Customer Reviews

Penguin Classics Discourse On Inequality

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A historic document with still validity in our days, where many of the reasons appointed by Rousseau as the causes of the inequality between men, are deeply felt today in our societies.
Sure, the limitations of the scientific knowledge at the time (1757), coupled with the intransigence of the Catholic dogmas in what regards some possible evolutionary view, restricts in great measure the range of Rousseaus' thought. In Rousseau's view, these inequalities should be ascribed to the modern spirit of emulation, which distorts the primeval feeling of self-fulfillment found on the very primitive societies of yesterday, where there was happiness among its members, thus turning human happiness today and at the time of Rousseau as a function of one's attainement vis-à-vis the other's, which is something very conspicous in our lives of today, where we seem to live totally in function of prescribed standards of comsumption and leisure. A necessary reading for the student of the social facts.

"I have received your new book against the human race, and thank you for it. Never was such cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid. One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it. Nor can I embark in search of the savages of Canada, because the maladies to which I am condemned render a European surgeon necessary to me; because war is going on in those regions; and because the example of our actions has made the savages nearly as bad as ourselves." Voltaire (1755)

Excellent discourse. This book discusses some of the rudiments of the history of inequality and how its self supporting and ever existing in human nature. I recommend this book for those readers who either want to increase their knowledge on Jean-Jacques Rousseau or historical development of inequality

For those who want to further their command over Rousseau's life- I suggest them to read 'Confessions' by Rousseau.