Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality . . . some notes.

I. Rousseau's Life
I would encourage you to look at his Confessions. Rousseau's autobiography is hundreds of pages and very interesting, and all I can do here is give the briefest sketch of his life.

Here is a link to a version of the Confessions on the web.

Born into a good family, both parents citizens of Geneva (only 1500 of 20000 residents were actually citizens, so this was really good.) Geneva was a Protestant Republic, with law shaped by Calvin. Italy (independent Sardinia) to the south was Catholic. Rousseau's mom died giving birth to him, his dad could not raise him alone, so he grew up with his aunt and uncle and various tutors. Eventually his uncle decided on engraving as a career for him (his dad was a watchmaker). Rousseau spent his teenage years as an apprentice for an engraver, where he says he first really learned vice since his work drove him to find pleasures in other things and his living conditions taught him envy and wickedness. He started stealing, etc. At the age of 16, he got in the habit of going out of the city on Sundays with some raucous buddies, and twice was locked out, at which point his master threatened to beat him to a pulp if he was locked out a third time. So, when he was locked out for a third time, he decided to just run away rather than go back to slavery under an angry master.
(This selection is taken from the Dartmouth Press edition of Rousseau's Confessions.)
In the first outbreak of my sorrow I threw myself upon the bank, and bit the ground., laughing at their misfortune, my comrades instantly made their choice. I also mad mine, but it was in a different manner. On the very spot I swore never to return to my master; and the next day, when they returned to the city at the opening of the gates, I said farewell to them forever, asking them only to inform my cousin Bernard in secret of the resolution I had made, and of the place here he could see me one more time . . ..
Before abandoning myself to the fatality of my destiny, permit me to turn my eyes for a moment onto the one that naturally awaited me, if I had fallen into the hands of a better master. Nothing was more suited to my disposition nor more fit to make me happy, than the tranquil and obscure condition of a good artisan, above all in undisputed classes, such as the engraver's is at Geneva. This condition, lucrative enough to give an easy subsistence, and not enough to lead to wealth, would have limited my ambition for the rest of my days, and leaving me a decent leisure for cultivating moderate tastes, it would have kept me in my sphere without offering me any means for leaving it. Having an imagination rich enough to adorn all conditions with its chimeras, powerful enough to transport me, so to speak, at my will from one to another, it mattered little to me in which I was in fact,. It could not have been so far from where I was to the first castle in Spain that I could not have easily settled there. From this alone it followed that the simplest conditions, the one that gave the least worry and fewest cares, the one that left the mind the most free, was the one that suited me best, and that was precisely my own. In the bosom of my religion, my fatherland, my family, and my friends, I would have passes a peaceful and sweet life, such as my character needed, in the uniformity of a labor to my taste, and of a society in harmony with my heart. I would have been a good Christian, good citizen, good father of a family, good friend, good worker, good man in everything. I would have loved my station; perhaps I would have honored it, and after having passed a simple and obscure, but even and sweet life, I would have died peacefully in the bosom of my own people. Doubtless soon forgotten, at least I would have been missed for as long as I might be remembered.
Instead of that . . . what picture am I going to draw? Ah! Let us not anticipate the miseries of my life . . .. (pp. 35-37, Pl. I.42-44)

Rousseau went to Sardinia, where he ended up in a school for catechumens as a way to get food and lodging. As a condition of this benefit, Rousseau had to be baptized a Catholic, which caused him to lose his citizenship in Geneva -- so it's not as legitimate a conversion as I had originally thought. He came out a Catholic and dirt poor, but managed to eek out a living as chance drove him towards France. He found a variety of lady patronesses who partially supported him. He also found a mistress, with whom he has five children, who he sends to the state orphanage. (He has a long defense that this is the best thing he can do for his children.) He worked as a cashier before being resolved to life a life of solitude and poverty, then worked transcribing music. He wrote a very successful opera, that earned him fame from strangers and jealousy from friends, neither of which pleased him. (After that, he stopped writing operas.) He became close friends with the most important members of the French intelligensia, including Diderot.

His friendship with Diderot, and in particular the long walks that he took from Paris to Vincennes, led to his first major foray into philosophy.

That year 1749 the Summer was excessively hot. From Paris to Vincennes adds up to two leagues. Hardly in a condition to pay for cabs, at two o'clock in the afternoon I went on foot when I was alone, and I went quickly so as to arrive earlier. The trees on the road, always pruned in the fashion of the country, gave almost no shade, and often exhausted from the heat and fatigue, I spread out on the ground when I was not able to go any farther. I took it into my head to take some book along to moderate my pace. One day I took the Mercury of France and while walking and glancing over it I fell upon this question proposed by the Academy of Dijon for the prize for the following year: "Has the progress of the sciences and arts tended to corrupt or purify morals?"
At the moment of that reading I saw another universe and I became another man. Although I have a lively remembrance of the impression I received from it, its details have escaped me since I stet them down in one of my four letter to M. de Malesherbes. This is one of the peculiarities of my memory that deserves to be told. If it serves me, it does so only as long as I have relied on it, as soon as I entrust the deposit to paper it abandons me . . ..
What I do recall very distinctly on this occasion is that, when I arrived at Vincennes, I was in an agitation that bordered on delirium. Diderot noticed it; I told him its cause, and . . . he exhorted me to give vent to my ideas and to compete for the prize. I did so, and from that instant I was lost. All the rest of my life and misfortunes was the inevitable effect of that instant of aberration . . ..
When this Discourse was done I showed it to Diderot who was satisfied with it, and who indicated some corrections for me. Nevertheless this work, full of warmth and strength, is absolutely lacking in logic and order; of all the ones that have come from my pen it is the weakest . . .. (pp. 294-95, see too the letter to Malesherbes)

The essay argues that progress in arts and sciences actually leads to vice rather than virtue. It defends this primarily on historical grounds, with a philosophical explanation for the naturalness of this progression. The seeds of the essay you read for today are clearly already present here, but only the seeds.
The essay won the prize that year, and Diderot arranged to have it published.

The following year 1750, when I was no longer thinking about my discourse, I learned that it had won the prize at Dijon. This news reawoke all the ideas that had dictated it to me, animated them with a new strength, and finished stetting into fermentation in my heart that first leaven of heroism and virtue which my Father and my fatherland and Plutarch had put there in my childhood. I no longer found anything great and beautiful but to be free and virtuous, above fortune and opinion, and to suffice to oneself.
The essay also won Rousseau instant literary fame . . . and infamy. He was attacked by the defenders of arts and sciences, who were many and prolific. His defenses distracted him, which he regrets.
Hardly had my Discourse appeared when the defenders of letters pounced on me as if by agreement . . .. I took up the pen [to defend myself] . . .. All these polemics occupied me very much, with much loss of time my copying, little progress for the truth, and little profit for my purse.
The second discourse, which we read, was written a few years later. Rousseau describes this opportunity as follows:
I soon had an occasion to develop them [my principles] completely in a work of the greatest importance; for it was, I think, in that year 1753 that the Program of the Academy of Dijon appeared on the origin of inequality among men. Struck by this great question, I was surprised that this Academy had dared to propose it; but since it had had this courage, I could certainly have the courage to tackle it, and I undertook to do so . . ..
From these meditations resulted the Discourse on Inequality, a work that was more to Diderot's taste than all my other writings, and for which his advice was most useful to me, but which found few readers who understood it in all of Europe, and none of these wanted to talk about it. It had been written to compete for the prize, thus I sent it, but I was certain in advance that it would not get it, knowing well that the prizes of Academies are not established for pieces of that stuff.

This essay did not win the prize, nor did R expect it to. After writing this essay, R went back to Geneva, where he reconverts to Protestantism and is made a citizen.
Rousseau eventually moves back to a "Hermitage" outside of Paris, built for him by one of his lady friends from Paris. There he goes on to write several more works, including a novel that rocked the continent, Julie, as well as his Social Contract, which had an important influence on both the American and French Revolutions, and Emile, a book on moral education. In the letter, this is the third work that forms a unity with the two discourses. These works are condemned in both France and Geneva, leading Rousseau to be banished from France and to renounce his citizenship in Geneva, and to flee to other city-states in Switzerland, to England, and eventually to return at the end of his life to Paris. Next week I will lecture on these works and their relationship to the second Discourse. Rousseau's life and work well deserves a course all its own, and I will do the best I can to give you a sense of his overall life's project without swamping you with hundreds of pages of reading. For now, though, let's turn to look more closely at the second Discourse in particular.

II. Context of this Discourse

A. In R's life, see I.

B. 1. Scientific discoveries. Buffon and Lineaus were the great biologists of the day. Linneaus had begun classifying huge numbers of animals, while Buffon -- the more important of the two at the time -- published a multivolume work just documenting the structures of various animals and giving an account of how animals developed in various parts of the world. He offered a "devolutionary" account. What is most important for the purposes of reading Rousseau is that biology and comparative biology were taking off at the time, and there was lots of data available about wild animals that would not have been as prominent a century earlier. Hence we find constant reference to animals and animal behavior, and Rousseau's account of savage man reads as a scientific account of an animal.
(See too Discourse p. 24, man as machine . . . )

2. Discoveries of new peoples. See the footnotes for the importance of these in Rousseau's discourse.

3. Philosophical predecessors and contemporaries: Locke, Voltaire, Diderot, Mandeville, Hume, Smith, etc... were all important.
Hobbes is perhaps the most important philosopher to have in the background. Hobbes's account of the emergence of man from the state of nature provides an important contrast to Rousseau's. Briefly, Hobbes's account was the following.

Man was initially solitary and motivated by three basic passions: greed, fear, and pride. Because goods were scarce, and people were always in danger of having their livelihood stolen and their lives taken away by others, people were in a constant state of war with each other. Hobbes calls this "the war of all against all." Even if people were not actually fighting at some particular time, everyone was always wary of others and looking for an opportunity to get the better of them. As Hobbes describes it, life in the state of nature was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
Human beings, realizing that their best chance for survival depended on ending the war of all against all, band together and submit to a soveriegn. They turn over absolute power to that sovereign, who rules over all of them, using the strength of his subjects to subdue any who would threaten them. Thus, with the loss of their liberty, the slaves of the king at least have peace. And, to complete this and introduce you to yet another genealogy, Hobbes claims that morality is just the will of the sovereign. Moral right and wrong are embodied in the laws of the land, which all must submit to because they turned over all their rights to the sovereign who wrote the laws.
There's a lot more to the story, but that's the basic idea.

Others (Grotius, Pufendorf) accepted Hobbes's basic model (Grotius may have been the model for Hobbes) but insisted that man is not purely selfish but rather has a basic instinct for social life itself.

You can see Rousseau responding to both the egoism of Hobbes (in his stuff on pity) and the social nature ascribed to man by Pufendorf. And he responds to both at once in his suggestions that man is not proud, fearful of others, or rational in the SN.