Quotation
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“The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau · Enlightenment · Enlightenment · 1755
What does it mean?
The mainstream reading is an origin story for inequality: civil society begins when someone encloses land, declares it his, and is believed, and Rousseau adds that crimes and wars might have been spared if someone had pulled up the stakes and cried that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to nobody. A competing reading treats the scene as a historical minute he claims happened one afternoon. He does not. He says property depends on ideas acquired slowly, and that things had probably already gone too far to continue as they were. The sentence opens Part II of the Discourse on Inequality of 1755. It is a genealogy, not a land-registry entry. Belief is half the founding. The simple hearers complete the act.
Did Jean-Jacques Rousseau really say this?
The library’s label is Paraphrase or translation. Cole's English of the opening of Part II. The French is the famous 'Ceci est à moi'. Rousseau immediately says the idea of property depended on many prior ideas, so the scene is a fable of a last step, not a dated event.
Where it comes from
Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men, Part II, opening, in G. D. H. Cole's translation
Approximate date: 1755.
How to use it
A developer who fences a path people in a Yorkshire village have used for decades, puts up a sign, and is obeyed, has repeated the scene in miniature. The sentence does not say every title is a theft, and Rousseau's own note complicates the romance of tearing the fence down. It says a social world can start in a declaration plus credulity. Asking who benefited from believing the sign is the political question. Ancestry of a right is not the same as a reason to keep it, and he wants the ancestry visible.
A mindset reading
When a rule feels immemorial, ask what was enclosed and who found it convenient to believe the first speaker. The habit is suspicious of 'it has always been property' without becoming a refusal of every boundary. He thinks the step into civil society was a disaster and a trap we cannot simply exit. The sentence is the picture of the step, and the next pages are why it stuck.
Understand the philosophy
The Discourse on Inequality is a conjectural history addressed to Geneva. Part I describes natural man. Part II opens with this enclosure and moves through metallurgy, agriculture, and the fraudulent social contract that fixed inequality. The key words are mine and civil society. The Social Contract of 1762, already quoted in this library, is a later answer to the disaster described here, not the same book. Readers who mix them make the fence and the general will into one mood.
- society
- justice
- power
FAQ
What does it mean?
The mainstream reading is an origin story for inequality: civil society begins when someone encloses land, declares it his, and is believed, and Rousseau adds that crimes and wars might have been spared if someone had pulled up the stakes and cried that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to nobody. A competing reading treats the scene as a historical minute he claims happened one afternoon. He does not. He says property depends on ideas acquired slowly, and that things had probably already gone too far to continue as they were. The sentence opens Part II of the Discourse on Inequality of 1755. It is a genealogy, not a land-registry entry. Belief is half the founding. The simple hearers complete the act.
Did Jean-Jacques Rousseau really say this?
Paraphrase or translation. Cole's English of the opening of Part II. The French is the famous 'Ceci est à moi'. Rousseau immediately says the idea of property depended on many prior ideas, so the scene is a fable of a last step, not a dated event.
Which work is it in?
Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men, Part II, opening, in G. D. H. Cole's translation Approximate date: 1755.