1755

The year 1755 marks a crucial hinge in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s political writing. His Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality among Men gave fuller, more qualified form to the contrast between nature and society; the Discourse on Political Economy, printed in the Encyclopædia, offered an early outline of constructive political principles. In the same year, Rousseau’s emerging argument also took aim at a basic error in political reasoning: neither force nor historical fact can establish a right to rule.

Two Discourses in Print

The Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality among Men appeared in 1755, after Rousseau had unsuccessfully competed for a second prize from the Academy of Dijon in 1753. He issued the essay with a long dedication to the Republic of Geneva. Voltaire, acknowledging a presentation copy, called it his “second book against the human race.” Yet the work represents a development beyond the first Discourse: Rousseau still sets the state of nature against society, but now gives nature positive content and makes a more reasoned case, conceding that something may be said on the other side.

About half the essay imagines human beings in a state of nature, with narrowly limited ideas, little need for one another, and few concerns beyond immediate necessities. This is not offered as a historical report. Rousseau explicitly treats the state of nature as an idea of reason, produced by abstraction from society, and its natural human being as a conceptual figure stripped of what society confers—not a portrait of an actual early population. The essay’s conclusion instead favors an intermediate condition: a rough society in which people might retain nature’s simplicity and advantages while gaining some of the rudimentary comforts and assurances of social life.

Rousseau does not propose that corrupt modern society return to nature. In a note to the essay, he argues that corruption has gone too far for such a return; the task is instead to mitigate the consequences of society’s introduction by using its arts more wisely. Society is therefore both a source of corruption and an unavoidable condition requiring political justification. The second Discourse remains stark in its opposition between nature and society, but its developed account of nature and its acknowledgment of society’s inevitability move Rousseau toward a more mature political theory.

Political Economy and the General Will

Also first printed in the Encyclopædia in 1755, the Discourse on Political Economy may have been composed before or after the Discourse on Inequality; its date cannot safely be inferred from its more constructive manner. Although the essay on inequality retains the rhetorical looseness of a prize work, its closing discussion already contains ideas later incorporated into The Social Contract. Both early Discourses are best understood as preliminary studies, more destructive in aim than final statements of Rousseau’s political system.

The Discourse on Political Economy gives the first sketch of the General Will. Rousseau uses “political economy” to mean public economy, not the organization of industry: his subject is the State as a public body responsible for the well-being of its members. He begins by rejecting an exaggerated analogy between the State and the family. Political authority, he argues, cannot simply be understood as paternal authority; the State’s real being lies in the General Will of its members. Its existence must be reconciled with human liberty, and its public finances judged by whether they serve the common good.

That purpose shapes the essay’s distinctive account of taxation. People who possess only necessities should not be taxed; superfluities should bear heavier taxes, with particularly heavy imposts on luxury. Tax policy is thus not treated as an end in itself or as a means of maximizing revenue, but as an instrument subordinated to the well-being of all. The concise fiscal argument and the account of the General Will show that constructive elements of Rousseau’s later political theory were already taking shape in work published in 1755.

Right, Fact, and Legitimate Society

The political problem running through these writings is how a social order can be legitimate when human beings are born free. In The Social Contract’s opening argument, Rousseau distinguishes the historical question of how subjection came about from the normative question of what could make it legitimate. Social order is a sacred right and the basis of other rights, but it does not arise from nature; it must rest on convention.

This distinction informs Rousseau’s criticism of writers who establish right by pointing to facts. He objects that the existence of slavery cannot prove that political power was established for the benefit of the governed, and he rejects reasoning that turns actual domination into a title to rule. His reductio of the “right of the strongest” makes the instability plain: if force creates right, each stronger force acquires that right in turn, and the supposed obligation disappears whenever coercion can be resisted. Force can compel obedience, but it cannot by itself transform obedience into duty.

Rousseau’s wider method likewise separates political theory from a mere account of existing institutions. Facts may help inquiry, but they cannot prove a right; the central question is the principle of political obligation. The 1755 writings therefore belong to a transition: the Discourse on Inequality refines the critique of society without treating an imagined natural condition as literal history, while the Discourse on Political Economy begins to articulate the principles by which a legitimate public order might reconcile collective life with liberty. That constructive project would reach its fuller statement in The Social Contract, published in 1762.