Discourse on Inequality - American University of Beirut

Discourse on InequalityJean Jacques RousseauTable of ContentsDiscourse on Jacques TO THE REPUBLIC OF DISSERTATION ON THE ORIGIN AND FOUNDATION OF THE Inequality OF FIRST SECOND on InequalityiDiscourse on InequalityJean Jacques RousseauTranslated by G. D. H. ColeA DISCOURSEON A SUBJECT PROPOSED BY THE ACADEMY OF DIJON:WHAT IS THE ORIGIN OF Inequality AMONG MEN, AND IS IT AUTHORISED BY NATURAL LAW?We should consider what is natural not in thingsdepraved but in those which are rightly orderedaccording to nature. Aristotle, Politics, Bk. i, ch. 5 DEDICATION TO THE REPUBLIC OF GENEVAMOST HONOURABLE, MAGNIFICENT AND SOVEREIGN LORDS, convinced that only a virtuous citizencan confer on his country honours which it can accept, I have been for thirty years past working to make myselfworthy to offer you some public homage; and, this fortunate opportunity supplementing in some degree theinsufficiency of my efforts, I have thought myself entitled to follow in embracing it the dictates of the zeal whichinspires me, rather than the right which should have been my authorisation.

I should have particularly avoided, as necessarily ill−governed, a Republic in which the people, imagining themselves in a position to do without magistrates, or at least to leave them with only a precarious authority, should imprudently have kept for themselves the administration of civil affairs and the execution of their own laws.

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  Inequality, Discourse, Imagining, Discourse on inequality

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