Rousseau and the paradoxes of property

Property and the theodicy of self-love

In support of this investigation, I borrow a device suggested by Frederick Neuhouser’s recent study of Rousseau’s Theodicy of Self-Love. ⁹ Here Neuhouser completes the recent rehabilitation of Rousseau’s concept of amour-propre. ¹⁰ Whereas amour-propre was once seen by most commentators as simply a debilitating (and ‘social’) vice, something close to ‘vanity’, and contrasted with a benign (and ‘natural’) amour de soi, Neuhouser now presents it as perhaps the central unifying theme of Rousseau’s entire philosophical enterprise. ¹¹ In some sense, amour-propre is not just the ‘curse’ but also the ‘cure’ for the affliction which it has brought upon civilized mankind (and which Rousseau has described at some length in the Second Discourse). There is some historical precedent for thinking about private property in the same way. Among the early church fathers (in Augustine above all), we find the view that, while common ownership or mendicancy might be the ‘more perfect way’ (recalling a time before the Fall), in a world of sin (in which the damned and the elect must coexist) private property is the necessary means of preventing a descent into violence and chaos – a restraint upon sinfulness and therefore a good thing. ¹² It may not be a part of the natural law; but it is not against the natural law. We can find much the same view in the later work of Gratian, Aquinas, and Alexander of Hales. ¹³

Such an account can be mapped, albeit rather imperfectly, onto Rousseau’s own work on property. Private property may bring a fateful, perhaps undesirable, and certainly irreversible change (and a ‘loss of innocence’) but, given that there is no going back (and, just as after the Fall, there is no going back), it may be that the best ‘cure’ for the vices that this brings in its train is actually a further dose of private property. But this comes with a proviso: that this property regime should be managed – so that private property is more evenly (though not equally) distributed and its general regulation (though not its particular allocation) brought under the jurisdiction of the general will. Upon this reading of Rousseau, we may (now) need private property and this may be a ‘good thing’ – it may provide the underpinning of a regime of civil freedom – but this is not because it protects an inalienable right which predates the creation of the state. ¹⁴ And this leaves state-makers and law-givers with considerable discretion about how the regime of private property may look. ¹⁵ In a world of private property, it is important that everyone has something and that the distance between rich and poor is squeezed. For what really matters in a world of unevenly owned private property is not the fact that the rich enjoy a materially better life. Whether or not we wholly believe him, Rousseau is absolutely consistent in his disdain for the better quality of life that riches can bring. ¹⁶ What really matters about the relations between rich and poor is, first, that they are relations of dependence and (thus) of dissembling and second that, in their differing ways, both tend to escape the community of virtuous and law-abiding citizens. ¹⁷ And it is this that must be avoided. (Rousseau seems really doubtful that, once established, this can be changed.)

This points us towards a further insight that arises from Neuhouser’s work. It is that, while property is clearly a central concern for Rousseau, it is almost never the principal driver of his account. ¹⁸ Thus in the Second Discourse, for Neuhouser, the precipitation of private property is just one (of four) manifestation(s) of an (‘inflamed’) amour-propre and not that which, first and foremost, precipitates the move towards civil society. And if we cast our attention forward, we can see that the purpose of the Social Contract is not principally to secure the prior rights of private property-holders. (Indeed outside the social contract such property claims are strictly provisional; possession only becomes fully legitimate property under the sanction of positive law.) The state does not recognize the prior (natural) rights of property-holders; rather, it inaugurates property rights but always mindful of the consequences (particularly seeking to avoid extremes of rich and poor). There is no natural or deontologic right to private property. Although Rousseau is wary of agrarian law – in a state that needs so to reallocate property-holding, it is already too late – the right to private property always stands to be trumped by a prior and real right which Rousseau does seem to argue for: the right to live. Thus, in the chapter on property in the Social Contract, Rousseau writes that ‘every man has naturally a right to everything that is necessary to him’. ¹⁹ To explore both these suggestions and these ambiguities more fully, we need to turn to the texts themselves.

The Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men

The opening lines of the second part of the Second Discourse, with its ringing denunciation of the coming of private property, are justly famous:

The true founder of civil society was the first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought of saying, ‘This is mine’, and came across people simple enough to believe him. How many crimes, wars, murders and how much misery and horror the human race might have been spared if someone had pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch, and cried out to his fellows: ‘Beware of listening to this charlatan. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and that the earth itself belongs to no one.’ ²⁰

When no one came forward to confront the ‘first fencer’, ‘the true youth of the world’ was lost: ‘all subsequent advances appear to be so many steps toward improvement of the individual, but, in fact, toward the enfeeblement of the species’. ²¹

On the face of it, this makes the coming of private property the key event in the progressive ‘enfeeblement of the species’ – but, in fact, this judgement may be just too quick. In Neuhouser’s account, though the emergence of private property precipitates some human vices, this derives in its turn from the prior influence of amour-propre: ‘it is amour-propre …  that ultimately explains the rapid growth – perhaps even the origins of private property’. ²² And in the text, Rousseau’s own bold claim about the ‘first fencer’ is immediately followed by this qualification: ‘the idea of property depends on many prior ideas, which [men] could only have acquired successively, and cannot have been formed all at once in the human mind’. There is certainly a developmental history to humankind’s ‘descent’ into civilization and, indeed, an incremental history in the emergence of private property itself. While it represented the first step in the decline of the species, this staking of a property claim was actually the last stage in the state of nature.

The earliest men and women lived in a ‘primitive condition, without houses or huts or property of any kind whatever … they had no idea of “mine” and “yours”, and no real idea of justice’. As the human race grew more numerous, its cares increased and its life became more sociable: and ‘as they grew enlightened, they grew industrious’. Humans began to interact, to construct a rudimentary language and to live in simple huts; and this brought on ‘a first revolution’, with the emergence of families and the introduction of ‘property of a sort’. In its turn, living together induced ‘conjugal and paternal love’ and the first sexual division of labour. As men and women interacted more frequently, so they began to make comparisons and to enter further judgements: ‘each person began to gaze on the others and to want to be gazed upon himself, … and this was the first step toward inequality and also toward vice’. ²³ Mutual indifference gave way to (an easily injured) pride and brought with it a torrent of violence and crimes of vengeance. ‘Morality began to be introduced into human actions’ but as yet there was no law and no law-enforcer and every man relied upon his own strength and judgement in avenging the injuries he perceived to have been done to him. But still property was not fully formed.

For all that these circumstances represented a ‘decline’ from man’s first and most natural condition, this must have been, so Rousseau supposes, ‘the happiest and most enduring age … striking a good balance between the indolence of the primitive state and the fervid activity of our own vanity (amour-propre)’. In this condition, men lived ‘free, healthy, good, and happy lives’. ²⁴ The really crucial change – what Rousseau styles ‘this great revolution’ – came only with the division of labour:

From the moment one man needed help from another, and as soon as they found it useful for one man to have provisions enough for two, equality evaporated, property was introduced, and work became mandatory; vast forests were transformed into sunny open country that had to be watered with the sweat of man, and where slavery and adversity were soon seen to germinate and ripen with the crops. ²⁵

Cultivation of the earth led to its division – and to (a more developed form of) property. In its turn, ‘the recognition of property led to the first rules of justice’ and ‘a new sort of right, that is, the right to property, which is different from the right deducible from the law of nature’ (emphasis added). Men’s natural inequalities (in strength, in ingenuity, in skill) were all that were needed to turn this new property order into one that (as time passed) became radically unequal. ²⁶

In Rousseau’s account, what is most important about this ‘great revolution’ is not that it makes some poor and others rich. Since most of what passes for wealth is of no value (other than as a token of our pride), riches are of limited value in themselves. What is really crucial about the rise of property (in close association with the division of labour) is the change it effects in men’s characters and in their disposition towards each other. Above all, it required them to be disingenuous: ‘being and appearing became two quite different things’. Hidden behind a ‘mask of benevolence’, ‘deceitful and crafty with some, harsh and domineering’ with others, men were driven by ‘consuming ambition’ and ‘a secret jealousy’ to use others as the means to promote their own interests. Men had thus to make use of others while always seeming to be interested in the well-being of those others themselves. At the same time, it sealed the dependency of both poor and rich:

Once free and independent, now subject, so to speak, through a multitude of new needs, to all of nature, and above all to his fellow men, whose slave he has in a sense become, even when he becomes their master. For if he is rich, he needs their services; if he is poor, he needs their aid. ²⁷

In its turn, this destruction of equality brought forth ‘the most appalling disorder’: ‘the encroachments of the rich, the thievery of the poor, and the unbridled passions of everyone, stifling natural pity and the still-hushed voice of justice, made men greedy, ambitious, and wicked’. The struggle between those who possessed by right of first occupation and by right of being the strongest led to a ‘most horrible state of war’. Moreover, men found that it was now impossible to go back to their former way of life. ²⁸ The ‘solution’ to this situation, as we shall see a little later, lay in the construction of a social contract.

‘Political Economy’ in the Encyclopedie

This reading may do something to deflect the full impact of Rousseau’s assault on private property in the Second Discourse, but can it really be reconciled with that much more Lockean Rousseau who argues (in the article on ‘Political Economy’ in the fifth volume of the Encyclopedie) that the state is ‘established only in order to provide security for private property, which is anterior to it’ and that ‘the right of property is the most sacred of all citizens’ rights, and in some respects more important than freedom itself’? Of course, we might now want to be a little wary about just how ‘Lockean’ even Locke was. Recent scholarship (above all that of Jeremy Waldron) suggests that Locke himself doubted that there was really a natural right to private property and that, in any case, it always stands to be trumped by a prior right to life. ²⁹ This line of argument has a pedigree that goes back at least to Aquinas. ³⁰ We also need to be careful about what exactly it is that Rousseau is saying in the article on political economy – and why. Rousseau’s own gloss offers no hint that there is a prior and natural right to property which citizens enter into a social pact to protect. Indeed, it is precisely the unreconciled (and irreconcilable) clash between first possessors and the strong that precipitates the need for a social contract and a state. The reasons he offers for the sanctity of property as a citizen’s right are 1) its centrality to the means of preserving life (which, as we have seen, Rousseau does come close to defining as a natural right), 2) its special vulnerability to being parted from its owner (the key dimension Hume identifies in his own privileging of property as the key dimension in the emergence of the ‘artificial’ virtue of justice ³¹ ) and 3) the means its provides for securing the accountability of the individual to the state (not least in the obligation to pay taxes). ³² In the immediately following paragraph, Rousseau makes it clear that there is no natural right of inheritance and that it is for the state to determine what should happen to a man’s goods at his death. When he writes that ‘everyone should be guaranteed the peaceful enjoyment of what he owns’, this is in the context of insisting that taxation must be extracted with consent, but that what is required here is the consent of a duly constituted majority rather than of the individual property-holder. ³³

Men do indeed come together to form civil societies ‘to guarantee each member’s property, life, and liberty’. But in practice this agreement exists principally for the benefit of the rich:

Let me briefly sum up the social pact between the two classes. ‘You need me, because I am rich and you are poor; let us therefore make an agreement: I will allow you to have the honour of working for me, on condition that you give me the little you still have in return for the trouble I take to give you orders’. ³⁴

Given this, ‘one of the most important things for a government to do … is to prevent extreme inequality in wealth [and] to protect the poor against the tyranny of the rich’. This it does ‘not by depriving the rich of their possessions, but by denying everyone the means of accumulating them’. In fact, ‘the worst has already happened when there are poor people to defend and rich people to restrain. The full force of the law is felt only by those in between; laws are equally powerless against the rich man’s wealth and the poor man’s destitution.’ ³⁵ We rely upon the laws and education to tutor the citizens and to make them virtuous; for, ‘in the long run, nations are what their governments make of them’. ³⁶

Emile and the melons

A second ‘Lockean’ source can be found in the story of Emile and the melons, the most sustained discussion of property in the whole of Rousseau’s long treatise on the education of the man-citizen. ³⁷ Here Rousseau encourages his young charge to plant some beans. They return every day to water them and to view the progress of the tender shoots. Emile’s delight increases when his mentor tells him that ‘this belongs to you’, establishing that ‘there is in this earth something of himself that he can claim against anyone whomsoever’. One day they return and find, to Emile’s shock and horror, that his beans have been uprooted. The child rails against this injustice. It turns out that this was the work of Robert, the gardener. But when confronted with his ‘crime’, it is Robert who is indignant. He had already planted this plot with valuable Maltese melons (which he had intended to share with Emile):

… in order to plant your miserable beans there, you destroyed my melons for me when they were already sprouting, and they can never be replaced. You have done me an irreparable wrong, and you have deprived yourselves of the pleasure of eating exquisite melons.

Rousseau pacifies the aggrieved gardener, assuring him that ‘we will never again work the land without knowing whether someone had put his hand to it before us’, though Robert responds that all the land locally has already been occupied. Turning to Emile, the gardener drives home the lesson: ‘No one touches his neighbour’s garden. Each respects the labour of others so that his own will be secure.’ When Emile innocently retorts that he has no garden, the gardener responds (somewhat gruffly?) ‘What do I care?’ The gardener agrees to allow Emile a patch in which to grow his beans but finishes with a warning: ‘I will go and plough up your beans if you touch my melons’. ³⁸

Rousseau seems well pleased with the lesson he has provided here. His proof that ‘the idea of property naturally goes back to the right of the first occupant by labour [is] clear, distinct, simple and within the child’s reach’. Indeed, Rousseau is consistent across a range of writings in arguing that only labour, indeed, perhaps only manual labour, can create a right to property. More than this, Rousseau has taught this lesson not (just) by telling Emile that he should not interfere with what belongs to someone else (his duty) but by first showing him how distressing it is to find the proper fruits of one’s own labour (his rights) disrespected, albeit that in Emile’s case his distress was based upon a ‘mistake’. But there are ambiguities in Rousseau’s story. ³⁹ Given Rousseau’s general hostility to luxury, does it matter that Robert had planted seeds ‘given [him] as a treasure’ and that they were destined to grow into ‘exquisite melons’ rather than ‘miserable beans’? Is it significant that Robert was prepared and preparing to share his fruit with Emile and Jean-Jacques (rather than to eat it all himself or to put it into exchange)? It appears that Robert works the land but is not its owner. It was ‘improved’ by his father but again there is no evidence that he owned it. Indeed, Robert seems to reprimand Emile not so much for encroaching upon his land as for undermining his previous labour. In the end, Robert declines Rousseau’s offer of a sharecropping arrangement and simply gifts a portion of his garden to Emile.

In a sequel, Rousseau explains the workings of exchange, of trade, of money and of the division of labour. Having left the state of nature, the division of labour and trade is now essential to our very survival: ‘for, finding the whole earth covered with thine and mine and having nothing belonging to him expect his body, where would [a man so placed] get his necessities?’ ⁴⁰ But even as he explains these hard facts of life, he is encouraging in Emile a healthy contempt for opulence and high living, recommending to him the ‘good fruits, good vegetables, good custard, and good people’ he will find in the home of the peasant. ⁴¹

It really is not clear that Rousseau’s message here is the same as Locke’s. (For example, he advises Emile that ‘countries rich in money must be poor in everything else’. ⁴² ) Locke certainly invests labour with an extraordinary power to create legitimate private property – but only under the very special (and long-gone) circumstances of the state of nature. Rousseau’s point is that only labour (indeed only manual labour) on an unworked resource can give rise to a legitimate property claim – and this is most typically a claim to the products of that labour, and not necessarily a claim in perpetuity to the land on which that labour is expended.

The Social Contract

It may be possible to read the Second Discourse, the ‘discourse on political economy’ and Emile in a way which makes these texts mutually comprehensible but, in some ways, it is the Social Contract which is the most difficult text to incorporate into a single, coherent Rousseauian view. The relations of sovereignty, the general will and the individuals as these are presented in the Social Contract have been abidingly controversial and commentators have wavered as to whether what Rousseau really intended here was the maximum possible freedom for private property or the effective subjection of all of the citizens’ possessions to the directing authority of the state. ⁴³

Certainly, this later version of the social contract looks quite different from that reconstructed in both the Second Discourse and ‘the discourse on political economy’. In the Second Discourse, the social pact is one in which the poor are conned by the rich. In the general social disorder that preceded the creation of the state, it was the rich who suffered most – as they stood in danger of losing not only their lives but also their property. Hence they proposition the weak (and propertyless): ‘let us unite [our forces] together in one supreme power that will govern us all according to wise laws, protect and defend all the members of the association, fend off common enemies, and preserve us in everlasting concord’.

Such was, or must have been, the origin of society and of laws, which put new shackles on the weak and gave new powers to the rich, which destroyed natural freedom irretrievably, laid down for all time the law of property and inequality, made clever usurpation into an irrevocable right, and henceforth subjected, for the benefit of a few ambitious men, the human race to labour, servitude and misery. ⁴⁴

The prehistory of humankind and the circumstances under which men come together to agree a social pact look very different in the Social Contract. The transition to civil society is now represented as bringing with it ‘a very remarkable change’ from the life of ‘a limited and stupid animal’ into ‘an intelligent being and a man’ (contrast this with Rousseau’s remark in the Second Discourse that ‘the man who meditates is a perverse animal’). ⁴⁵ The social pact itself loses the appearance of being a ruse perpetrated upon the poor and the gullible by the rich and the avaricious. Now it seems that ‘the fundamental contract substitutes moral and legal equality for whatever degree of physical inequality nature has put between men’. ⁴⁶ More than this, it replaces ‘natural freedom’ with ‘civil freedom’ and ‘moral liberty’: for ‘to be driven by our appetites alone is slavery, while to obey a law that we have imposed on ourselves is freedom’. ⁴⁷ Famously, the challenge presented by Rousseau is to ‘find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole of its joint strength, the person and property of each associate, and under which each of them, uniting himself to all, will obey himself alone, and remain as free as before’. ⁴⁸ Just as famously, the solution is that ‘each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will; and we as a body receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole’. ⁴⁹ This requires ‘the complete transfer of each associate, with all his rights, to the whole community’. For Rousseau, it is the very comprehensiveness of this transfer which ensures that it is not oppressive:

Each in giving himself to all gives himself to none, and since there are no associates over whom he does not acquire the same rights as he cedes, he gains the equivalent of all that he loses, and greater strength for the conservation of what he possesses. ⁵⁰

Property is absolutely central to the new social pact. At its creation, everyone passes all that they possess to the association. But this does not mean that all property is effectively held by the sovereign. Indeed, it means that property, which in the state of nature is ‘fragile’, provisional and in part simply a usurpation, becomes ‘stronger and more irrevocable’ as it is cemented in law. Here echoing Hobbes, Rousseau argues that in the state of nature man had a natural right to everything (at least, to everything that was useful to him) but this right was of little value. Thus: ‘in the state of nature, in which everything is common property, I owe nothing to others, having promised them nothing; the only thing I recognize as belonging to others are those that are of no use to me’. ⁵¹ At the same time, Rousseau does argue that first occupancy (under specified conditions which include labouring) should give rise to a property title (whether in the state of nature or in civil society) and that ‘the right of the first occupant is more real than the right of the strongest’. ⁵² But it is only in civil society that there is a ‘true’ right of property, guaranteed by the laws of the sovereign:

The remarkable thing about this transfer of ownership is that when the community receives the possessions of individuals it does not in any way despoil them, but instead ensures that their ownership is legitimate, changing usurpation into genuine right, and enjoyment of use into property … their act of ceding ownership to the state has benefited not only the public but, even more, themselves, and they have as it were acquired everything that they have given – a paradox which is easily explained if we distinguish between the rights that the sovereign and the owner have over the same piece of property. ⁵³

Of course, the rights that the sovereign has are real – ‘the right that each individual has over his property is always subordinate to the right that the community has over everyone’. But, at the same time, the sovereign can only ever act by laws of general application and, within these limits, ‘any man can make full use of his goods and liberty that is left him’. ⁵⁴ At one point, Rousseau indicates that ‘what each person transfers, in accordance with the social pact, as regards his power, his goods, and his freedom, amounts at most to the portion of these things that it is important for the community to use’. He adds that it is for the sovereign to decide what that portion is, though, of course, it is also crucial to remember that for Rousseau this sovereign is the ‘body politic’ when ‘active’ (and not Hobbes’s Leviathan). Rousseau is clear that this is a good deal for the individual: ‘nothing is truly renounced by private individuals’ under the social contract. They have effected a ‘beneficial transfer’: ‘exchanging an uncertain and precarious mode of existence for a better and more secure one, natural independence for liberty, the power of hurting others for their own safety, and reliance on their own strength, which others might overcome, for a position of right that social unity makes invincible’. ⁵⁵

Is Rousseau’s account here truly a paradox? Is it really true that, for property-holders, ‘their act of ceding ownership to the state has benefited not only the public but, even more, themselves, and they have as it were acquired everything that they have given’? Of course, Rousseau’s own unlocking of the paradox invites us to consider the respective (and differing) rights of private owner and state – but this resolution is ambiguous. The individual cedes only so much control as ‘it is important for the community to use’ and yet it is for this community to determine what that portion is. While attempts to use these passages to pin upon Rousseau the responsibility for a whole subsequent history of ‘totalitarian democracy’ seem quite unconvincing, it is quite unclear how precisely the relationship between state and citizen is supposed to look. ⁵⁶ We can perhaps get some sense of what Rousseau himself really intended by looking briefly at those later works in which he discusses constitutional reform in the very particular circumstances of Corsica (1765) and Poland (1772).

In the Constitutional Project for Corsica, Rousseau repeats his preference for agriculture over commerce, since ‘commerce produces wealth, but agriculture ensures freedom’, and for the countryside over the city: ‘cities are harmful … a capital is an abyss’. He insists that ‘everyone should make a living, and none should grow rich’. He discourages trade: ‘Corsica has no need for money’. ⁵⁷ He seems to advocate a substantial role for common property and expresses reservations about the impact of private property:

Far from wanting the state to be poor, I should like, on the contrary, for it to own everything, and for each individual to share in the common property only in proportion to his services … [my idea] is not to destroy private property absolutely, since that is impossible, but to confine it within the narrowest possible limits … In short, I want the property of the state to be as large and strong, that of the citizens as small and weak, as possible. ⁵⁸

Yet, a few pages later, he rejects the idea of an agrarian law or indeed any retrospective assault on large estates: ‘no law can despoil any private citizen of any part of his property; the law can merely prevent him from acquiring more’. ⁵⁹

The Considerations on the Government of Poland contains a lot of detail concerning constitutional reform. Rousseau is circumspect about what can be done. He does though recommend a reformed polity built around agriculture which should, wherever possible, eschew payment of monetary taxes in favour of payment in kind or public service. He presents the Poles with a choice in determining the character of their economic future. They could chose to follow the successful nations of Western Europe, to ‘cultivate the arts and sciences, commerce and industry … to make money very necessary … [and to] encourage material luxury’. This way they ‘will create a scheming, ardent, avid, ambitious, servile and knavish people … one given to the two extremes of opulence and misery, of licence and slavery, with nothing in between’. The alternative is to ‘preserve and revive among your people simple customs and wholesome tastes, and a warlike ambition devoid of ambition … devote your people to agriculture and the most necessary arts and crafts; you must make money contemptible and, if possible, useless’. This is the way to create ‘a free wise and peaceful nation, one which has no fear or need of anyone but is self-sufficient and happy’. He joked that some might see him as ‘trying to turn Poland into a nation of mendicant friars’. ⁶⁰

Making sense of Rousseau

Can we make sense of Rousseau’s overall position on property – indeed, does such a position exist? Perhaps. First, we should note that Rousseau is a critic but not an opponent of private property. ⁶¹ It may well be (as he argues so passionately in the Second Discourse) that it would have been better if men and women had for ever lived their solitary and indolent lives in the woods. But when, in fact, no one did pull down the first fences or fill in the first ditch, the die was irretrievably cast. We are now wholly different from our savage ancestors: ‘savage man and civilized man differ so much in the depths of their hearts and in their inclinations that what constitutes the supreme bliss of the one would drive the other to despair’. ⁶² We cannot, just as we do not wish to, escape from the hamster-wheel of modernity. We live irreversibly in a world of property.

Second, it is labour – in fact, it is only labour, indeed, it is only manual labour – that can justify a claim to create property (though such a claim must always remain provisional until it is embodied in positive law and may be a claim only to the product of that labour, and not necessarily to the land on which it is performed). But this is not an argument from natural right. Even labour-based possession is ‘usurpation’ in the state of nature. True property (rather than possession-tending-towards-property) is only created when the political community inaugurates formal title (though Rousseau’s usage is far from consistent and he certainly writes of a kind of property existing before the agreement that precipitates civil society). But even within civil society the presumption in favour of what I have produced with my own hands remains. So, on the one hand, labour does less work for Rousseau than it did for Locke. It creates only an assumption in favour of the labourer, rather than a natural right to property, in the pre-social state. On the other hand, labour continues to offer a compelling (perhaps the compelling) source of title after it has lost this status for Locke (because of the appearance of money) though not, as we saw in the case of Emile, where property is already claimed by the labour of others.

Third, there is for Rousseau a claim that is prior to and indeed always trumps the claims of property – indeed, it is a natural right – and that is the right to live: ‘every man must live … If there is some miserable state in the world where a man cannot live without doing harm and where the citizens are rascals by necessity, it is not the malefactor who should be hanged, but he who forces him to become one’. ⁶³ If we do (have to) live in a world of property and there is no way to return to a world without it (we do and we can’t), it is important that everyone should have something (indeed, enough) that he can call his own, at the very least that which will keep body and soul together; for nature ‘permits everything to anyone who has no other possible means of living’. ⁶⁴ For, ‘in order to render to each his own, each must be able to own something’. ⁶⁵

Just as crucially, no one should have too much: for it is the rich as much as the poor who lie beyond the purview of the laws. This points us towards a fourth point: Rousseau’s real concern is not with equality but with inequality. ⁶⁶ And this concern with inequality was not so much about the uneven distribution of resources (though he was concerned about destitution), but rather about the fact that inequality produced relations of dependence (of the poor upon the rich, but also of the rich upon the poor) and that this, in turn, led to a world of insincerity in which the rich and the poor were both minded to cheat and to deceive (each other and) us. Thus, ‘no one who depends on others, and lacks resources of his own, can ever be free’. ⁶⁷ Rousseau is absolutely consistent (and not alone) in arguing that what matters about wealth is not so much utility or commodious living but rather social position. ⁶⁸ The real problem, so Rousseau supposes, is not the distribution of resources but the ubiquity of (perhaps just an over-excited) amour-propre. The rich have a ‘consuming ambition, the burning passion to raise one’s relative fortune, less out of a real need than to make oneself superior to others’. ⁶⁹

Differences, even significant differences, in middling fortunes are not a problem. The real problem is the existence of the rich and the poor:

As for equality, the word must not be taken to mean that the degrees of power and wealth should be exactly the same, but … as regards wealth, that no citizen should be rich enough to be able to buy another, and none so poor that he has to sell himself: and this depends on those of high position exercising restraint concerning property and influence, and on the common people restraining their greed and envy. ⁷⁰

He adds in a footnote that ‘extreme opulence and destitution … are inseparable by nature … It is always between them that public liberty is traded, one buying and the other selling’.

Under a ‘bad government’ the equality which the social pact establishes ‘is only apparent and illusory: it serves only to keep the poor wretched and preserve the usurpations of the rich’:

Laws in reality are always useful to those with possessions and detrimental to those who have nothing: whence it follows that the social state is advantageous to men only if all have a certain amount and none too much. ⁷¹

In fact, the sovereign can and should use the laws to guard against the emergence of rich and poor. Once we have a propertied regime, if we are to avoid relations of master and slave and a society based upon appearance and conceit, it is important to ensure that all should have enough property and none should have too much. So the sovereign may legislate for progressive taxation and (possibly) provision for the poor. All should work (because this is the only legitimate source of property).

Conclusion

As Judith Shklar observed, when we look for truthfulness in Rousseau we should look less for consistency than for sincerity. ⁷² If we seek to make him speak to us across all his writings in a single voice and with a single message, we are likely to read him wrong. But is the story we have traced here best understood as smartly paradoxical or simply inconsistent? I think that it is possible to identify in Rousseau an attitude to property that, while nuanced and sometimes obscure, is generally consistent. Although the state of nature is never celebrated again in quite the way that it is in the Second Discourse, Rousseau never really lost his enthusiasm for the simple life, for the country against the city, for simplicity against luxury, for self-sufficiency or simple exchange over against money and commerce (as the constitutional commentaries on Corsica and Poland suggest). But whether or not this view is ‘tragic’, he certainly believed that there was no way back to the world we have lost. He consistently thought that labour (indeed, manual labour) was the only real source of a claim to property but that certainly did not amount to a natural right. It was only when the tendency for labour to suggest title was given the sanction of positive law by the relevant community (in the Social Contract, the sovereign), that ‘real’ property begins. And this property was always subject to the sanctions that that property-conferring lawful institution placed upon it. It seems a crude misreading of Rousseau to suggest that this meant that for him the best property order was one in which the state disposed of all resources. Most of the time it was best just to let people get on with their lives. In the end, though, it is not easy to endorse Rousseau’s own judgement that the paradoxes he identified – above all, that at the heart of the social contract – were capable of ‘easy explanation’. The proposed device of a circle-squaring social pact that would create ‘a form of association which will defend and protect, with the whole of its joint strength, the person and property of each associate, and under which each of them, uniting himself to all, will obey only himself, and remain as free as before’ does not really work. But that should not lead us to misunderstand Rousseau’s intentions. He was concerned above all to find a form of association in which all could be free and equal (enough) so that human relationships could regain a simplicity, directness and honesty which they lost when we emerged out of the woods and started gazing upon each other. This could only ever happen when everyone had enough and no one had too much.