experience of social relations

guarantee to owners all offspring of slave women,however fathered, at the slight disadvantage of losing to them suchoffspring as might have been fathered on free women by slave men.

Each new increment of freedomthat the lower classes regarded as their due represented the provi-sional outcome of the last round in a continuing boxing-match andestablished the fighting weights of the contenders in the next round

Lamarckism

Nothing so well illustrates that impossibility as the conviction amongotherwise sensible scholars that race ‘explains’ historical phenomena

thecitizen, forever active, sweats, bustles about, constantly frets to seek ever morelaborious tasks: he works to death, he even runs toward it in order to be in aposition to live, or he renounces life in order to acquire immortality. He courtsthe great he hates and the rich he despises; he spares nothing to obtain the honorof serving them; he boasts proudly of his baseness and of their protection and,proud of his slavery, he speaks with contempt of those who do not have thehonor of sharing it.

hat this state is theveritable youth of the world, and that all subsequent progress has been inappearance so many steps toward the perfection of the individual, and in facttoward the decrepitude of the species

In riots, in streetfights, the populace assembles, the prudent man moves away. It is the rabble, itis the marketwomen, who separate the combatants and keep decent people fromslitting one another’s throat

they needed to knowtheir properties and differences, they needed observations and definitions, that is,much more natural history and metaphysics than the men of that time could havehad

The first difficulty that arises is to imagine how languagescould have become necessary, for since men have neither relations amongthemselves nor any need of them, neither the necessity of this invention nor itspossibility is conceivable unless it were indispensable

a female

t would be sad for us to be forced to agreethat this distinctive and almost unlimited faculty is the source of all man’smisfortunes, that it is this faculty which, by dint of time, draws him out of thatoriginal condition in which he would pass tranquil and innocent days, that it isthis faculty which, over the centuries, by causing his enlightenment and hiserrors, his vices and his virtues, to bloom, makes him in the long run the tyrantof himself and of nature

knowledge men do not naturally

. For it is no light undertaking to disentangle what is originalfrom what is artificial in the present nature of man, and to know correctly a statewhich no longer exists

his precious freedom, which is maintained by large nations onlythrough exorbitant taxes, costs you almost nothing to preserve

people soon scorns those laws which it seeschange daily, and that by becoming accustomed to neglect ancient practices onthe pretext of doing better, great evils are often introduced to correct lesser ones

For freedomis like those hearty and succulent foods or those full-bodied wines which are fitfor nourishing and fortifying robust temperaments which are accustomed tothem, but which overwhelm, ruin, and intoxicate those weak and delicatetemperaments which are not up to them.

were not only free, but worthy of being so

I would have chosen a society of a sizelimited by the extent of human faculties—that is, by the possibility of being wellgoverned—and where, each person being up to his task, no one was compelledto entrust others with the functions with which he was charged; a state where, allindividuals knowing one another, neither the obscure maneuvers of vice nor themodesty of virtue could be hidden from the public’s notice and judgment, andwhere that sweet habit of seeing and knowing one another made love of thefatherland a love of the citizens rather than love of the soi

For regardless of what the constitution of agovernment may be, if there is a single man5 who is not subject to the law, all theothers are necessarily at his discretion (I

was going to see Diderot, at that time a prisoner in Vincennes; I had in my pocket a Mercury of Francewhich I began to leaf through along the way. I fell across the question of the Academy of Dijon whichgave rise to my first writing. If anything has ever resembled a sudden inspiration, it is the motion that wascaused in me by that reading; suddenly I felt my mind dazzled by a thousand lights; crowds of livelyideas presented themselves at the same time with a strength and a confusion that threw me into aninexpressible perturbation; I feel my head seized by a dizziness similar to drunkenness. . . . Oh Sir, if Ihad ever been able to write a quarter of what I saw and felt under that tree, how clearly I would havemade all the contradictions of the social system seen, with what strength I would have exposed all theabuses of our institutions, with what simplicity I would have demonstrated that man is naturally good andthat it is from these institutions alone that men become wicked

If so, wouldn’t human nature therefore be shaped to a greatextent by historical, environmental, and social forces instead of having auniversal and unvarying form

reason is the servan