Savages and Citizens 

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712-1778

"The philosophers, who have examined the foundations of society, have, every one of them, perceived the necessity of tracing it back to a state of nature, but not one of them has ever arrived there. Some of them have not scrupled to attribute to man in that state the ideas of justice and injustice, without troubling their heads to prove, that he really must have had such ideas, or even that such ideas were useful to him: others have spoken of the natural right of every man to keep what belongs to him, without letting us know what they meant by the word belong; others, without further ceremony ascribing to the strongest an authority over the weakest, have immediately struck out government, without thinking of the time requisite for men to form any notion of the things signified by the words authority and government. All of them, in fine, constantly harping on wants, avidity, oppression, desires and pride, have transferred to the state of nature ideas picked up in the bosom of society. In speaking of savages they described citizens. (Italics added). Nay, few of our own writers seem to have so much as doubted, that a state of nature did once actually exist; though it plainly appears by Sacred History, that even the first man, immediately furnished as he was by God himself with both instructions and precepts, never lived in that state, and that, if we give to the books of Moses that credit which every Christian philosopher ought to give to them, we must deny that, even before the deluge, such a state ever existed among men, unless they fell into it by some extraordinary event: a paradox very difficult to maintain, and altogether impossible to prove."

Ω

When Rousseau talks about a state of nature he is - as he admits - not so much describing an actual state of affairs that might once has existed as constructing an analytical tool to reveal what is natural in human nature as contrasted with what is rather the product of human society. His 'state of nature' is designed to facilitate an analysis of human nature as it is now in what for Rousseau is a degraded condition. You cannot, he claims in effect, read back onto the past those features of human nature that are the product of our having come together in civil societies. Civil society is not, in his view, a simple benefit and paradigm of progress, but rather a set of costs that have detracted from what we essentially were or are. He does not imply, I think, that society and civilisation are all bad, but he does want us to appreciate that this progress increases human unhappiness as well as increasing benefits.

What are the costs of civil society that Rousseau draws attention to? What kinds of styress, and unhappiness arise from our living together in civilised societies?