Intro. [Recording date: May 26, 2025.]
Russ Roberts: Today is May 26th, 2025, and my guest today is author and teacher, and professor Leon Kass, the Dean of Faculty here at Shalem College in Jerusalem. This is Leon’s second appearance on the program. He was last here in March of 2021 talking about human flourishing, living well, and Aristotle. Leon, welcome back to EconTalk.
Leon Kass: Thanks very much. Nice to be back with you Russ.
Russ Roberts: Our topic for today is a thinker I have never respected, but I really never read either. So that’s kind of awkward. And I realized with Leon’s help that maybe I had judged Jean-Jacques Rousseau a little too quickly.
So, what we’re going to do today: Leon’s going to give a brief summary of Rousseau’s life and career; and we’re going to do a close reading of a few paragraphs from his Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men, which is also known as the Second Discourse. We’ll link to that work, to the text we’ll be studying. You can follow along with this or you can just listen. We’ll be reading out loud some of the passages that we’ll be discussing.
But, first, I’d like Leon to give us a little background on Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Leon, it’s all yours.
Leon Kass: Thank you. Rousseau was a giant not only of 18th-century European thought and culture, but really of all of Western philosophy. Born in the Republic of Geneva, 1712; dies in France, 1778. A prolific political philosopher known for The Social Contract, a philosopher of education, famous for his Emile; author of a romantic novel, composer of seven operas, a theater critic; an author of the first modern autobiography, The Confessions; and even a scientist writing an Elements of Botany.
He lived a colorful and checkered life with good relations with Voltaire, d’Alembert, Burke, Boswell, and Frederick the Great, but he had a horrible public fight with David Hume and he suffered political exile for his views. His books were burned in Paris. He enjoyed many love affairs and is said to have littered Europe with many illegitimate children.
It’s impossible to summarize Rousseau’s thought. His range is enormous. His writings seem to contradict each other for they are written from different perspectives on the world.
Here, he is a citizen of Geneva. While there, he’s the individual Jean-Jacques. All of his works are suffused with irony. His persistent interests are freedom and happiness, which he finds lacking in modern bourgeois society, given to the love of gain, luxury, conformity, insincerity, and the joyless pursuit of getting ahead. But because he approaches the questions of freedom and happiness from different perspectives, he seems to be confused, if not a teacher of error. He’s both praised and blamed for the French Revolution, progressive education, and psychoanalysis. He’s embraced by civic republicans and Marxist revolutionaries, by admirers of the noble savage, and admirers of the yeoman soldier. Reading him looking for agreement, any modern reader can find a Rousseau that he will like and one that he will hate.
But, few people see the real Rousseau, who was not an ideologue but a true seeker after wisdom, and whose books offer not doctrine, but invitations to joint inquiry. To learn from Rousseau, we need to rescue him from his blinkered critics and simplistic admirers who see only answers wrong or right, and instead follow up his opening up of deep questions. Rightly read, Rousseau is a teacher, an indispensable companion and guide for anyone seeking wisdom about the enduring human questions of human nature and culture, language and reason, society and religion, love and marriage, happiness and politics. All of these are on the table in the text we’re going to discuss today, the Discourse on Inequality.
Russ Roberts: Awesome. Let’s get started.
And, what I’ve asked Leon to do, for those of you listening at home–as I said, you can follow along; I’ve asked Leon to treat me as his student. I have to say, Leon, your description of Rousseau reminded me of the way I would describe you as a teacher who has a lot to say about a lot of things. So, I’m excited that we’re going to explore this text together. It’s a text I’ve only read for the first time earlier today, so I’m sure I didn’t get all of it and you’re going to help me find more than I saw.
Leon Kass: Okay. Let me introduce the work itself and then we’ll get started.
Rousseau wrote this as a response to an essay contest in 1753. The question is: What is the origin of inequality among men and whether it is authorized by natural law? The last part, Rousseau ignores. He says,
How do we know inequality among men without knowing man? And, how do you know man as he comes from the hand of nature without separating natural man from the various accretions that history and circumstances have produced in him?
So, Part One of the discourse is a picture of man in the pure state of nature–so-called the noble savage or nature boy–where natural man lives as a solitary, independent, speechless and roughly mindless orangutan with possibilities. He pursues the elementary needs of life and he enjoys without complication the sentiment of his present existence.
In Part Two, Rousseau traces the processes whereby man by stages emerges from this pure state of nature eventually to become the civilized creatures that we are with our inequality, our unhappiness, and our vices.
We’re going to pick up the story a little bit down the road towards civilization with the first habitations and the first settlements of settled families. And, we’re going to follow certain psychological and social insights on the subjects of desires and needs, love and jealousy, the birth of vanity and the desire for recognition, and the claim to consideration and the desire for vengeance when it’s violated. That’s the agenda Russ. I think we should get started.
Russ Roberts: Okay. I’m going to start by reading–shall I read paragraph 13?
Russ Roberts: Okay. So, this is, I would say something like the hunter-gatherer, the beginnings of families living in crude dwellings. That’s the lead-in, right?
Leon Kass: Correct. Exactly.
Russ Roberts: Okay. Here we go [Paragraph 13].
In this new state, with a simple and solitary life, very limited needs, and the implements they had invented to provide for them, since men enjoyed very great leisure, they used it to procure many kinds of commodities unknown to their Fathers; and that was the first yoke they imposed on themselves without thinking about it, and the first source of the evils they prepared for their Descendants. For, besides their continuing thus to soften body and mind, as these commodities had lost almost all their pleasantness through habit, and as they had at the same time degenerated into true needs, being deprived of them became much more cruel than possessing them was sweet; and people were unhappy to lose them without being happy to possess them.
Leon Kass: Very good.
What are commodities? What are these people doing with their leisure?
Russ Roberts: What’s funny about this, of course, is that I’m an economist and you’re not. So, we’re going to have an interesting conversation here.
What an economist would say is that people develop some primitive tools that allowed them to begin to enjoy a slightly higher standard of living–a slightly higher level of material well-being–than they had before. What those ‘commodities’ were–well, he says they had great leisure. Now, there’s a debate about whether that’s true, but let’s take him as being correct. They had extra time and so they used that time to fashion, presumably, a nicer hut, maybe a better way to catch fish, a better way to bring down game, an iPhone. Well, maybe not an iPhone, but a set of what we would call technological change, or innovation, or progress that he seems to think is not necessarily–in fact definitely isn’t–such a great thing.
Leon Kass: Good. So, commodities: all of these conveniences and amenities, the product of innovation, which is somehow built into the human beings always looking to make things a little better. But he says this is “the first yoke they imposed on themselves without thinking about it.” What’s a yoke?
Russ Roberts: So, it’s this word you don’t hear very much in everyday English language because it’s a reference to agricultural life. Nothing could be more familiar to most of human history–of civilized human history–than a yoke; but it’s Y-O-K-E, not Y-O-L-K. Y-O-L-K is the egg yolk. This is the yoke that restrains an animal, typically an ox or some kind of domesticated animal, and forces them to do their duty to plow the field, to create a furrow. It’s something that keeps you from being free. It is a constraint, a serious constraint.
And he’s arguing, obviously, that when we as human beings created things that our ancestor didn’t have access to, we lost some of our freedom. As opposed to–many people would see it the opposite: ‘Well, now we’re more free. We have technology that liberates us in all kinds of ways.’ But evidently Rousseau felt otherwise.
Leon Kass: Well, he’s going to explain to us in what sense these new devices are in fact yokes without our knowing it. He’s not talking about the side effects–the harm to the environment or various other things. A yoke is a constraint on a freedom. It’s a form of servitude.
And, here’s the sentence; you should parse it for me: For in addition to softening, continuing to “soften body and mind, as these commodities had lost almost all their pleasantness through habit”–and this is the part of the sentence I want your help with–“and as they had at the same time degenerated into true needs, being deprived of them became much more cruel than possessing them was sweet.” We’re unhappy to lose them without being happy to have them. What does it mean to say that these new innovations, which last week we didn’t need, degenerate–that’s a big word–into true needs?
Russ Roberts: Well, it’s a remarkably prescient statement. Before we recorded this, Leon and I talked a little bit about Adam Smith, and Adam Smith talks about our pursuit of gadgets, in 1759 in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. And he points out that a person will acquire a very fancy, expensive watch that does slightly better at keeping on his time, but doesn’t make the person any more timely for the meetings that they’re late for. And, what Smith is interested in is the beauty. He thinks we’re seduced by the beauty of things.
I think he’s onto something, but what Rousseau is arguing here, I think we can all relate to in modern times. A device comes along, a technology comes along, and it’s so much better than what we have that we, quote, “have to have it.” We want to possess it. But it’s shocking, isn’t it, how after a relatively short period of time we can get incredibly annoyed when it doesn’t, say, work the way it’s supposed to. You’re on the train–if you’ve ever been on Amtrak between Washington D.C. and New York or Boston and you’re surfing the Internet doing some crucial email, or something, or shopping, and all of a sudden the Internet goes out. And you can’t believe how annoying and frustrating it is. This is something that is an extraordinary miracle that it ever works at all. But, once you’ve had it and once you’ve become accustomed to it, it becomes a need–as Rousseau would word it. And the thrill is gone, which I think he’s right. Often, not always, but often.
Leon Kass: He is offering us in here in a way a definition of a true need. Yesterday it was a mere want or a desire that we didn’t need. I mean, in the state of nature people have simple needs. Those are real needs for food and water and rest. But now, all kinds of other things previously desires degenerate into the category of a true need. What’s the definition of a true need that he gives us right in this paragraph? What makes a true need a true need?
Russ Roberts: Well, he’s suggesting that–well, I’m not sure, so I’m going to bounce that back to you for a second. But one thing he’s clearly saying is that the pleasure that we get from having them is dwarfed by the misery we have when we don’t have them.
So, once we have them, all of a sudden the loss of them is relatively large relative to the gain we got from them.
Again, as an economist, this is hard to accept. He’s saying that civilization has immiserated us in some sense. Right? It has created a set of false needs that, when satisfied, just lead us to look for the next new thing. Is that a fair summary?
Leon Kass: Yeah. I think close. I don’t think he’s yet talking about that this is false satisfaction. He’s saying, ‘Look, a true need is something that you feel you can’t live without.’
Russ Roberts: Fair enough.
Leon Kass: What is necessary is something you must have. And, since the pleasures of it vanish or decline greatly with familiarity, it’s not that they make you miserable: it’s that they don’t make you any happier; and there are so many more things you now need that you are now yoked to the desire to have to have more and more and more lest you feel you’re missing the things without which life would be impossible.
I don’t know how many people–I sometimes make a habit of reminding myself to give thanks for a shower, or indoor plumbing–all of just the elementary things that make life less solitary, nasty, brutish, and short. We don’t give thanks for those things. We take them for granted. If we’re missing them we are in a way slaved to those commodities, and we’re continuing to provide new ones so that our children can’t imagine living without their phones or without the Internet or what have you.
And, this question, this is not a side-effect of technology or technology assessment. This is the intrinsic effect of our tools on our expectations and the malleability of desire that last year’s desires once routinely satisfied, become next year’s necessities; and the things that become necessary to live grow and grow and grow. And, we are in a way yoked by those things.
Russ Roberts: You’re lucky if you can remember to be grateful for a shower on a random Monday morning. But, if you ever lose your shower or your hot water or your heat, all of a sudden you’re in a panic. Especially if you don’t have a friend whose shower you can borrow or a place you can go that’s warm. You’re in a state of chaos internally. When’s it going to get fixed? It’s very, very difficult to cope with that hardship.
Reminds me of the episode we had with Michael Easter on the comfort zone. We’ve become accustomed to comfort in the modern world and we don’t appreciate it; and when it’s taken away, we are very unhappy to lose those comforts.
Leon Kass: Yeah. This is, as you said early in the first thing you said, how prescient he is. This is with respect to the simplest of technologies: We shape our tools and then our tools reshape us. And, that part of it is rarely reckoned because the advantages of these tools are perfectly well-known. But the costs of them are often hidden; and the costs in the way in which they transform the whole economy of what is necessary and what is not necessary continues to be altered.
Just as an aside, in the 1939 World’s Fair, the American housewife was introduced to washing machines, vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, dryers–all of those sorts of things. My mother washed clothes on an iron scrub board in the basement every Monday, and the clothes were hung out to dry with a clothespin. There was a ringer to get the water out of it. That World’s Fair in 1939 showed people things that they really wanted because the toil was arduous. I don’t think you could produce a World’s Fair today of anything that people know that they need in the way in which those needs could be anticipated and satisfied. And, all of the satisfaction of those needs has not produced the kind of contentment, because one has forgotten what they replaced.
Russ Roberts: Fair enough. I’ve written a lot on the transformation of our standard of living over the 20th century, and I’ve tried to debunk what I think are incorrect stories about stagnation in the last 40, 50 years. People claim that people’s standard of living hasn’t changed: the average person’s hasn’t changed. And I think that’s totally wrong.
And, whenever I write about that, I always concede that while our material well-being is extraordinarily higher, say, than it was in 1900, say, in America or in the West–I was usually writing those pieces as an American. When I was writing that, I would concede that I’m not sure we’re any happier. In fact, we might be less happy–which is what Rousseau is alluding to.
Having said that: We don’t want to go back. The image of your mother’s washing in the basement–no one says, ‘Yeah, those were the good old days.’ There might be things about that time that were the good old days, but that’s not one of them–the scrub board.
And, there are other things I think economists would add about longer life and the longer quality of life at a high level for a longer period of time–higher quality of life for a longer period of time.
But, this is a fascinating thing that 1939–by the way, David Gelernter wrote a wonderful novel on the 1939 World Fair, which I really enjoyed, which I recommend. But, that 1939 World Fair, it’s true that we as human beings craved those things. Especially women who had incredible drudgery working in the early 1900s when they worked usually 12 hours a day just to boil water, make food, clean clothes. Just a terrible life of drudgery. There is less drudgery in the world. But there’s not a lot more happiness–maybe. And that I think is fascinating statement about the human being.
Leon Kass: Yep. That, I think is the main point of this paragraph. The question is whether or not–at least there are new possible sources of unhappiness because of the deprivation of so many other things without which life now seems to be impossible.
Leon Kass: Why don’t we go on and look at the next vignette? This one, paragraph 15, and this now leads to the development of new human sentiments unknown before.
Russ Roberts: Okay. Here we go [Paragraph 15]:
Everything begins to change its appearance. Men who until this time wandered in the Woods, having adopted a more fixed settlement, slowly come together, unite into different bands, and finally form in each country a particular Nation, unified by morals and character, not by Regulations and Laws but by the same kind of life and foods and by the common influence of Climate. A permanent proximity cannot fail to engender at length some contact between different families. Young people of different sexes live in neighboring Huts; the passing intercourse demanded by Nature soon leads to another kind no less sweet and more permanent through mutual frequentation. People grow accustomed to consider different objects and to make comparisons; imperceptibly they acquire ideas of merit and beauty which produce sentiments of preference. By dint of seeing one another, they can no longer do without seeing one another again. A tender and gentle sentiment is gradually introduced into the soul and at the least obstacle becomes an impetuous fury. Jealousy awakens with love; Discord triumphs, and the gentlest of the passions receives sacrifices of human blood.
Well, that was going fine until it turned dark there at the end, didn’t it?
Leon Kass: Right. Let’s trace it.
Russ Roberts: Okay.
Leon Kass: Population grows, people have fixed settlements, they come together. The different families in the neighboring huts, they gather. The young people of different sexes meet. The passing intercourse of nature demanded–sorry–“the passing intercourse demanded by Nature”–sexual desire, casual sexuality–“soon leads to another kind no less sweet and more permanent through mutual frequentation. People grow accustomed to consider different objects and to make comparisons; imperceptibly they acquire ideas of merit and beauty which produce sentiments of preference. By dint of seeing one another, they can no longer do without seeing one another again.” What’s he talking about? Just to that point?
Russ Roberts: Mostly I think love. Some concept of romantic love as opposed to pure sexual attraction. But, the way he describes it is quite extraordinary. He’s talking about the power of judgment, of what we would call discrimination–not the way the word is usually used with the pejorative way, but simply the idea that some things we might find more appealing or attractive than others: some sense of merit, some sense of beauty. When you’re living by yourself, you’ve got nothing to compare yourself to. When you’re hanging out with your family, you’re all kind of close-knit and everything’s hunky-dory. If you’ve got another family nearby who is more athletic, beautiful, has bigger fish than you catch, and whose hut has more bedrooms and bathrooms and a larger lawn, all of a sudden things change.
Leon Kass: That I think–that comparison is in his account a little later stage.
Russ Roberts: Okay.
Leon Kass: Here he’s still talking in the realm of sexuality and love. And, the ideas of merit and beauty, he’s talking about: there’s more than one woman out there.
Russ Roberts: Yeah. More than one man.
Leon Kass: More than one man.
Russ Roberts: It’s the birth of aesthetics. It’s the birth of the idea that–I mean, it’s a strange idea. We take it for granted that, shown two pictures, most people can say that one’s prettier than that one. That one’s more handsome than that one. But, why is that, actually, when you think about it? Why would you just say, ‘Well, there’s that one and there’s that one and there’s two of them now.’? But, evidently that’s not the way we’re made.
Leon Kass: Yeah. Something emerges as a result of the experience. This one seems more beautiful to me than that one. And, this one is–there’s something about her qualities that I seem to like. And instead of it’s being just about sex, it’s: They want to keep seeing one another. As a result of having seen them, they want to see them again, over and over and over again. This is the transformation of lust to something like admiration and being admired.
And then, he says, “A tender and gentle sentiment is gradually introduced into the soul….” Very nice.
Russ Roberts: Yeah. Beautiful.
Leon Kass: Very nice, “…and at the least obstacle becomes an impetuous fury.” Why?
Russ Roberts: Well, I think once on this show I mentioned that there is a kind of love that most of us are blessed to have, where when your beloved is absent, you don’t just say, ‘Oh: be nice to be with her or be with him.’ but you have a physical longing, a stomach ache. The thought of seeing the beloved is so overwhelming–and that’s one way of describing love–but also, if you’re not allowed to see that person or if that person is not interested in seeing, it’s of course devastating.
And, it’s not obvious that the least obstacle becomes an impetuous fury, as Rousseau says. But, that’s his description. And worse, not just a fury that you can’t get to that person. There’s jealousy, which is that someone else can.
Leon Kass: Well, if you can’t get to them, she might be with somebody else.
Russ Roberts: Yeah.
Leon Kass: “Jealousy awakens with love.” Is that true?
Russ Roberts: I think so. I’d have trouble explaining why. I think there’s a possessiveness about love that certainly Shakespeare and many, many other observers of the human condition have noted. We don’t have to go into my or your personal lives. But, yeah. Jealousy is–we are possessive, not just about our tools and toys, but about the people we care about.
Leon Kass: Yeah, and the jealousy, I think–the jealousy is in a way connected to the sense that this kind of love is exclusive. In other words, that I am my beloved and she is mine. And, it doesn’t have to come simply to possession in a pejorative sense. But, there is something about this kind of love: if it’s genuinely love, sort of excludes others–or so would hope. And therefore, if there is a sense that the love wanders or it is not exclusive, or if she’s absent, I want to see her again lest she be lost, or lost to someone else, and so on. And, I don’t think we’re prone, I think–we’re prone because we’re such nice people–to think that true love would not know jealousy. But, that’s probably an acquired education which is not primordial. This kind of experience of love is sort of exclusive. And, it seems to me that jealousy is right behind.
Russ Roberts: I’m sure even a mediocre evolutionary psychologist like myself could cook up a evolutionary reason for this.
Russ Roberts: But what I find interesting about Rousseau is he ends with a very dark, dark note. First he says, there’s a “tender and gentle sentiment” that can lead to fury. That jealousy is next. “Discord triumphs”–that’s a very negative statement. And, “the gentlest of the passions receives sacrifices of human blood”–meaning violence is the natural follower of the birth of love. It’s a pretty dark image of the human condition.
Leon Kass: As you yourself said, there are lots of such stories. The Trojan War–pretty bloody enterprise for the sake of a woman.
You can go any way you want. I think the important thing here is not that he’s got so much a dark picture, but he’s showing how, of the things that make us miserable, they have to do not with things that were present to nature boy, but that they follow through the gradual stages of the emergence of our complicated humanity. And, there are no free lunches. The various things that are sort of improvement either soften us, or confine us, or enslave us, or make us vulnerable because: you give your life to someone else, you could lose that, if your happiness now depends on her presence and returning and on her staying alive. Love is exposed to all sorts of grief, and it’s not for nothing that the ancient Epicureans told you to–the ancient Stoics told you to limit your desires to the things in your power so that you would be least likely to be disappointed, frustrated by things that are not under your control.
To fall in love is to be vulnerable. To fall in love is to be vulnerable; also, its being lost to you and especially being taken from you by a more worthy–so she thinks–suitor. I think he’s just telling it like it is.
Russ Roberts: Yeah. I’m definitely sympathetic to that view of our nature. I don’t think religion is designed to make us happy, but you could argue that some of the strictures of religion,–say, I’m thinking about the Ten Commandments’ not to covet, which would be another example here–are ways to remove some of your options that might seem appealing but actually are difficult for you to process.
I couldn’t help thinking–we were talking about the desire to see the person again: That’s why people go to the movies more than once sometimes. They have a crush on a male or female film star, and part of that thrill is you can watch them all you want; and now you can take them home with you and watch them on their[?your?] phone, and you can use your imagination. And, those are unfulfilling thrills that weren’t available to Rousseau’s person in the hut next door. So, things have just in many ways just gotten more challenging.
Leon Kass: Yeah. Should we go on?
Russ Roberts: Sure.
Leon Kass: Or do you want do something more with this?
Russ Roberts: No.
Leon Kass: Let’s do the next paragraph. This has also got to do–in the one we’ve just done, he talks about seeing and wanting to see again. Here we’ve got another aspect of the eyes, slightly different and much more potent in its effect. Let’s do it: Paragraph 16.
Russ Roberts: [Paragraph 16]:
In proportion as ideas and sentiments follow upon one another and as mind and heart are trained, the human Race continues to be tamed, contacts spread, and bonds are tightened. People grew accustomed to assembling in front of the Huts or around a large Tree; song and dance, true children of love and leisure, became the amusement or rather the occupation of idle and assembled men and women. Each one began to look at the others and to want to be looked at himself, and public esteem had a value. The one who sang or danced the best, the handsomest, the strongest, the most adroit, or the most eloquent became the most highly considered; and that was the first step toward inequality and, at the same time, toward vice. From these first preferences were born on one hand vanity and contempt, on the other shame and envy; and the fermentation caused by these new leavens eventually produced compounds fatal to happiness and innocence.
Whooph! That’s a heck of a paragraph.
Leon Kass: It’s a terrific paragraph. It again begins now with leisure. There are more people. They gather in front of the huts or around a large tree. Instead of just digging for roots, they now sing and they dance. The “children of love and leisure”–we’ve got the love from before; now they’re out there singing to each other, they dancing. And, each one begins to “look at the others and to want to be looked at himself.” Because, having public esteem–being thought well of in the eyes of the others–is now valuable. Okay?
Now: “The one who sang or danced the best, the handsomest, the strongest, the most adroit, the most eloquent,” they became the ones who were “most highly considered.” And, “that was the first step toward inequality.” That’s obvious, right? You’re making distinctions amongst abilities and talents. But also, “at the same time, toward vice.” And, it’s the part about vice that I think we want to work on because that’s what he does in the end of the paragraph. Are we okay to this point?
Russ Roberts: Yeah. But, I have to comment on two things first.
Leon Kass: Please. [More to come, 39:31]
