Discussion Starter: Rousseau’s position on Private Property

Rousseau view of private property differs from part one to part two of his work. In Part one Rousseau sees property rights as unnecessary because it is inconvenient for one man to perpetually deprive another of his property. Rousseau has an opinion with different assumptions in his second part.

Rousseau expresses that it would make no sense for a man to deprive another man of property. Rousseau asserts that the time and energy it would take man to deprive another man of property he could easily make for himself. Rousseau implicitly asserts that having laws around the wrongful taking of private property are unnecessary because it doesn’t make sense for man to steal another’s property if he can acquire his own just as well.

            Rousseau also condemns Hobbes’ assertion that man is inherently flawed. Rousseau explains the contradiction in Hobbes’s notion of a “robust child” (98). Rousseau explains man is either robust and thus is able to care for his own needs or he is dependent or a child and must depend on others. He uses this line of reasoning to condemn the necessity of property rights. Man is either independent and willing to care for himself or is he dependent and needs other to take care of himself. It doesn’t make sense for man to be dependent that he must take from man since is he is able to do this he is just as able to produce the fruit the other man attained.

            Rousseau seems to contradict this viewpoint later on in his work. Rousseau claims that one society has gotten away from the “wild west”. The assumption that “fruit” on the Earth is open for the taking. Rousseau later points out the inequality comes from government.  Rousseau explains a world view echoed by many modern day politicians to the idea that ‘“I am the one who built that wall; I have earned this land with my labor.”’ (78). Rousseau’s position doesn’t seem to be contingent on how he views property rights but rather the amount of property available for man to consume. The more property available, the less he values property rights. On the same hand he offers that he who accumulated wealth owes a debt to society since he was aided in his work.

            Rousseau offers that government is the one who truly creates inequality: “Such was, or should have been, the origin of society and laws, which gave new fetters to the weak and new forces to the rich, irretrievably destroyed natural liberty, established forever the law of property and of inequality,” (79). Rousseau states again “...the first stage was the establishment of the laws and of the right of property…” (87). Rousseau sees the establishment of private property as the birth of inequality.  

            Does Rousseau’s idea of property rights imply the necessity of such implies an inequality among citizens? That is if man is encouraged to steal his horizons to provide for himself lawfully (assuming property laws) is diminished?