Page 140 - DPOL201_WESTERN_POLITICAL_THOUGHT_ENGLISH

Western Political Thought

Notes In the case of Rousseau, property was the only artificial right or privilege that emerged in society,
and this right belonged to a few. The institutionalization of property rights put an end to the self-
sufficiency that existed in the state of nature, bringing misery to the majority:
But from the moment one man began to stand in need of the help of another; from the
moment it appeared advantageous to any one man to have enough provisions for two,
equality too disappeared, property was introduced, for work became indispensable,
and vast forests became smiling fields, which man had to water with the sweat of his
brow, and where slavery and misery were soon seem to germinate and grow up with
crops.
Rousseau was not attempting to paint a picture of the evolution of civil society in stages by
chronological events. He explained that these investigations were not “considered as historical
truths, but only as mere conditional and hypothetical reasonings, rather calculated to explain the
nature of things, than to ascertain their actual origin”.
The change from the state of nature to that of civil society was abrupt. It emerged when,
the First man, who having enclosed a piece of ground, he thought 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, of
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”.
In Rousseau’s ideal, a golden mean between the primitive state of nature and his own contemporary
times would emerge. There would be no division of labour. This was akin to the Marxist Utopia.
Each would be able to meet one’s own needs by one’s own efforts. The moment a person became
dependent on the other, he lost his independence and autonomy. Human beings not only compared
themselves materially, but also liked others to recognize them as superior. Not only did property
create social dissensions, but it also brought forth new kinds of mutual dependence between the
rich and the poor. The rich needed the services of the poor, and the poor required the help of the
rich. The distinctions increased and became sharper. The poor coveted the property of the rich,
and the rich feared losing it, leading to a state of war similar to the one described by Hobbes. The
Discourses:
... attempted to draw upon the anthropological knowledge ... in order to reconstruct
systematically the origins of private property and to show how it caused the evils of
society to evolve. His (Rousseau’s) anthropology was not sound, but his way of looking
at social questions in historical terms was full of possibilities for the future. Babeuf
inherited this primitive historical consciousness, which later developed into a
fundamental element in the revolutionary outlook during the nineteenth century.
However, Rousseau, unlike the socialists, did not advocate common ownership of property or the
means of production. He regarded property as the most sacred of all citizens’ rights:
But he had no serious idea of abolishing property and no very definite idea about its
place in the community. What Rousseau contributed to socialism, Utopian or other,
was the much more general idea that all rights, including those of property, are rights
within the community and not against it.
Rousseau’s ideal, however, was an economic system based on small farmers owning tracts of land.
He opposed the sharp distinctions that property ownership entailed. In this sense he could be
regarded as a spiritual forerunner of modern socialism, for his perception that property was the
source of misery and inequality. His indictment of property, like that of Plato, was on moral
grounds.

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