The social contract & discoursesRousseau, Jean-Jacques
Philosophy
The social contract & discourses
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques
Economics; Political science -- Early works to 1800; Social contract
When they grew more industrious, it is natural to believe that they
began, with the help of sharp stones and pointed sticks, to cultivate
a few vegetables or roots around their huts; though it was long before
they knew how to prepare corn, or were provided with the implements
necessary for raising it in any large quantity; not to mention how
essential it is, for husbandry, to consent to immediate loss, in order
to reap a future gain--a precaution very foreign to the turn of a
savage's mind; for, as I have said, he hardly foresees in the morning
what he will need at night.
The invention of the other arts must therefore have been necessary
to compel mankind to apply themselves to agriculture. No sooner were
artificers wanted to smelt and forge iron, than others were required
to maintain them; the more hands that were employed in manufactures,
the fewer were left to provide for the common subsistence, though
the number of mouths to be furnished with food remained the same:
and as some required commodities in exchange for their iron, the
rest at length discovered the method of making iron serve for the
multiplication of commodities. By this means the arts of husbandry and
agriculture were established on the one hand, and the art of working
metals and multiplying their uses on the other.
The cultivation of the earth necessarily brought about its
distribution; and property, once recognised, gave rise to the first
rules of justice; for, to secure each man his own, it had to be
possible for each to have something. Besides, as men began to look
forward to the future, and all had something to lose, every one
had reason to apprehend that reprisals would follow any injury he
might do to another. This origin is so much the more natural, as it
is impossible to conceive how property can come from anything but
manual labour: for what else can a man add to things which he does
not originally create, so as to make them his own property? It is the
husbandman's labour alone that, giving him a title to the produce of
the ground he has tilled, gives him a claim also to the land itself,
at least till harvest; and so, from year to year, a constant possession
which is easily transformed into property. When the ancients, says
Grotius, gave to Ceres the title of Legislatrix, and to a festival
celebrated in her honour the name of Thesmophoria, they meant by that
that the distribution of lands had produced a new kind of right: that
is to say, the right of property, which is different from the right
deducible from the law of nature.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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