Jean Jacques Rousseau · Politics
Rousseau’s revolutionary reversal of Hobbes: human beings are naturally good and free, and it is society, not nature, that corrupts them.
Where Hobbes saw natural man as a frightened predator needing a master, Rousseau saw the opposite. His Social Contract (1762) opens with a line that would echo through every revolution to come: man is born free, yet everywhere he is in chains. The chains are not natural - we are not born to be ruled and bound. They are the product of society, of institutions and inequalities that humans themselves created. Something went wrong, and Rousseau set out to find what.
Rousseau’s sharpest psychological insight is a distinction between two forms of self-love. Amour de soi is natural and good: simply caring for your own well-being and survival. But society breeds a second, toxic form - amour-propre: a self-love measured against others, a craving to be esteemed, to rank above your neighbours, to be seen as superior. Once humans live together and compare themselves, amour-propre is born - and with it vanity, envy, contempt, and the endless competition for status that natural man never knew. We start needing others not for survival but for their opinion.
Behind Rousseau’s whole account lies a concept he made famous: perfectibility (perfectibilité). What truly distinguishes human beings from the animals, he argues, is not reason as such but a more basic capacity - the open-ended power to change, to develop new faculties, to acquire new habits and ideas, to be shaped by circumstance and to reshape ourselves. An animal is at the end of a few months what it will be all its life; a beaver builds the same dam its ancestors built. But a human being is indefinitely modifiable, capable of becoming almost anything depending on conditions - which is precisely why society can transform the gentle natural creature so utterly, for better or for worse.
This is one of Rousseau’s most consequential and double-edged ideas. Perfectibility is the source of everything good that humanity achieved - reason, language, art, science, morality, civilisation itself, none of which a fixed creature could ever have developed. But it is, by the very same token, the source of everything bad: our corruptibility, our capacity to be deformed by bad institutions, to acquire artificial needs and poisonous vanities, to fall so far below the contented animal. The faculty that lets us rise is the same faculty that lets us fall. Note the word Rousseau chose: not ‘perfection’ but perfectibility - the capacity for indefinite change in any direction, not a guaranteed march toward the better. Human nature, for Rousseau, is not fixed at all; it is radically open, made and remade by history and society. This is why he can hold both that we are ‘naturally good’ and that we have become terrible: our nature is precisely to have no fixed nature, to be the creature that its conditions create.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Rousseau inverts Hobbes’s state of nature. Explain how natural man can be peaceful rather than warlike, and what changes that, in your own words.
Leads to Immanuel Kant.
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