A Discourse on Inequality by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. New York. 1984. Penguin Books. 0140444394. Translated from the French & With An Introduction by Maurice Cranston. 188 pages. paperback. The cover shows Cochin's engraving of Rousseau delivering his discourse, reproduced by permission of the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris (photo: Bulloz).
DESCRIPTION - A DISCOURSE ON INEQUALITY is one of the most revolutionary documents to have come out of eighteenth-century Europe. The discourse sets out to demonstrate how the growth of civilization corrupts man's natural happiness and freedom by creating artificial inequalities of wealth, power and social privilege. Rousseau contends that primitive man is equal to his fellows because he can be independent of them, but as societies become more sophisticated, the strongest and most intelligent members of the community gain an unnatural advantage over their weaker brethren, and the constitutions set up to rectify these imbalances through peace and justice in fact do nothing but perpetuate them. Probably the most influential of all Rousseau's works, the political and social arguments were to make the discourse a classic denunciation of the social conditions of his time. ‘The translation and introduction by Rousseau's biographer, Maurice Cranston, are admirably authoritative' - Sunday Times.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jean-Jacques Rousseau (28 June 1712 - 2 July 1778) was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer of the 18th century. His political philosophy influenced the French Revolution as well as the overall development of modern political, sociological, and educational thought. Rousseau's novel Emile, or On Education is a treatise on the education of the whole person for citizenship. His sentimental novel Julie, or the New Heloise was of importance to the development of pre-romanticism and romanticism in fiction. Rousseau's autobiographical writings - his Confessions, which initiated the modern autobiography, and his Reveries of a Solitary Walker - exemplified the late 18th-century movement known as the Age of Sensibility, and featured an increased focus on subjectivity and introspection that later characterized modern writing. His Discourse on Inequality and The Social Contract are cornerstones in modern political and social thought. Rousseau was a successful composer of music, who wrote seven operas as well as music in other forms, and made contributions to music as a theorist. As a composer, his music was a blend of the late Baroque style and the emergent Classical fashion, and he belongs to the same generation of transitional composers as Christoph Willibald Gluck and C.P.E. Bach. One of his more well-known works is the one-act opera Le devin du village, containing the duet 'Non, Colette n'est point trompeuse' which was later rearranged as a standalone song by Beethoven. During the period of the French Revolution, Rousseau was the most popular of the philosophes among members of the Jacobin Club. Rousseau was interred as a national hero in the PanthEon in Paris, in 1794, 16 years after his death.
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