A Discourse Upon the Origin and the Foundation of the Inequality Among Mankind | Page 2

it depends on a kind of convention, and is
established, or at least authorized, by the common consent of mankind. This species of
inequality consists in the different privileges, which some men enjoy, to the prejudice of
others, such as that of being richer, more honoured, more powerful, and even that of
exacting obedience from them.

It were absurd to ask, what is the cause of natural inequality, seeing the bare definition of
natural inequality answers the question: it would be more absurd still to enquire, if there
might not be some essential connection between the two species of inequality, as it would
be asking, in other words, if those who command are necessarily better men than those
who obey; and if strength of body or of mind, wisdom or virtue are always to be found in
individuals, in the same proportion with power, or riches: a question, fit perhaps to be
discussed by slaves in the hearing of their masters, but unbecoming free and reasonable
beings in quest of truth.
What therefore is precisely the subject of this discourse? It is to point out, in the progress
of things, that moment, when, right taking place of violence, nature became subject to
law; to display that chain of surprising events, in consequence of which the strong
submitted to serve the weak, and the people to purchase imaginary ease, at the expense of
real happiness.
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. Nay, few of
our own writers seem to have so much as doubted, that a state of nature did once actually
exit; 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.
Let us begin therefore, by laying aside facts, for they do not affect the question. The
researches, in which we may engage on this occasion, are not to be taken for historical
truths, but merely as hypothetical and conditional reasonings, fitter to illustrate the nature
of things, than to show their true origin, like those systems, which our naturalists daily
make of the formation of the world. Religion commands us to believe, that men, having
been drawn by God himself out of a state of nature, are unequal, because it is his pleasure
they should be so; but religion does not forbid us to draw conjectures solely from the
nature of man, considered in itself, and from that of the beings which surround him,
concerning the fate of mankind, had they been left to themselves. This is then the
question I am to answer, the question I propose to examine in the present discourse. As
mankind in general have an interest in my subject, I shall endeavour to use a language
suitable to all nations; or rather, forgetting the circumstances of time and place in order to
think of nothing but the men I speak to, I shall suppose myself in the Lyceum of Athens,
repeating the lessons of my masters before the Platos and the Xenocrates of that famous

seat of philosophy as my judges, and in presence of the whole human species as my
audience.
O man, whatever country you may belong to, whatever your opinions may be, attend to
my words; you shall hear your history such as I think I have read it, not in books
composed by those like you, for they are liars, but