Discourse on Inequality

"the equality once broken was followed by the most shocking disorders."

"There arose between the title of the strongest, and that of the first occupier a perpetual conflict, which always ended in battery and bloodshed. Infant society became a scene of the most horrible warfare: Mankind thus debased and harassed, and no longer able to retreat, or renounce the unhappy acquisitions it had made; labouring, in short merely to its confusion by the abuse of those faculties, which in themselves do it so much honour, brought itself to the very brink of ruin and destruction."

"the rich man, thus pressed by necessity, at last conceived the deepest project that ever entered the human mind: this was to employ in his favour the very forces that attacked him, to make allies of his enemies, to inspire them with other maxims, and make them adopt other institutions as favourable to his pretensions."

"With this view, after laying before his neighbours all the horrors of a situation, which armed them all one against another, which rendered their possessions as burdensome as their wants were intolerable, and in which no one could expect any safety either in poverty or riches, he easily invented specious arguments to bring them over to his purpose. "Let us unite," said he."

"at length men began to butcher each other by thousands without knowing for what; and more murders were committed in a single action, and more horrible disorders at the taking of a single town, than had been committed in the state of nature during ages together upon the whole face of the earth."

"the citizens of a free state suffer themselves to be oppressed merely in proportion as, hurried on by a blind ambition, and looking rather below than above them, they come to love authority more than independence."

"the most refined policy would find it impossible to subdue those men, who only desire to be independent; but inequality easily gains ground among base and ambitious souls, ever ready to run the risks of fortune, and almost indifferent whether they command or obey, as she proves either favourable or adverse to them."

"Were this a proper place to enter into details, I could easily explain in what manner inequalities in point of credit and authority become unavoidable among private persons the moment that, united into one body, they are obliged to compare themselves one with another, and to note the differences which they find in the continual use every man must make of his neighbour."

"I could show how much this universal desire of reputation, of honours, of preference, with which we are all devoured, exercises and compares our talents and our forces: how much it excites and multiplies our passions; and, by creating an universal competition, rivalship, or rather enmity among men, how many disappointments, successes, and catastrophes of every kind it daily causes among the innumerable pretenders whom it engages in the same career. I could show that it is to this itch of being spoken of, to this fury of distinguishing ourselves which seldom or never gives us a moment's respite, that we owe both the best and the worst things among us, our virtues and our vices, our sciences and our errors, our conquerors and our philosophers; that is to say, a great many bad things to a very few good ones."

"Savage man and civilised man differ so much at bottom in point of inclinations and passions, that what constitutes the supreme happiness of the one would reduce the other to despair. The first sighs for nothing but repose and liberty; he desires only to live, and to be exempt from labour; nay, the ataraxy of the most confirmed Stoic falls short of his consummate indifference for every other object. On the contrary, the citizen always in motion, is perpetually sweating and toiling, and racking his brains to find out occupations still more laborious."

"What a spectacle must the painful and envied labours of an European minister of state form in the eyes of a Caribbean! How many cruel deaths would not this indolent savage prefer to such a horrid life, which very often is not even sweetened by the pleasure of doing good?"

"the savage lives within himself, whereas the citizen, constantly beside himself, knows only how to live in the opinion of others; insomuch that it is, if I may say so, merely from their judgment that he derives the consciousness of his own existence."

"ever inquiring of others what we are, and never daring to question ourselves on so delicate a point, in the midst of so much philosophy, humanity, and politeness, and so many sublime maxims, we have nothing to show for ourselves but a deceitful and frivolous exterior, honour without virtue, reason without wisdom, and pleasure without happiness. It is sufficient that I have proved that this is not the original condition of man, and that it is merely the spirit of society, and the inequality which society engenders, that thus change and transform all our natural inclinations."

"It appears therefore that man, having teeth and intestines like frugivorous animals, should naturally be placed in that class. And not only do anatomical observations confirm this opinion, but the monuments of antiquity are also very favorable to it. “Dicaearchus,” says St. Jerome, “relates in his books on Greek antiquities that under the reign of Saturn, when the earth was still fertile by itself, no man ate flesh, but that all lived on fruits and vegetables that grew naturally.” … From this one can see that I am neglecting several advantageous considerations that I could turn to account. For since prey is nearly the exclusive subject of fighting among carnivorous animals, and since frugivorous animals live among themselves in continual peace, if the human species were of this latter genus, it is clear that it would have had a much easier time subsisting in the state of nature, and much less need and occasion to leave it."

"The character of and commitment to equality remains both controversial and disputed among historical and theoretical analysts of classical political economy, and this has been true from the beginning. Smith's earliest writings confronted the critique of commercial society, the vice of luxury, and the inequality both fostered and perpetuated by the regime of private property made by Rousseau in his early economic writing, the Discourse on Inequality (2009 [1755]). Smith responded in at least two ways to this critique of the inherent inequality and unfreedom of commercial society. On the one hand, Smith recognized that a driving force of market operation and expansion was in some sense dependent on that acquisitive psychology that accompanied “the useful inequality in the fortunes of mankind which naturally and necessarily arise from the various degrees of capacity, industry, and diligence in different individuals” (Smith 1983 [1762–3/1766]: 338). This, of course, was to recognize a form of inequality of capacity in society with which Rousseau did not disagree. On the other hand, Smith went further in both the Wealth of Nations and the Lectures on Jurisprudence, and argued untramque partem that the very pursuit of luxury critiqued as vice by Rousseau and others helped to destroy the Gothic ruling class, who “sold their birthrights for baubles,” and in destroying the old feudal order of entrenched inequality, brought both greater liberty and greater equality to those living in the commercial age. In this sense, Smith appeared to employ the rhetorical device of paradiastole to render the putative vice of luxury as a virtue in the classical political economic context, and to suggest that private property – seen as the source of injustice for critics of the commercial order such as Rousseau, was – in the four stages of the progress of society – the very source of justice, because around property basically unsocial natural men had unified in what Kant would later term an “unsocial sociability.” Smith produced other arguments as well for the destruction of monopolies, guilds, and corporations in order to equalize market-driven production and distribution with the understanding (or the hope) that greater social and economic equality would accompany the ever greater expansion of the market. However, it is unquestionable that Smith recognized the inequalities inherent within the actual operation of the market mechanism in his own lifetime, inequalities that later classicals such as Ricardo and Mill would openly admit."