A Natural Right to Housing (part 4a): Rousseau

Previous posts a) defined "natural" rights, as opposed to other types of rights, b) reviewed Hobbes's Leviathan, and c) reviewed Locke's Two Treatises of Government. We now to turn Rousseau.

I am going to break this discussion into three parts, Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality (1755), Discourse on Political Economy (1755), and On Social Contract (1762).

Rousseau starts the Discourse on Inequality by stating this his purpose is determine when "right" replaced violence and "nature" was subjected to law. While Rousseau acknowledges that true equality may never have existed, he felt that understanding equality conceptually helps us to understand what is meant by natural rights and our current status. In summary, Rousseau believes inequality is wrong and generally did not exist in nature, to know why there is inequality we must understand humans, to understand humans we must understand human nature, and to know human nature we must strip away their current environment, circumstances, and society.

Rousseau reduces human nature to two features (one of which will sound familar): 1) the desire for self-preservation and 2) a repugnance at seeing others suffer or perish. In this way, Rousseau claims that humans are naturally good and that all persons should be governed by a sort of golden rule - "do what is good for you with the least possible harm to others."

One quick note regarding shelter - Rousseau believed that the Earth provided sufficient shelter for humans without any necessary modification. In such a world, humans live a simple, uniform, and solitary life. If they don't have shelter, it is because they do not need it (i.e. have learned or been so endowed as to survive without it).

Rousseau then passes from a state of nature (i.e. life without society), through a state of simple society (i.e. where people may live together for social purposes but each person tended to themselves), to a state of current society identified by its division of labor. Property is introduced due to the division of labor and human misery (i.e. avarice, ambition, and wickedness) begins. And so, natural endowments that lead to inequality and may have been imperceptible in a state of nature become more obvious through a division of labor and the establishment of property.

Rousseau then says that those with property (i.e. the rich) devised a scheme of protecting their property by deceiving others into thinking that it was for everyone's good to have laws. These laws became the basis of society, destroyed natural liberty, and subjected the whole human race to labor, servitude, and misery.

Rousseau concludes with an argument about inequality - moral inequality (i.e. inequality founded upon laws) that does not result from physical inequality found in nature is contrary to the law of nature. In other words, Rousseau believes it is not right for a few persons to be abundantly wealthy while multitudes lack bare necessities. In part 4c, Rousseau will describe a new kind of social contract designed to address these issues.