some under the direction of, and so depen-

dent on, others;

(4) these inequalities made greater by differences in native endowments

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14. Observe that Rousseau is careful about how he does this, as seen from his com-

ments on methodology in SD, 103, 105, 180.

15. [See Appendix A at the end of this lecture for further elaboration of the Christian

doctrine of original sin, from Rawls’s 1981 lecture notes. —Ed.]

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as these are trained and educated, with some more highly trained and edu-

cated than the rest.

It is these features which, in the absence of an effective public institu-

tional commitment to preserving equality, lead people to see their relations

as antagonistic. They view society as a rivalry, as a competitive scrabble of

each against all. In Rousseau’s view, Hobbes describes people whose charac-

ter and aims have been fashioned by these social conditions.

A further point against Hobbes, as Rousseau reads him, is that the state

of war Hobbes presents depends on the passions of pride and vanity. But

for Rousseau, these passions presuppose a certain cultural and intellectual

development, which in turn presupposes certain social institutions. In Rous-

seau, primitive man was not capable of pride and vanity and the other vices

of civilization. Only amour de soi (shown in such desires as those for food,

drink, and sleep [SD, 116]) and compassion are in this sense natural for

Rousseau. Vanity and pride, and the vices of inﬂamed amour-propre, were

not present in the ﬁrst stages, but are found only much later.

3. The Second Discourse is one of Rousseau’s most pessimistic works. By

the time of On the Social Contract (when he wrote the statement to

Malesherbes from Dialogue I, quoted earlier) he no longer thinks that there

is a best age anywhere in the past and he looks more to the future, or per-

haps better, to what is possible. He now believes that it is at least possible to

describe a legitimate form of government and its system of institutions

such that it would, with good fortune, be reasonably just, happy, and stable.

Its members would be free from the more serious vices of inﬂamed amour-

propre such as vanity and pretense, insincerity and greed. It is not inevitable

that we grow worse and worse; it is possible for us to get better.

If, however, the Social Contract presents the principles of political right

for a just and workable, stable society, there is not much leeway. Rousseau’s

belief that human nature is good, and that it is through social institutions

that we become bad, comes to these two propositions:

(a) Social institutions and conditions of social life exercise a predomi-

nant inﬂuence over which human propensities will develop and express

themselves over time. When realized, some of these propensities are good,

some are bad.

(b) There exists at least one possible and reasonably workable scheme

of legitimate political institutions that both satisﬁes the principles of politi-

cal right and meets the requirements for institutional stability and human

happiness.

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Thus, that our nature is good means that it allows a scheme of just, sta-

ble, and happy political institutions. What this society is like and how it

might arise Rousseau tells us in the Social Contract. The point of Rousseau’s

genealogy of vice in the Second Discourse is to show that we need not reject

the idea of our natural goodness. The reason given is that the ideal of social

cooperation (found in the Social Contract) is compatible with our nature if

the idea of natural goodness is true. While the Social Contract modiﬁes

somewhat the pessimism of the Second Discourse, the earlier work provides

the background for the problem Rousseau addresses in the later.

We conclude that human nature is good in the sense that just and stable

political and social arrangements are at least possible. The remedy for our

trouble consists in a social world properly arranged to cohere with our true

nature and the natural state of our amour-propre. Thus the opening para-

graph of Book I of the Social Contract: “I want to inquire whether there can

be a legitimate and reliable rule of administration in the civil order, taking

men as they are and laws as they can be. I shall try always to reconcile in

this research what right permits with what interest prescribes, so that jus-

tice and utility are not at variance.”

4. Now the question arises: how good does he think human nature re-

ally is? In asking this question, I assume that human nature can be repre-

sented (for the purposes of answering this question) by the most funda-

mental principles of human psychology, including principles of learning of

all kinds. We have these principles right when, together with the principles

of common-sense political sociology, we can give at least a plausible ac-

count of the kinds of virtues and vices, aims and aspirations, ﬁnal ends and

desires, and much else—in short, the kind of character—we come to have

under different social and historical conditions. The principles of human

nature are like a function: given social and historical conditions, they assign

the kinds of character that will develop and be acquired in society.

Accepting this deﬁnition, then whether human nature is good depends,

it seems, on two things:

(a) on the range and variety of historical conditions under which the so-

ciety of the Social Contract can be realized, and

(b) on whether those conditions can be reached from most, or from

many, other different conditions.

Suppose that we cannot reach the conditions for a just, happy, and sta-

ble society from where we are: we are too far along the path of vice and

corruption, and cannot cooperate to solve our problems. Too bad for us.

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But suppose further that we could not do so in most conditions likely to

arise out of our long history? Then the pessimism of the Second Discourse is

hardly mitigated.

Masters, in the introduction to his new edition of the Second Discourse,

says the following: “Almost alone in his century, Rousseau seems to have

viewed human nature as an animal species whose nature deﬁnes a good and

healthy mode of life, but whose evolution has made a naturally good life in-

accessible (at least for most of those living in civilized societies).”

I concur in this judgment, and nothing I have said conﬂicts with it. Also,

it ﬁts with the relation between the Second Discourse and the Social Contract I

have suggested: namely, that the latter explains how to arrange the institu-

tions of a social world so that the vices and miseries accounted for in the

former, and which we now see in most all ages and in our culture and civili-

zation, will not arise.

Rousseau’s answer is: we must arrange our political and social institu-

tions according to the terms of cooperation expressed by the social con-

tract (SC, 1.6): it is these terms that, when effectively realized, ensure that

those institutions secure our moral freedom, political and social equality,

and independence. They also make possible our civic freedom and prevent

the hostilities and vices that would otherwise plague us.

Rousseau Lecture I (1981): Appendix A

Rousseau: The Doctrine of the Natural

Goodness of Human Nature

§1. Contra Original Sin

Let’s start by contrasting Rousseau’s view with the orthodox doctrine

of original sin, which includes these parts: (a) The original natural perfec-

tion of the ﬁrst pair, Adam and Eve. (b) Their sin was their own fault, an act

of free will, by a nature without defect. (c) It was motivated by pride

and self-will. (d) The punishment and corruption of their sin is manifest

in concupiscence and propagated in the sexual act. (e) All of us now are co-

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responsible and participate in their sin; so that now (f ) our nature is scarred

and subject to death and misery, (g) escape from which lies only in divine

grace.

Keeping these points in mind, note that Rousseau rejects them one

by one: (a) The natural state (State of Nature) is not one of natural perfec-

tion but a primitive state in which our potentialities for perfection and our

reason and moral sensibilities are undeveloped. They are realized only in

society via many changes over time. (b) Human misery and present vices

and false values are not rooted in free choices but come about as the conse-

quence of unfortunate historical accidents and social trends. (c) Rousseau

denies the ﬁrst pair could have acted from pride and self-will, for these mo-

tives are found only in society. (d) Vice and false values are propagated by

social institutions as each generation responds to them. (e) The way out lies

in our own hands.

Rousseau’s account of historical and social development is secular

and naturalistic, like the account of others in the Enlightenment: Diderot,

Condorcet, d’Alembert, and so on. (Compare his account with Hume’s.)

§2. Rousseau contra Hobbes: Further Meaning

of Natural Goodness—as Premise of Social Theory

Although Rousseau is rejecting original sin (as did Hume and many

others, with some heat), so is he also rejecting elements of Hobbes’s view.

In particular, he thought (whether correctly or not) that Hobbes held pride

and vanity, and the will to dominate, to be basic and original impulses or

psychological principles of human nature, which accounts in part for why

the State of Nature is a State of War. Rousseau denies this, and attributes

these propensities to society. In the primitive state of nature, people are

moved only by their natural needs, guided by self-love (amour de soi), and re-

strained by natural compassion.

Rousseau also rejected Hobbes’s view that the ostensible forms of

compassion and other like feelings could be reduced to self-love. He holds

that compassion and self-love are distinct; indeed self-love guided by reason

and moderated by compassion provides, under suitable social conditions

and modes of education, the psychological basis of humane and moral con-

duct.

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§3. The Possibilities of a Well-Regulated Society

Now let’s ask what these disputes about an original human nature and

its propensities are all about. Everyone agrees, let’s say, that given people as

they are, many are moved by pride and vanity and the will to dominate, at

least on some occasions; and sufﬁciently many to be a major political factor.

What difference does it make whether these propensities are original or de-

rived? And do we know what we mean by this distinction; and could we tell

in actual behavior which is which?

The matter at stake might be put this way: Suppose we assume (as

Rousseau and the Enlightenment did) that human beings and their ends are

the basic units of deliberation and action, as well as of responsibility (suit-

ably understood), so that our deeds collectively are one of the main causes

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Figure 5. Outline of the Social Contract. Adapted from Hilail Gildin’s discussion in

Rousseau’s Social Contract (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 12–17.

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