Rousseau's State of Nature

The original natural man

Rousseau's natural man has almost nothing we would recognize as human in the social sense. He has no language, no sustained relationships, no property, and no concept of the future beyond immediate desire. He wanders alone, eats what the forest provides, sleeps when tired, and avoids pain.

He is not moral. He doesn't know right from wrong. But he is also not immoral. He has no occasion for cruelty because he wants nothing from others and has nothing to protect.

What natural man does have is pitié: a pre-rational aversion to the suffering of others. When he sees another creature in pain, he recoils. This is not altruism, which requires a self-concept. It is something more primitive, a sympathetic flinching that Rousseau considers the root of all social virtue, and which civilization systematically erodes.

How society corrupted natural man

The pivot in Rousseau's story is property. "The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, took it into his head to say 'This is mine,' and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society." Everything that followed, law, government, morality as we practice it, was scaffolding built to protect that original act of enclosure.

Property introduced comparison. Once you can accumulate more than another, you can be superior or inferior. Comparison introduced pride and shame. Pride and shame introduced competition. Competition introduced the need for the esteem of others, which made each person dependent on how others saw them, the condition Rousseau called amour propre: a corrosive, relational self-regard that replaced natural self-sufficiency.

Language, arts, agriculture, and metallurgy accelerated this process. Each advance made the social web denser, each person more dependent on the rest, and the original freedom more inaccessible.

The paradox Rousseau left behind

Rousseau did not recommend returning to the forest. He knew that was impossible. Once language, society, and self-consciousness exist, the simplicity of natural man is gone permanently.

What Rousseau did argue was that civilization as it actually existed had made the trade badly. We gave up freedom and natural equality and got back inequality, dependence, and suffering that natural man never knew. The social contract, at least the one we have, was a con: the rich persuaded everyone to accept law and order, which happened to protect their property.

The question Rousseau leaves open is whether a better contract is possible, one that might restore some of the equality and freedom that nature provided. His answer, attempted in The Social Contract, is the general will. Whether it succeeds is a separate argument. That civilization as given is a moral failure is his starting point, not his conclusion.