Tl;Dr: the idea that private property lead to social inequality came from Native Americans
I gotta say – this chapter blew my mind. I (and perhaps you) thought that Jean-Jacques Rosseau wrote Discourse on the Inequality of Man more or less on his own.
Turns out it was written as an entry in a national essay contest. So right off the bat the idea that this just occured to Mr. Rosseau while sitting under the apple tree one day is wrong. Not only was it Not novel. Thought, it was part of the National discourse in France.
The more interesting question is why was it part of the national discourse in France? The Discourse was published in 1755, the French revolution started about 40 years later (1792) – perhaps there was some internal cultural current related to social equality (and inequality) in the mix even then – almost definitely there was.
But you know what else was floating around the cultural milieau? The external cultural influence of native Americans and the Europeans colonizing the continent. This seems like a huge claim on it’s face: how would native Americans influence the culture of France? David and David provide some pretty convincing evidence.
But if French assessments of the character of ‘savages’ tended to be decidedly mixed, the indigenous assessment of French character was distinctly less so.
Father Pierre Biard, for example, was a former theology professor assigned in 1608 to evangelize the Algonkian-speaking Mi’kmaq in Nova Scotia, who had lived for some time next to a French fort. Biard did not think much of the Mi’kmaq, but reported that the feeling was mutual:
“They consider themselves better than the French: ‘For,’ they say, ‘you are always fighting and quarrelling among yourselves; we live peaceably. You are envious and are all the time slandering each other; you are thieves and deceivers; you are covetous, and are neither generous nor kind; as for us, if we have a morsel of bread we share it with our neighbour.’ They are saying these and like things continually.”
What seemed to irritate Biard the most was that the Mi’kmaq would constantly assert that they were, as a result, “richer” than the French. The French had more material possessions, the Mi’kmaq conceded; but they had other, greater assets: ease, comfort and time. 20 years later Brother Gabriel Sagard, a recollect friar, wrote similar things of the Wendat nation
Source for this seems to be The Myth of the Nobel Savage by Ter Ellingson. But so what if some missionaries got an earful (even if it was consistent over 20 years).
Well… Brother Gabriel Sagard’s Le Grande Voyage du pays de Hurons was cited by Locke and Hobbes, the famous social philosophers of their time (and influencers on Rosseau).
Similarly, the works Louis-Armand de Lom d’Arce de Lahontan of about his time in the Americas were published and widely read in europe. And they reveal the true hero of Chapter 2: Kandiaronk (the Muskat in Huron/Wendat, or The Rat in French apparently).
You can learn more about Kandiaronk here. Here is a snippet of a longer quote from that Wikipedia page:
Kondiaronk: I have spent 6 years reflecting on the state of European society and I still can’t think of a single way they act that is not inhuman and I generally think this can only be the case as long as you stick to your distinctions of “mine” and “thine.” I affirm that what you call “money” is the devil of devils, the tyrant of the French, the source of all evils, the bane of souls and slaughterhouse of the living. To imagine one can live in the country of money and preserve one’s soul is like imagining one can preserve one’s life at the bottom of a lake.
The Native American critique of European society is that European people (unlike the Native Americans) have no freedom. This is distinct from Equality, something that wasn’t obvious to European thinkers of the time, and was written about at length in the late 1740s and early 1750s by Madame de Graffigny and Mssr. Turgot. All of this writing was very popular in France at the time, it’s hard to imagine that Rousseau was unaware of it.
There’s more to this chapter: some nuance between the concepts of social equality and freedom, but they come up in later chapters too.
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