Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality

See also Hobbes, Leviathan

The following questions are from various years in Arts One.

2013-2014:

• Discuss the relationship between language and power in Rousseau.
• Why does Rousseau believe that natural inequality is insufficient to explain moral or political inequality? Is his argument convincing?
• Consider Rousseau’s views of nascent man in relation to Kant’s cautions against “the shadowy image of the golden age” (p. 174). Is longing for the past valuable?
• Why and how well does Rousseau remake Hobbes?
• Rousseau tries to convince us that “savage people” are happier than we are. Does he succeed?
• Why does Hobbes and/ or Rousseau so strongly emphasize the originally independent or self-made individual?




2014-2015:

• Discuss the relationship between language and society in Rousseau and Hobbes.
• Using Rousseau’s comments on indigenous peoples and his account of human beings in nascent society, suggest how he would react to the portrayal of Caliban in The Tempest. Please consider Rousseau’s notes in composing your answer.
• Rousseau seems skeptical about the power of reason. What does he privilege instead, and how does his argument proceed from this different perspective? You may also wish to consider one of the following: Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, Plato’s Republic, Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
• Carefully assess Rousseau’s arguments and discuss whether A Discourse on Inequality levels an effective critique against Hobbes’s Leviathan with regard to the benefits of civilization, the nature of human beings, or any other concern shared by the two authors.
• What role does the concept and institution of property play in Rousseau’s account of the origins of inequality? Would the abolition of private property conceivably address or resolve Rousseau’s principal concerns?
• “[S]ocial man lives always outside himself; he knows how to live only in the opinions of others, it is, so to speak, from their judgment alone that he derives the sense of his own existence” (Rousseau 136). Discuss Rousseau’s theories on civilized “man” with reference to the issues of assimilation and authenticity raised in Appelfeld’s Until the Dawn’s Light.
• Rousseau tries to convince us that “savage people” are happier than we are. Does he succeed?
• Can Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality be read as a secularized narrative of the Fall? Discuss with reference to Genesis.
• In A Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau claims that human beings in the state of nature exist in total isolation and independence. Evaluate the consistency of this claim throughout the discussion of “natural man.”