Discourse on the Origin of Inequality: (Annotated Edition)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality among Men, often abbreviated to Discourse on Inequality, is a treatise on human nature in civil society, in which the author inquires about what divides people from people and how those inequalities originated in the first place. His work is divided into four sections, namely the Dedication, the Preface, then the First and Second Parts of "A Dissertation on the Origin and Foundation of the Inequality of Mankind."To begin with, Rousseau dedicates the work to his birthplace, Geneva. He praises the social system in Geneva as an ideal, near-perfect one. In his utopian and highly idealized vision of Geneva, he notes how the laws and institutions there are just and stable, how its inhabitants live in mutual harmony and continue with the community spirit, and how the State of Geneva maintains a friendly and peaceful relationship with its neighboring countries by neither threatening them nor being threatened by them. Rousseau's Utopian picture of 18th-century Geneva was far from an accurate one, and the state in his writing seems to be more of an ideal embodiment of the virtues he had always wished for, rather than an accurate picture of Geneva itself. Thus, the idealized Geneva turns to be a counter-discourse to the contemporary Paris, the city where Rousseau had spent quite a few years of his life and the city he would leave afterwards with dejection.