Leon Kass on the Wisdom of Rousseau

Jun 16 2025

Does technology liberate us or enslave us? How do our social interactions affect our sense of self and our emotional health? Listen as author and master teacher Leon Kass and EconTalk's Russ Roberts do a close reading of a few paragraphs of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and explore some of the deepest aspects of our relationships with each other and with our technology.

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0:37	Intro. [Recording date: May 26, 2025.] Russ Roberts: Today is May 26th, 2025, and my guest today is author and teacher, and professor Leon Kass, the Dean of Faculty here at Shalem College in Jerusalem. This is Leon's second appearance on the program. He was last here in March of 2021 talking about human flourishing, living well, and Aristotle. Leon, welcome back to EconTalk. Leon Kass: Thanks very much. Nice to be back with you Russ.
1:03	Russ Roberts: Our topic for today is a thinker I have never respected, but I really never read either. So that's kind of awkward. And I realized with Leon's help that maybe I had judged Jean-Jacques Rousseau a little too quickly. So, what we're going to do today: Leon's going to give a brief summary of Rousseau's life and career; and we're going to do a close reading of a few paragraphs from his Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men, which is also known as the Second Discourse. We'll link to that work, to the text we'll be studying. You can follow along with this or you can just listen. We'll be reading out loud some of the passages that we'll be discussing. But, first, I'd like Leon to give us a little background on Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Leon, it's all yours. Leon Kass: Thank you. Rousseau was a giant not only of 18th-century European thought and culture, but really of all of Western philosophy. Born in the Republic of Geneva, 1712; dies in France, 1778. A prolific political philosopher known for The Social Contract, a philosopher of education, famous for his Emile; author of a romantic novel, composer of seven operas, a theater critic; an author of the first modern autobiography, The Confessions; and even a scientist writing an Elements of Botany. He lived a colorful and checkered life with good relations with Voltaire, d'Alembert, Burke, Boswell, and Frederick the Great, but he had a horrible public fight with David Hume and he suffered political exile for his views. His books were burned in Paris. He enjoyed many love affairs and is said to have littered Europe with many illegitimate children. It's impossible to summarize Rousseau's thought. His range is enormous. His writings seem to contradict each other for they are written from different perspectives on the world. Here, he is a citizen of Geneva. While there, he's the individual Jean-Jacques. All of his works are suffused with irony. His persistent interests are freedom and happiness, which he finds lacking in modern bourgeois society, given to the love of gain, luxury, conformity, insincerity, and the joyless pursuit of getting ahead. But because he approaches the questions of freedom and happiness from different perspectives, he seems to be confused, if not a teacher of error. He's both praised and blamed for the French Revolution, progressive education, and psychoanalysis. He's embraced by civic republicans and Marxist revolutionaries, by admirers of the noble savage, and admirers of the yeoman soldier. Reading him looking for agreement, any modern reader can find a Rousseau that he will like and one that he will hate. But, few people see the real Rousseau, who was not an ideologue but a true seeker after wisdom, and whose books offer not doctrine, but invitations to joint inquiry. To learn from Rousseau, we need to rescue him from his blinkered critics and simplistic admirers who see only answers wrong or right, and instead follow up his opening up of deep questions. Rightly read, Rousseau is a teacher, an indispensable companion and guide for anyone seeking wisdom about the enduring human questions of human nature and culture, language and reason, society and religion, love and marriage, happiness and politics. All of these are on the table in the text we're going to discuss today, the Discourse on Inequality.
5:10	Russ Roberts: Awesome. Let's get started. Excerpts from J-J. Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men (trans. by Roger Masters). Click for PDF file. And, what I've asked Leon to do, for those of you listening at home--as I said, you can follow along; I've asked Leon to treat me as his student. I have to say, Leon, your description of Rousseau reminded me of the way I would describe you as a teacher who has a lot to say about a lot of things. So, I'm excited that we're going to explore this text together. It's a text I've only read for the first time earlier today, so I'm sure I didn't get all of it and you're going to help me find more than I saw. Leon Kass: Okay. Let me introduce the work itself and then we'll get started. Rousseau wrote this as a response to an essay contest in 1753. The question is: What is the origin of inequality among men and whether it is authorized by natural law? The last part, Rousseau ignores. He says, How do we know inequality among men without knowing man? And, how do you know man as he comes from the hand of nature without separating natural man from the various accretions that history and circumstances have produced in him? So, Part One of the discourse is a picture of man in the pure state of nature--so-called the noble savage or nature boy--where natural man lives as a solitary, independent, speechless and roughly mindless orangutan with possibilities. He pursues the elementary needs of life and he enjoys without complication the sentiment of his present existence. In Part Two, Rousseau traces the processes whereby man by stages emerges from this pure state of nature eventually to become the civilized creatures that we are with our inequality, our unhappiness, and our vices. We're going to pick up the story a little bit down the road towards civilization with the first habitations and the first settlements of settled families. And, we're going to follow certain psychological and social insights on the subjects of desires and needs, love and jealousy, the birth of vanity and the desire for recognition, and the claim to consideration and the desire for vengeance when it's violated. That's the agenda Russ. I think we should get started.
7:46	Russ Roberts: Okay. I'm going to start by reading--shall I read paragraph 13? Leon Kass: Please. Russ Roberts: Okay. So, this is, I would say something like the hunter-gatherer, the beginnings of families living in crude dwellings. That's the lead-in, right? Leon Kass: Correct. Exactly. Russ Roberts: Okay. Here we go [Paragraph 13]. In this new state, with a simple and solitary life, very limited needs, and the implements they had invented to provide for them, since men enjoyed very great leisure, they used it to procure many kinds of commodities unknown to their Fathers; and that was the first yoke they imposed on themselves without thinking about it, and the first source of the evils they prepared for their Descendants. For, besides their continuing thus to soften body and mind, as these commodities had lost almost all their pleasantness through habit, and as they had at the same time degenerated into true needs, being deprived of them became much more cruel than possessing them was sweet; and people were unhappy to lose them without being happy to possess them. Leon Kass: Very good. What are commodities? What are these people doing with their leisure? Russ Roberts: What's funny about this, of course, is that I'm an economist and you're not. So, we're going to have an interesting conversation here. What an economist would say is that people develop some primitive tools that allowed them to begin to enjoy a slightly higher standard of living--a slightly higher level of material well-being--than they had before. What those 'commodities' were--well, he says they had great leisure. Now, there's a debate about whether that's true, but let's take him as being correct. They had extra time and so they used that time to fashion, presumably, a nicer hut, maybe a better way to catch fish, a better way to bring down game, an iPhone. Well, maybe not an iPhone, but a set of what we would call technological change, or innovation, or progress that he seems to think is not necessarily--in fact definitely isn't--such a great thing. Leon Kass: Good. So, commodities: all of these conveniences and amenities, the product of innovation, which is somehow built into the human beings always looking to make things a little better. But he says this is "the first yoke they imposed on themselves without thinking about it." What's a yoke? Russ Roberts: So, it's this word you don't hear very much in everyday English language because it's a reference to agricultural life. Nothing could be more familiar to most of human history--of civilized human history--than a yoke; but it's Y-O-K-E, not Y-O-L-K. Y-O-L-K is the egg yolk. This is the yoke that restrains an animal, typically an ox or some kind of domesticated animal, and forces them to do their duty to plow the field, to create a furrow. It's something that keeps you from being free. It is a constraint, a serious constraint. And he's arguing, obviously, that when we as human beings created things that our ancestor didn't have access to, we lost some of our freedom. As opposed to--many people would see it the opposite: 'Well, now we're more free. We have technology that liberates us in all kinds of ways.' But evidently Rousseau felt otherwise. Leon Kass: Well, he's going to explain to us in what sense these new devices are in fact yokes without our knowing it. He's not talking about the side effects--the harm to the environment or various other things. A yoke is a constraint on a freedom. It's a form of servitude. And, here's the sentence; you should parse it for me: For in addition to softening, continuing to "soften body and mind, as these commodities had lost almost all their pleasantness through habit"--and this is the part of the sentence I want your help with--"and as they had at the same time degenerated into true needs, being deprived of them became much more cruel than possessing them was sweet." We're unhappy to lose them without being happy to have them. What does it mean to say that these new innovations, which last week we didn't need, degenerate--that's a big word--into true needs? Russ Roberts: Well, it's a remarkably prescient statement. Before we recorded this, Leon and I talked a little bit about Adam Smith, and Adam Smith talks about our pursuit of gadgets, in 1759 in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. And he points out that a person will acquire a very fancy, expensive watch that does slightly better at keeping on his time, but doesn't make the person any more timely for the meetings that they're late for. And, what Smith is interested in is the beauty. He thinks we're seduced by the beauty of things. I think he's onto something, but what Rousseau is arguing here, I think we can all relate to in modern times. A device comes along, a technology comes along, and it's so much better than what we have that we, quote, "have to have it." We want to possess it. But it's shocking, isn't it, how after a relatively short period of time we can get incredibly annoyed when it doesn't, say, work the way it's supposed to. You're on the train--if you've ever been on Amtrak between Washington D.C. and New York or Boston and you're surfing the Internet doing some crucial email, or something, or shopping, and all of a sudden the Internet goes out. And you can't believe how annoying and frustrating it is. This is something that is an extraordinary miracle that it ever works at all. But, once you've had it and once you've become accustomed to it, it becomes a need--as Rousseau would word it. And the thrill is gone, which I think he's right. Often, not always, but often. Leon Kass: He is offering us in here in a way a definition of a true need. Yesterday it was a mere want or a desire that we didn't need. I mean, in the state of nature people have simple needs. Those are real needs for food and water and rest. But now, all kinds of other things previously desires degenerate into the category of a true need. What's the definition of a true need that he gives us right in this paragraph? What makes a true need a true need? Russ Roberts: Well, he's suggesting that--well, I'm not sure, so I'm going to bounce that back to you for a second. But one thing he's clearly saying is that the pleasure that we get from having them is dwarfed by the misery we have when we don't have them. So, once we have them, all of a sudden the loss of them is relatively large relative to the gain we got from them. Again, as an economist, this is hard to accept. He's saying that civilization has immiserated us in some sense. Right? It has created a set of false needs that, when satisfied, just lead us to look for the next new thing. Is that a fair summary? Leon Kass: Yeah. I think close. I don't think he's yet talking about that this is false satisfaction. He's saying, 'Look, a true need is something that you feel you can't live without.' Russ Roberts: Fair enough. Leon Kass: What is necessary is something you must have. And, since the pleasures of it vanish or decline greatly with familiarity, it's not that they make you miserable: it's that they don't make you any happier; and there are so many more things you now need that you are now yoked to the desire to have to have more and more and more lest you feel you're missing the things without which life would be impossible. I don't know how many people--I sometimes make a habit of reminding myself to give thanks for a shower, or indoor plumbing--all of just the elementary things that make life less solitary, nasty, brutish, and short. We don't give thanks for those things. We take them for granted. If we're missing them we are in a way slaved to those commodities, and we're continuing to provide new ones so that our children can't imagine living without their phones or without the Internet or what have you. And, this question, this is not a side-effect of technology or technology assessment. This is the intrinsic effect of our tools on our expectations and the malleability of desire that last year's desires once routinely satisfied, become next year's necessities; and the things that become necessary to live grow and grow and grow. And, we are in a way yoked by those things.
18:20	Russ Roberts: You're lucky if you can remember to be grateful for a shower on a random Monday morning. But, if you ever lose your shower or your hot water or your heat, all of a sudden you're in a panic. Especially if you don't have a friend whose shower you can borrow or a place you can go that's warm. You're in a state of chaos internally. When's it going to get fixed? It's very, very difficult to cope with that hardship. Reminds me of the episode we had with Michael Easter on the comfort zone. We've become accustomed to comfort in the modern world and we don't appreciate it; and when it's taken away, we are very unhappy to lose those comforts. Leon Kass: Yeah. This is, as you said early in the first thing you said, how prescient he is. This is with respect to the simplest of technologies: We shape our tools and then our tools reshape us. And, that part of it is rarely reckoned because the advantages of these tools are perfectly well-known. But the costs of them are often hidden; and the costs in the way in which they transform the whole economy of what is necessary and what is not necessary continues to be altered. Just as an aside, in the 1939 World's Fair, the American housewife was introduced to washing machines, vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, dryers--all of those sorts of things. My mother washed clothes on an iron scrub board in the basement every Monday, and the clothes were hung out to dry with a clothespin. There was a ringer to get the water out of it. That World's Fair in 1939 showed people things that they really wanted because the toil was arduous. I don't think you could produce a World's Fair today of anything that people know that they need in the way in which those needs could be anticipated and satisfied. And, all of the satisfaction of those needs has not produced the kind of contentment, because one has forgotten what they replaced. Russ Roberts: Fair enough. I've written a lot on the transformation of our standard of living over the 20th century, and I've tried to debunk what I think are incorrect stories about stagnation in the last 40, 50 years. People claim that people's standard of living hasn't changed: the average person's hasn't changed. And I think that's totally wrong. And, whenever I write about that, I always concede that while our material well-being is extraordinarily higher, say, than it was in 1900, say, in America or in the West--I was usually writing those pieces as an American. When I was writing that, I would concede that I'm not sure we're any happier. In fact, we might be less happy--which is what Rousseau is alluding to. Having said that: We don't want to go back. The image of your mother's washing in the basement--no one says, 'Yeah, those were the good old days.' There might be things about that time that were the good old days, but that's not one of them--the scrub board. And, there are other things I think economists would add about longer life and the longer quality of life at a high level for a longer period of time--higher quality of life for a longer period of time. But, this is a fascinating thing that 1939--by the way, David Gelernter wrote a wonderful novel on the 1939 World Fair, which I really enjoyed, which I recommend. But, that 1939 World Fair, it's true that we as human beings craved those things. Especially women who had incredible drudgery working in the early 1900s when they worked usually 12 hours a day just to boil water, make food, clean clothes. Just a terrible life of drudgery. There is less drudgery in the world. But there's not a lot more happiness--maybe. And that I think is fascinating statement about the human being. Leon Kass: Yep. That, I think is the main point of this paragraph. The question is whether or not--at least there are new possible sources of unhappiness because of the deprivation of so many other things without which life now seems to be impossible.
23:20	Leon Kass: Why don't we go on and look at the next vignette? This one, paragraph 15, and this now leads to the development of new human sentiments unknown before. Russ Roberts: Okay. Here we go [Paragraph 15]: Everything begins to change its appearance. Men who until this time wandered in the Woods, having adopted a more fixed settlement, slowly come together, unite into different bands, and finally form in each country a particular Nation, unified by morals and character, not by Regulations and Laws but by the same kind of life and foods and by the common influence of Climate. A permanent proximity cannot fail to engender at length some contact between different families. Young people of different sexes live in neighboring Huts; the passing intercourse demanded by Nature soon leads to another kind no less sweet and more permanent through mutual frequentation. People grow accustomed to consider different objects and to make comparisons; imperceptibly they acquire ideas of merit and beauty which produce sentiments of preference. By dint of seeing one another, they can no longer do without seeing one another again. A tender and gentle sentiment is gradually introduced into the soul and at the least obstacle becomes an impetuous fury. Jealousy awakens with love; Discord triumphs, and the gentlest of the passions receives sacrifices of human blood. Well, that was going fine until it turned dark there at the end, didn't it? Leon Kass: Right. Let's trace it. Russ Roberts: Okay. Leon Kass: Population grows, people have fixed settlements, they come together. The different families in the neighboring huts, they gather. The young people of different sexes meet. The passing intercourse of nature demanded--sorry--"the passing intercourse demanded by Nature"--sexual desire, casual sexuality--"soon leads to another kind no less sweet and more permanent through mutual frequentation. People grow accustomed to consider different objects and to make comparisons; imperceptibly they acquire ideas of merit and beauty which produce sentiments of preference. By dint of seeing one another, they can no longer do without seeing one another again." What's he talking about? Just to that point? Russ Roberts: Mostly I think love. Some concept of romantic love as opposed to pure sexual attraction. But, the way he describes it is quite extraordinary. He's talking about the power of judgment, of what we would call discrimination--not the way the word is usually used with the pejorative way, but simply the idea that some things we might find more appealing or attractive than others: some sense of merit, some sense of beauty. When you're living by yourself, you've got nothing to compare yourself to. When you're hanging out with your family, you're all kind of close-knit and everything's hunky-dory. If you've got another family nearby who is more athletic, beautiful, has bigger fish than you catch, and whose hut has more bedrooms and bathrooms and a larger lawn, all of a sudden things change. Leon Kass: That I think--that comparison is in his account a little later stage. Russ Roberts: Okay. Leon Kass: Here he's still talking in the realm of sexuality and love. And, the ideas of merit and beauty, he's talking about: there's more than one woman out there. Russ Roberts: Yeah. More than one man. Leon Kass: More than one man. Russ Roberts: It's the birth of aesthetics. It's the birth of the idea that--I mean, it's a strange idea. We take it for granted that, shown two pictures, most people can say that one's prettier than that one. That one's more handsome than that one. But, why is that, actually, when you think about it? Why would you just say, 'Well, there's that one and there's that one and there's two of them now.'? But, evidently that's not the way we're made. Leon Kass: Yeah. Something emerges as a result of the experience. This one seems more beautiful to me than that one. And, this one is--there's something about her qualities that I seem to like. And instead of it's being just about sex, it's: They want to keep seeing one another. As a result of having seen them, they want to see them again, over and over and over again. This is the transformation of lust to something like admiration and being admired. And then, he says, "A tender and gentle sentiment is gradually introduced into the soul...." Very nice. Russ Roberts: Yeah. Beautiful. Leon Kass: Very nice, "...and at the least obstacle becomes an impetuous fury." Why? Russ Roberts: Well, I think once on this show I mentioned that there is a kind of love that most of us are blessed to have, where when your beloved is absent, you don't just say, 'Oh: be nice to be with her or be with him.' but you have a physical longing, a stomach ache. The thought of seeing the beloved is so overwhelming--and that's one way of describing love--but also, if you're not allowed to see that person or if that person is not interested in seeing, it's of course devastating. And, it's not obvious that the least obstacle becomes an impetuous fury, as Rousseau says. But, that's his description. And worse, not just a fury that you can't get to that person. There's jealousy, which is that someone else can. Leon Kass: Well, if you can't get to them, she might be with somebody else. Russ Roberts: Yeah. Leon Kass: "Jealousy awakens with love." Is that true? Russ Roberts: I think so. I'd have trouble explaining why. I think there's a possessiveness about love that certainly Shakespeare and many, many other observers of the human condition have noted. We don't have to go into my or your personal lives. But, yeah. Jealousy is--we are possessive, not just about our tools and toys, but about the people we care about. Leon Kass: Yeah, and the jealousy, I think--the jealousy is in a way connected to the sense that this kind of love is exclusive. In other words, that I am my beloved and she is mine. And, it doesn't have to come simply to possession in a pejorative sense. But, there is something about this kind of love: if it's genuinely love, sort of excludes others--or so would hope. And therefore, if there is a sense that the love wanders or it is not exclusive, or if she's absent, I want to see her again lest she be lost, or lost to someone else, and so on. And, I don't think we're prone, I think--we're prone because we're such nice people--to think that true love would not know jealousy. But, that's probably an acquired education which is not primordial. This kind of experience of love is sort of exclusive. And, it seems to me that jealousy is right behind. Russ Roberts: I'm sure even a mediocre evolutionary psychologist like myself could cook up a evolutionary reason for this.
33:31	Russ Roberts: But what I find interesting about Rousseau is he ends with a very dark, dark note. First he says, there's a "tender and gentle sentiment" that can lead to fury. That jealousy is next. "Discord triumphs"--that's a very negative statement. And, "the gentlest of the passions receives sacrifices of human blood"--meaning violence is the natural follower of the birth of love. It's a pretty dark image of the human condition. Leon Kass: As you yourself said, there are lots of such stories. The Trojan War--pretty bloody enterprise for the sake of a woman. You can go any way you want. I think the important thing here is not that he's got so much a dark picture, but he's showing how, of the things that make us miserable, they have to do not with things that were present to nature boy, but that they follow through the gradual stages of the emergence of our complicated humanity. And, there are no free lunches. The various things that are sort of improvement either soften us, or confine us, or enslave us, or make us vulnerable because: you give your life to someone else, you could lose that, if your happiness now depends on her presence and returning and on her staying alive. Love is exposed to all sorts of grief, and it's not for nothing that the ancient Epicureans told you to--the ancient Stoics told you to limit your desires to the things in your power so that you would be least likely to be disappointed, frustrated by things that are not under your control. To fall in love is to be vulnerable. To fall in love is to be vulnerable; also, its being lost to you and especially being taken from you by a more worthy--so she thinks--suitor. I think he's just telling it like it is. Russ Roberts: Yeah. I'm definitely sympathetic to that view of our nature. I don't think religion is designed to make us happy, but you could argue that some of the strictures of religion,--say, I'm thinking about the Ten Commandments' not to covet, which would be another example here--are ways to remove some of your options that might seem appealing but actually are difficult for you to process. I couldn't help thinking--we were talking about the desire to see the person again: That's why people go to the movies more than once sometimes. They have a crush on a male or female film star, and part of that thrill is you can watch them all you want; and now you can take them home with you and watch them on their[?your?] phone, and you can use your imagination. And, those are unfulfilling thrills that weren't available to Rousseau's person in the hut next door. So, things have just in many ways just gotten more challenging. Leon Kass: Yeah. Should we go on? Russ Roberts: Sure. Leon Kass: Or do you want do something more with this? Russ Roberts: No.
36:33	Leon Kass: Let's do the next paragraph. This has also got to do--in the one we've just done, he talks about seeing and wanting to see again. Here we've got another aspect of the eyes, slightly different and much more potent in its effect. Let's do it: Paragraph 16. Russ Roberts: [Paragraph 16]: In proportion as ideas and sentiments follow upon one another and as mind and heart are trained, the human Race continues to be tamed, contacts spread, and bonds are tightened. People grew accustomed to assembling in front of the Huts or around a large Tree; song and dance, true children of love and leisure, became the amusement or rather the occupation of idle and assembled men and women. Each one began to look at the others and to want to be looked at himself, and public esteem had a value. The one who sang or danced the best, the handsomest, the strongest, the most adroit, or the most eloquent became the most highly considered; and that was the first step toward inequality and, at the same time, toward vice. From these first preferences were born on one hand vanity and contempt, on the other shame and envy; and the fermentation caused by these new leavens eventually produced compounds fatal to happiness and innocence. Whooph! That's a heck of a paragraph. Leon Kass: It's a terrific paragraph. It again begins now with leisure. There are more people. They gather in front of the huts or around a large tree. Instead of just digging for roots, they now sing and they dance. The "children of love and leisure"--we've got the love from before; now they're out there singing to each other, they dancing. And, each one begins to "look at the others and to want to be looked at himself." Because, having public esteem--being thought well of in the eyes of the others--is now valuable. Okay? Now: "The one who sang or danced the best, the handsomest, the strongest, the most adroit, the most eloquent," they became the ones who were "most highly considered." And, "that was the first step toward inequality." That's obvious, right? You're making distinctions amongst abilities and talents. But also, "at the same time, toward vice." And, it's the part about vice that I think we want to work on because that's what he does in the end of the paragraph. Are we okay to this point? Russ Roberts: Yeah. But, I have to comment on two things first. Leon Kass: Please. Russ Roberts: That's the first mention we've had of inequality in this section. As an essay contest entrant, I hope he referred to it earlier. I hope he didn't have to get through all of Part One and this far to Part Two before he starts talking about inequality. Or is that the case? Leon Kass: He will talk about, in other places, some people might be stronger or faster than others, but it made no difference because if someone was strong enough to take away your food, you'd go find something else. The distinctions were not of the sort that mattered to you because you didn't feel humiliated. You just were sad that you lost your dinner and you went and found it elsewhere. Here, it's inequality that now becomes registered and significant in the way people think about things. So the physical inequalities didn't matter; but the moral inequalities--the inequalities that emerge in society--they become toxic.
40:38	Russ Roberts: So, of course, listeners know what I'm thinking about, right? You guys out there know what I'm thinking about: "Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely." Perhaps my favorite quote from The Theory of Moral Sentiments. This idea that we want to be looked at, and we want to be admired, and we want to be respected, and we want to matter. And, Rousseau is giving us the dark side of that, which is that that impulse has some challenges to it. I'm interested in, when I write about Smith and how that, hardwired--when he says "naturally desires," he's saying we're hardwired to care about what other people think of us. And that can induce good behavior. Here it's the opposite. So, take me through the next part, Leon. What do we want to look at? Leon Kass: Okay. He, by the way, will say--in a passage we don't have--that this concern for recognition is--I think he has a passage--it's responsible for some of our virtues and all of our vices. So, he does credit in other places that it's the source of the desire to be recognized for good. But at this particular place, these preferences--from these preferences--two things are born[?borne?] in the soul. This section is not being talked of in terms of social roles. He's talking about the developments that happen in the human psyche. And, that's what we want to concentrate on. From these first preferences, the last sentence: "We're born on the one hand vanity and contempt and on the other shame and envy." We should do something with these terms. And we'll do something more detailed on vanity because he's got an important footnote that we'll look at in a minute. But, just for openers, what would you say are, on the one hand, vanity and contempt, and on the other hand, shame and envy, and how do you relate them to each other? Russ Roberts: So, once we're dancing around the tree, some people are better dancers than others. Some are better singers than others. Some are better-looking than others. And it's a pleasant feeling to be one of those. That's the vanity. And then, there's this horrible part that can come with that, which is its cousin or sibling, which is: not only do you feel that you're important and special, but that implies that other people are less so. And that's the contempt; and that's human. And then, for those on the other side of the equation, the people who feel the contempt or who are not at the same level as the others in terms of dancing, handsomeness, etc., they've got shame: I'm inadequate. And, envy: I wish I were like that person over there who is getting all the rewards and honor and glory, and I'm inferior. And, that's an incredible level of inequality. Again, as you say, it's a psychic inequality. There's nothing here about that guy drives a better car than I have, or his watch is nicer, or his spouse is more attractive, or fill in the blank. Or his house. It's simply that I'm not as good. Leon Kass: How does it strike you? Reasonable? Russ Roberts: Well, not for me, Leon. I've never had contempt for anyone. No. I think it's--as a social scientist? Leon Kass: Yeah. Does it strike you as anthropologically sound? Do you recognize this as somehow--after all, this is--we don't yet have books that teach you that pride is a sin. The original sin, in fact. But, anthropologically speaking, before there's instruction, the recognition of one's superiority and the recognition and consideration you get from it, doesn't it produce a sense of one's superiority and some sense that the others are not as good? You look down upon them, you disdain them? Russ Roberts: Well, once--one of the things you learn when you start meditating is how often you judge. And, one of the powers of meditation, when it's effective, is to help you be aware of that. It's kind of shocking when it first happens, because you realize that you judge every single person. Not necessarily in the way we're talking about here: 'That's an inferior person. That person is not as good as I am.' Not that. Simply that the human brain--this is the part that I'm going to agree with you anthropologically--the brain is constantly making distinctions. Sometimes with respect to myself, yes: That person is tall. I'll pick some relatively uncontroversial things. 'Oh, that person is taller than I am,' or 'that person is faster than I am,' or that person is thinner than I am,' or 'that person is younger than I am, or 'that person's hair is darker than mine.' It's totally unconscious. When you first start to notice it--which again is a gift from a good meditation practice--it's quite alarming. It's like, 'Wow. This has been going on the whole time and I'm just kind of noticing it.' And, that's what we do. And, I'm sure again, there's evolutionary reasons for it. There's maybe some good benefits from it. But it's jarring. And certainly, as you point out, I think a lot of civilization, religion, moral writing is designed to temper that; but with modest success, probably.
47:21	Leon Kass: Yeah. Let's add to this Rousseau's own treatment in the footnote on what is, in English, translated as vanity. It's Footnote 15. Russ Roberts: Okay. So, there's going to be two French phrases here. Do you want to introduce those first, Leon? Amour-propre and amour de soi-meme, which are two kinds of self-love. Leon Kass: Right. In English, if you say self-love and vanity, it sounds like they belong to two different species, but in French and in the original, they're both species of amour--Amour-propre and amour de soi-meme. And this is--why don't I read the note? [Note XV]: Amour-propre [Leon Kass: which we would translate as love of own] and love of oneself (amour de soi-meme), two passions very different in their Nature and their effects, must not be confused. Love of oneself is a natural sentiment which inclines every animal to watch over its own preservation, and which, directed in man by reason and modified by pity, produces humanity and virtue. Amour-propre [Leon Kass: translated 'vanity'] is only a relative sentiment, artificial and born in Society, which inclines each individual to have a greater esteem for himself than for anyone else, inspires in men all the harm they do to one another, and is the true source of honor. There's the care for yourself--a love of yourself in terms of your biological neediness. And then there is the love of what is your own or appropriated to you. And, it's primarily your self-image and your regard for yourself. It's, in a way the first property that you have is what you think of yourself as it's been reflected to you in relation to others. And the preoccupation with this--the preoccupation with this is in a way the source of the harm people do to each other, the source of much of our unhappiness. It's very nice to say these are two different kinds of self-love. One of this is the self-love of the naturally given self, and the other is the love of the self, which is as close to you now to us as grown and civilized people as the other. But, in origin and its relation to our happiness and goodness, they're a very different valence. What do you think? Russ Roberts: Well, it's fantastically interesting. I don't--in economics, we talk about self-interest; and sometimes we talk about selfishness. And you know, I like to say that Smith's view of human beings is that they're self-interested and that no one can disagree with that. No one could disagree that we care about whether we survive, that we want food: that we put ourselves first. That's natural and human. And what he's saying here, which is utterly fantastically interesting, is that there's this other kind of self-interest. Which could be called vanity. It's not a very good word for it because vanity gets tangled up--to me--with just appearance, often. But he's saying there's this other self-love that comes from being amongst other people. Right? Man--nature boy--still needs a roof over his head and he needs food to survive, and he's got a natural urge and desire to feed himself, and procreate, and so on. So does nature girl, by the way--just to keep things more egalitarian here for a moment. But, once we're mingling--once we have a social life--and by that I don't mean parties to go to. But, once we are interacting regularly with other people, these distinctions he's been talking about raise their relatively unattractive head and we start feeling a certain sense of where we fit in. And, of course, he suggests that we all think we're better than average drivers. Which is not possible. But, he's saying we have a greater esteem for ourselves than for anyone else. So, I think that's true. But the part I'm fascinated by is the next part: "Inspires in men all the harm they do to one another and is the true source of honor." Why don't you tell me what that means to you? Leon Kass: Look, I think the harm that they do to one another is born out of rivalry and a sense of not wanting to be found inferior. I mean, the classic Biblical story of this. And, we'll tie also to the next paragraph, which I hope we can do very briefly, is the story of Cain and Abel in which Cain had a very exalted self-image of himself, but his sacrifice wasn't accepted and it gives rise to--well, that's really closer to the next paragraph. I'm a little ahead of myself. But also, the true source of honor, which is in a way at least half positive--it's the desire to somehow conduct yourself, to deserve to be well thought of, and to be able to think well of yourself. The honor, of course, is received in the eyes of the community. Only a sufficiently self-confident person will honor himself and be content with that and not look for any other recognition. But, this love of your reputation or this love of your self-image, of your self-esteem--that causes all kinds of terrible things to those who are your rivals but it also might inspire you to do something to be worthy. Russ Roberts: Stepping outside, not as the anthropologist, but as the--I'll say as the mensch: What do you do with this, Leon? What do you do with this fact that we care--and this is again, going back to Adam Smith. I don't talk very much about this in my book on Adam Smith. But it's in the background. Which is: At its extreme, you might end up devoting much of your activity based on what other people think rather than on your own values or what you think is important. In fact, you start to think that what's important is whatever other people think is important. You couldn't even imagine there's something else other than in your social circle. It's a very, I think, a dark part of ambition and achievement. Right? This pursuit of self-esteem, this pursuit of honor, this pursuit of a self-image or to make sure that your self-image is actually somewhat aligned--that you are lovely, not just loved as Smith said. So, it fascinates me that it has this violent side, which I think is true: the harm that we do to each other, the sense of injustice that we feel if we're not sufficiently honored and treated with respect. It's an extraordinarily powerful part of the human experience that Rousseau is talking about here. Leon Kass: Yeah. He concentrates on this in his educational writing and émile on how to cure people from an improper sense of amour-propre. His treatment of this subject is perhaps one of his greatest contributions to psychology and to social psychology. And, what interests me a lot about it--that[?] most people who think that the harm human beings do to one another has to do with oppression or social conditions or poverty or things of that sort-- Russ Roberts: Testosterone. Just for violent-- Leon Kass: Right. But, this sense that what matters so much to us is how we seem in our own eyes, and that we can only somehow know through the eyes of those who look upon us--this accounts for all kinds of sorting by opinion groups. People afraid to stand out in a different way. All kinds of herds are formed by people who need to have that kind of validation from others. And, if they don't get it in the proper way, there can be hell to pay.
57:04	Leon Kass: Look, I think we should fill this out with the next paragraph, where the whole question of injustice comes in. And it's still the same theme, but now not only--he's going to show you how this becomes sort of fatal to happiness and innocence. Let's do just the first few paragraphs of 17. Russ Roberts: Okay. You don't want to finish the footnote? Leon Kass: Basically the rest of the footnote says man in the state of nature does not have a soul sufficient to have amour-propre, because he does not yet have the mind capable of making the comparisons and those passions--he doesn't have hate or the desire for revenge because he doesn't have those kinds of relations and doesn't have a self-image to have been wounded. But, that's the subject of the text we're now going to do. So, why don't you do--do the beginning of 17. Russ Roberts: Okay. [Paragraph 17]: As soon as men had begun to appreciate one another, and the idea of consideration was formed in their minds, each one claimed a right to it, and it was no longer possible-- Leon Kass: "Each one claimed a right to it." Sorry to interrupt. We're now moving into a moral territory and not just a psychological one. Do it again. First-- Russ Roberts: [Paragraph 17]: As soon as men had begun to appreciate one another, and the idea of consideration was formed in their minds, each one claimed a right to it, and it was no longer possible to be disrespectful toward anyone with impunity. From this came the first duties of civility, even among Savages; and from this any voluntary wrong became an outrage, because along with the harm that resulted from the injury, the offended man saw in it contempt for his person which was often more unbearable than the harm itself. Thus, everyone punishing the contempt shown him by another in a manner proportionate to the importance he accorded himself, vengeances became terrible, and men bloodthirsty and cruel. This is precisely the point reached by most of the Savage Peoples known to us, and it is for want of having sufficiently distinguished between ideas and noticed how far these Peoples already were from the first state of Nature that many have hastened to conclude that man is naturally cruel, and that he needs Civilization in order to make him gentler. On the contrary, nothing is so gentle as man in his primitive state when, placed by Nature at equal distances from the stupidity of brutes and the fatal enlightenment of Civil man, and limited equally by instinct and reason to protecting himself from the harm that threatens him, he is restrained by Natural pity from harming anyone himself, and nothing leads him to do so even after he has received harm. For, according to the axiom of the wise Locke, where there is no property, there is no injury. So, that was a long paragraph. But, the key part is this idea that the physical harm we get is not comparable to the injustice--that it has befallen us, this harm--and unmerited obviously, because: 'Look at me. I don't deserve that.' Leon Kass: Yeah. This is the beginning of--he says the beginnings of "duties of civility." You better be nice to other people and show respect because if you don't and you diss them, there will be hell to pay. And, the beginning of justice--the beginning of a concern with justice--is not some lofty sense of the other fellow's good. The beginning of a sense of injury--of injustice, iniuria, injustice--in addition to the harm that you've caused me, you have not treated me the way I know I need to be deserved. And, there is an injustice. And, the only thing to settle this is I take revenge on you for having shown me disrespect. And, the size of--the measure of what's coming to you is the fatness of your sense of self-worth. You know: each person has his own measure of what he thinks is coming to him. He'll punish you according to the contempt in a manner proportionate to the importance he accords himself. And then people take vengeance, and life becomes bloodthirsty and cruel. What do you think? Russ Roberts: Well, I think about codes of honor, which are ways to constrain this from its most dangerous forms. Dueling is the way that--when you're perceived to have been treated unjustly, there's this stylized way which eventually I think became mostly just a show--I hope, I think, maybe, kind of. But, this emotion, this emotion of injustice that one has been treated unfairly is unbelievably prevalent in our human interactions. It is everywhere. And, I'm fascinated by this idea of civility, right? This idea of trying to temper this very potent urge. What are your thoughts? Leon Kass: I mentioned the Cain and Abel story before, but Cain is the first human being born of woman. Okay? So, Adam and Eve have a different origin. Cain is the first person born into the world. Cain is the inventor of sacrifices. He's the older brother. He's the proud farmer. And it turns out God disses his sacrifice. And he gets enraged; and he treats Abel as if Abel was trying to outdo him, and he eliminates the rival. That's--the first human being has anger and a sense of having been wronged to the point of fratricide. That's the primary human story. Russ Roberts: Wait: He takes it out on the wrong actor. He's really mad at God, and yet he kills Abel. Leon Kass: He kills Abel, but it's partly the displaced anger because he treats Abel--who is a mere imitator--he's a mere imitator: This no-good brother who wanders out with a sheep when I'm planting crops and producing things from the ground. He treats Abel's success as if he were trying to outdo him. That's a perfectly normal kind of human reaction. Somebody perfectly going about their business doing well, and you lose, and you basically attribute bad intent to the fact that they've gotten ahead of you. And especially, God is invisible, and it would be pretty dangerous to get angry with Him anyhow. Russ Roberts: But I do think it's a fascinating thing that, whether you believe in God or not, I think ill fortune--which implies a certain randomness, but it sometimes just means a bad thing happening to you--can make you angry. That's not rational. It is clearly a manifestation of what Rousseau is talking about. Leon Kass: Yeah. But, there's a big difference. If you're a normal person walking down the street and if a flower pot falls off the ledge and hits you and you got a slight bruise on the forehead, you're hurt, you're annoyed. But, only if you think the universe is arranged so that no bad thing will happen to you, are you going to get angry. Russ Roberts: I don't know. Leon Kass: If you think your neighbor up there was waiting for you to come by and pushed it off on purpose, much more a source of fury is his intention than the harm.
1:06:00	Russ Roberts: That's true. But, I do think there is the 'why me?' aspect of misfortune and the sense of injustice, I think is born out of this amour-propre--this love of one's own that Rousseau is on to. And it's giving me a different way to think about some of my own shortcomings--which we will not go into. But, I do want to tell the Soviet joke that I know you know--of the two Russian peasants under communism. And, one's got a goat; and the other one doesn't. And the guy with the goats, he's got some extra benefits because he's got a goat. And one day the guy without the goat finds a little lamp and he rubs it, and the next thing he knows there's a genie, and the genie offers to grant him a wish. And, what does he wish for? He says, 'I wish that my neighbor's goat would die.' And that is an extreme version of what we're talking about here. Right? It's a desire for schadenfreude--a desire for misfortune to befall your inferior neighbor rather than what has become your lot. And Rousseau is on to something here, clearly. Leon Kass: And, with respect to the people who basically get angry at every misfortune, I think Rousseau would say that their anger is somehow proportionate to the importance they attach to themselves. And, if they have a very inflated view of what is coming to them from the universe--only good things--then yeah, sure, every least misfortune is a source of a temper tantrum in one form or another. But, ordinarily, we can distinguish from intentional harm done to us to simple accidents and so on, or at least most reasonable people, I think can. Russ Roberts: I'm not sure. I remember, more than once, when someone has been cruel, I have tried to give them the benefit of doubt and said maybe something unfortunate has happened to their loved one. And, sometimes that's true; and people lash out in those circumstances.
1:08:32	Russ Roberts: Actually, I want to ask you about two things. I assume you have something else you want to do, but I want to ask you about two things. We didn't talk about the last line of Paragraph 16. In the last phrase, he says--after he says "vanity and contempt" are born and "shame and envy." This idea that when you start to see other people being more successful in social settings, you start to get jealous and you look down on people and you feel good about yourself. He says, "The fermentation caused by these new leavens eventually produced compounds fatal to happiness and innocence." And, leavens, meaning yeast, meaning things that work on other things and grow. In this case, compounds that are fatal to happiness and innocence. How do you read that? Leon Kass: Yeah. I don't know what the compounds are. So, it's wonderful of you to raise that. I've never slowed down over that. What I would say is these are new passions in the soul: vanity and contempt, shame and envy don't exist in the pure state of nature. They don't exist until man becomes social and then becomes concerned with how he stands with respect to others. But, I think he wants to say that these comparative considerations of superiority and inferiority relative to others--envy and disdain and so on--they infect so many things, so many aspects of our lives that they tend to destroy our happiness. We're always envying somebody or feeling ashamed because we're not measuring up. Or, they give rise to the coveting and taking what is not ours; or of lording it over other people because we think they don't deserve the superior positions we have. In other words, it's those particular passions relative to others that wind up destroying our happiness because they infect absolutely everything else. Every way in which we look at the world are in danger of doing that. And, they destroy our happiness; and they contribute to our being bad people toward others. I can't specify the compound, but it's basically this yeast goes everywhere. Russ Roberts: And, we all can understand some of that, or we can relate to it. We can say that seems plausible. But of course, it doesn't have to be that way. Why wouldn't it be the case when I'm out in the public sphere and I see people who are more attractive or more successful than I am: Okay? So that's that. I make a note of it, perhaps I observe it; and I go back to my own hut and I have my own family and my own successes. So, I'm not as great as so-and-so. But, it eats at you. That's why I like the "compounds" and the "leavens." It's hard to put it down. And then even stranger: Shouldn't, at least, the successful people who have the vanity and the contempt, shouldn't they be happy? But of course, there's only one, perhaps, who can see themselves at the top, the alpha of the tribe. Even the most successful people are often thinking, 'Yeah, I'm successful, but I wish I could have had that. And you don't. So even they suffer. Leon Kass: Yep. Yep.
1:12:24	Russ Roberts: One more thing-- Leon Kass: We'll probably try to pull a couple-- Russ Roberts: One more thing I want to ask. Leon Kass: Please. Russ Roberts: One more thing I want to ask, and then you can bring us home. In my experience, some of the most vain people, the most arrogant people, the most pretentious people are insecure. They use their public image of vanity and contempt for the people they see as less than themselves as a form of armor. A fear that they're not measuring up. A fear of--maybe it's envy--toward the people who are maybe content, even though they don't have the gifts or the wealth or the accomplishments of those people. Does Rousseau have anything to say on that? Do you want to reflect on that? Because I think that's true. Leon Kass: I think it's true. I don't think he speaks about that in here. But, no: these are often covers and roles and postures that people invent for themselves in the dark of the night. In fact, there's a wonderful saying attributed to the pianist, Arthur Rubenstein: 'When I compare myself, I feel proud. When I regard myself, I feel humble.' When there aren't the others, when he really looks at himself-- In any case, look, I love these paragraphs, because they go to the root of certain very primordial things in the human psyche before morality and culture come along to try to instruct them. They give you the unvarnished view of the human being not in the primitive condition when he's little distinguished from an ape, but with possibilities. But, when certain anthropological things deeply rooted, come into view, and then one begins to see what culture has to address in a deep way and not think you jiggle around these institutions or provide these new incentives, if you don't somehow understand what the potential demons are in the soul for yourself and for the people you live with, you'll get it all wrong. Rousseau is in a way bothered by bourgeois society in particular because it feeds those kinds of vanities and those senses of inequalities and those pursuits of advantage over others. The very thing which makes capitalist prosperity and the ease of our life go, turns out to be, in some ways, from a Rousseauan point of view, corrupting of the soul. Also in the sense that our needs now are vastly greater than one would really need to live cheerfully and well at a much lower plane. The solutions--he doesn't offer you solutions. He's offering you a kind of insight to look into the mirror and have a really good look at what it means to be a human being, top to bottom. And then, begin to think about what kind of social arrangements might leave people freer than they were and less culpable of cruelty and vice towards their neighbors. There's no simple Rousseauan answer, but to set you the table and to help you think about it, there are fewer better people. Russ Roberts: My guest today has been Leon Kass. Leon, thanks for being part of EconTalk. Leon Kass: Thanks for being with you, Russ.

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Podcast Episode Highlights

0:37

Intro. [Recording date: May 26, 2025.]

Russ Roberts: Today is May 26th, 2025, and my guest today is author and teacher, and professor Leon Kass, the Dean of Faculty here at Shalem College in Jerusalem. This is Leon's second appearance on the program. He was last here in March of 2021 talking about human flourishing, living well, and Aristotle. Leon, welcome back to EconTalk.

Leon Kass: Thanks very much. Nice to be back with you Russ.

1:03

Russ Roberts: Our topic for today is a thinker I have never respected, but I really never read either. So that's kind of awkward. And I realized with Leon's help that maybe I had judged Jean-Jacques Rousseau a little too quickly.

So, what we're going to do today: Leon's going to give a brief summary of Rousseau's life and career; and we're going to do a close reading of a few paragraphs from his Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men, which is also known as the Second Discourse. We'll link to that work, to the text we'll be studying. You can follow along with this or you can just listen. We'll be reading out loud some of the passages that we'll be discussing.

But, first, I'd like Leon to give us a little background on Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Leon, it's all yours.

Leon Kass: Thank you. Rousseau was a giant not only of 18th-century European thought and culture, but really of all of Western philosophy. Born in the Republic of Geneva, 1712; dies in France, 1778. A prolific political philosopher known for The Social Contract, a philosopher of education, famous for his Emile; author of a romantic novel, composer of seven operas, a theater critic; an author of the first modern autobiography, The Confessions; and even a scientist writing an Elements of Botany.

He lived a colorful and checkered life with good relations with Voltaire, d'Alembert, Burke, Boswell, and Frederick the Great, but he had a horrible public fight with David Hume and he suffered political exile for his views. His books were burned in Paris. He enjoyed many love affairs and is said to have littered Europe with many illegitimate children.

It's impossible to summarize Rousseau's thought. His range is enormous. His writings seem to contradict each other for they are written from different perspectives on the world.

Here, he is a citizen of Geneva. While there, he's the individual Jean-Jacques. All of his works are suffused with irony. His persistent interests are freedom and happiness, which he finds lacking in modern bourgeois society, given to the love of gain, luxury, conformity, insincerity, and the joyless pursuit of getting ahead. But because he approaches the questions of freedom and happiness from different perspectives, he seems to be confused, if not a teacher of error. He's both praised and blamed for the French Revolution, progressive education, and psychoanalysis. He's embraced by civic republicans and Marxist revolutionaries, by admirers of the noble savage, and admirers of the yeoman soldier. Reading him looking for agreement, any modern reader can find a Rousseau that he will like and one that he will hate.

But, few people see the real Rousseau, who was not an ideologue but a true seeker after wisdom, and whose books offer not doctrine, but invitations to joint inquiry. To learn from Rousseau, we need to rescue him from his blinkered critics and simplistic admirers who see only answers wrong or right, and instead follow up his opening up of deep questions. Rightly read, Rousseau is a teacher, an indispensable companion and guide for anyone seeking wisdom about the enduring human questions of human nature and culture, language and reason, society and religion, love and marriage, happiness and politics. All of these are on the table in the text we're going to discuss today, the Discourse on Inequality.

5:10

Russ Roberts: Awesome. Let's get started.

*Excerpts from J-J. Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men (trans. by Roger Masters). Click for PDF file.*

And, what I've asked Leon to do, for those of you listening at home--as I said, you can follow along; I've asked Leon to treat me as his student. I have to say, Leon, your description of Rousseau reminded me of the way I would describe you as a teacher who has a lot to say about a lot of things. So, I'm excited that we're going to explore this text together. It's a text I've only read for the first time earlier today, so I'm sure I didn't get all of it and you're going to help me find more than I saw.

Leon Kass: Okay. Let me introduce the work itself and then we'll get started.

Rousseau wrote this as a response to an essay contest in 1753. The question is: What is the origin of inequality among men and whether it is authorized by natural law? The last part, Rousseau ignores. He says,

How do we know inequality among men without knowing man? And, how do you know man as he comes from the hand of nature without separating natural man from the various accretions that history and circumstances have produced in him?

So, Part One of the discourse is a picture of man in the pure state of nature--so-called the noble savage or nature boy--where natural man lives as a solitary, independent, speechless and roughly mindless orangutan with possibilities. He pursues the elementary needs of life and he enjoys without complication the sentiment of his present existence.

In Part Two, Rousseau traces the processes whereby man by stages emerges from this pure state of nature eventually to become the civilized creatures that we are with our inequality, our unhappiness, and our vices.

We're going to pick up the story a little bit down the road towards civilization with the first habitations and the first settlements of settled families. And, we're going to follow certain psychological and social insights on the subjects of desires and needs, love and jealousy, the birth of vanity and the desire for recognition, and the claim to consideration and the desire for vengeance when it's violated. That's the agenda Russ. I think we should get started.

7:46

Russ Roberts: Okay. I'm going to start by reading--shall I read paragraph 13?

Leon Kass: Please.

Russ Roberts: Okay. So, this is, I would say something like the hunter-gatherer, the beginnings of families living in crude dwellings. That's the lead-in, right?

Leon Kass: Correct. Exactly.

Russ Roberts: Okay. Here we go [Paragraph 13].

In this new state, with a simple and solitary life, very limited needs, and the implements they had invented to provide for them, since men enjoyed very great leisure, they used it to procure many kinds of commodities unknown to their Fathers; and that was the first yoke they imposed on themselves without thinking about it, and the first source of the evils they prepared for their Descendants. For, besides their continuing thus to soften body and mind, as these commodities had lost almost all their pleasantness through habit, and as they had at the same time degenerated into true needs, being deprived of them became much more cruel than possessing them was sweet; and people were unhappy to lose them without being happy to possess them.

Leon Kass: Very good.

What are commodities? What are these people doing with their leisure?

Russ Roberts: What's funny about this, of course, is that I'm an economist and you're not. So, we're going to have an interesting conversation here.

What an economist would say is that people develop some primitive tools that allowed them to begin to enjoy a slightly higher standard of living--a slightly higher level of material well-being--than they had before. What those 'commodities' were--well, he says they had great leisure. Now, there's a debate about whether that's true, but let's take him as being correct. They had extra time and so they used that time to fashion, presumably, a nicer hut, maybe a better way to catch fish, a better way to bring down game, an iPhone. Well, maybe not an iPhone, but a set of what we would call technological change, or innovation, or progress that he seems to think is not necessarily--in fact definitely isn't--such a great thing.

Leon Kass: Good. So, commodities: all of these conveniences and amenities, the product of innovation, which is somehow built into the human beings always looking to make things a little better. But he says this is "the first yoke they imposed on themselves without thinking about it." What's a yoke?

Russ Roberts: So, it's this word you don't hear very much in everyday English language because it's a reference to agricultural life. Nothing could be more familiar to most of human history--of civilized human history--than a yoke; but it's Y-O-K-E, not Y-O-L-K. Y-O-L-K is the egg yolk. This is the yoke that restrains an animal, typically an ox or some kind of domesticated animal, and forces them to do their duty to plow the field, to create a furrow. It's something that keeps you from being free. It is a constraint, a serious constraint.

And he's arguing, obviously, that when we as human beings created things that our ancestor didn't have access to, we lost some of our freedom. As opposed to--many people would see it the opposite: 'Well, now we're more free. We have technology that liberates us in all kinds of ways.' But evidently Rousseau felt otherwise.

Leon Kass: Well, he's going to explain to us in what sense these new devices are in fact yokes without our knowing it. He's not talking about the side effects--the harm to the environment or various other things. A yoke is a constraint on a freedom. It's a form of servitude.

And, here's the sentence; you should parse it for me: For in addition to softening, continuing to "soften body and mind, as these commodities had lost almost all their pleasantness through habit"--and this is the part of the sentence I want your help with--"and as they had at the same time degenerated into true needs, being deprived of them became much more cruel than possessing them was sweet." We're unhappy to lose them without being happy to have them. What does it mean to say that these new innovations, which last week we didn't need, degenerate--that's a big word--into true needs?

Russ Roberts: Well, it's a remarkably prescient statement. Before we recorded this, Leon and I talked a little bit about Adam Smith, and Adam Smith talks about our pursuit of gadgets, in 1759 in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. And he points out that a person will acquire a very fancy, expensive watch that does slightly better at keeping on his time, but doesn't make the person any more timely for the meetings that they're late for. And, what Smith is interested in is the beauty. He thinks we're seduced by the beauty of things.

I think he's onto something, but what Rousseau is arguing here, I think we can all relate to in modern times. A device comes along, a technology comes along, and it's so much better than what we have that we, quote, "have to have it." We want to possess it. But it's shocking, isn't it, how after a relatively short period of time we can get incredibly annoyed when it doesn't, say, work the way it's supposed to. You're on the train--if you've ever been on Amtrak between Washington D.C. and New York or Boston and you're surfing the Internet doing some crucial email, or something, or shopping, and all of a sudden the Internet goes out. And you can't believe how annoying and frustrating it is. This is something that is an extraordinary miracle that it ever works at all. But, once you've had it and once you've become accustomed to it, it becomes a need--as Rousseau would word it. And the thrill is gone, which I think he's right. Often, not always, but often.

Leon Kass: He is offering us in here in a way a definition of a true need. Yesterday it was a mere want or a desire that we didn't need. I mean, in the state of nature people have simple needs. Those are real needs for food and water and rest. But now, all kinds of other things previously desires degenerate into the category of a true need. What's the definition of a true need that he gives us right in this paragraph? What makes a true need a true need?

Russ Roberts: Well, he's suggesting that--well, I'm not sure, so I'm going to bounce that back to you for a second. But one thing he's clearly saying is that the pleasure that we get from having them is dwarfed by the misery we have when we don't have them.

So, once we have them, all of a sudden the loss of them is relatively large relative to the gain we got from them.

Again, as an economist, this is hard to accept. He's saying that civilization has immiserated us in some sense. Right? It has created a set of false needs that, when satisfied, just lead us to look for the next new thing. Is that a fair summary?

Leon Kass: Yeah. I think close. I don't think he's yet talking about that this is false satisfaction. He's saying, 'Look, a true need is something that you feel you can't live without.'

Russ Roberts: Fair enough.

Leon Kass: What is necessary is something you must have. And, since the pleasures of it vanish or decline greatly with familiarity, it's not that they make you miserable: it's that they don't make you any happier; and there are so many more things you now need that you are now yoked to the desire to have to have more and more and more lest you feel you're missing the things without which life would be impossible.

I don't know how many people--I sometimes make a habit of reminding myself to give thanks for a shower, or indoor plumbing--all of just the elementary things that make life less solitary, nasty, brutish, and short. We don't give thanks for those things. We take them for granted. If we're missing them we are in a way slaved to those commodities, and we're continuing to provide new ones so that our children can't imagine living without their phones or without the Internet or what have you.

And, this question, this is not a side-effect of technology or technology assessment. This is the intrinsic effect of our tools on our expectations and the malleability of desire that last year's desires once routinely satisfied, become next year's necessities; and the things that become necessary to live grow and grow and grow. And, we are in a way yoked by those things.

18:20

Russ Roberts: You're lucky if you can remember to be grateful for a shower on a random Monday morning. But, if you ever lose your shower or your hot water or your heat, all of a sudden you're in a panic. Especially if you don't have a friend whose shower you can borrow or a place you can go that's warm. You're in a state of chaos internally. When's it going to get fixed? It's very, very difficult to cope with that hardship.

Reminds me of the episode we had with Michael Easter on the comfort zone. We've become accustomed to comfort in the modern world and we don't appreciate it; and when it's taken away, we are very unhappy to lose those comforts.

Leon Kass: Yeah. This is, as you said early in the first thing you said, how prescient he is. This is with respect to the simplest of technologies: We shape our tools and then our tools reshape us. And, that part of it is rarely reckoned because the advantages of these tools are perfectly well-known. But the costs of them are often hidden; and the costs in the way in which they transform the whole economy of what is necessary and what is not necessary continues to be altered.

Just as an aside, in the 1939 World's Fair, the American housewife was introduced to washing machines, vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, dryers--all of those sorts of things. My mother washed clothes on an iron scrub board in the basement every Monday, and the clothes were hung out to dry with a clothespin. There was a ringer to get the water out of it. That World's Fair in 1939 showed people things that they really wanted because the toil was arduous. I don't think you could produce a World's Fair today of anything that people know that they need in the way in which those needs could be anticipated and satisfied. And, all of the satisfaction of those needs has not produced the kind of contentment, because one has forgotten what they replaced.

Russ Roberts: Fair enough. I've written a lot on the transformation of our standard of living over the 20th century, and I've tried to debunk what I think are incorrect stories about stagnation in the last 40, 50 years. People claim that people's standard of living hasn't changed: the average person's hasn't changed. And I think that's totally wrong.

And, whenever I write about that, I always concede that while our material well-being is extraordinarily higher, say, than it was in 1900, say, in America or in the West--I was usually writing those pieces as an American. When I was writing that, I would concede that I'm not sure we're any happier. In fact, we might be less happy--which is what Rousseau is alluding to.

Having said that: We don't want to go back. The image of your mother's washing in the basement--no one says, 'Yeah, those were the good old days.' There might be things about that time that were the good old days, but that's not one of them--the scrub board.

And, there are other things I think economists would add about longer life and the longer quality of life at a high level for a longer period of time--higher quality of life for a longer period of time.

But, this is a fascinating thing that 1939--by the way, David Gelernter wrote a wonderful novel on the 1939 World Fair, which I really enjoyed, which I recommend. But, that 1939 World Fair, it's true that we as human beings craved those things. Especially women who had incredible drudgery working in the early 1900s when they worked usually 12 hours a day just to boil water, make food, clean clothes. Just a terrible life of drudgery. There is less drudgery in the world. But there's not a lot more happiness--maybe. And that I think is fascinating statement about the human being.

Leon Kass: Yep. That, I think is the main point of this paragraph. The question is whether or not--at least there are new possible sources of unhappiness because of the deprivation of so many other things without which life now seems to be impossible.

23:20

Leon Kass: Why don't we go on and look at the next vignette? This one, paragraph 15, and this now leads to the development of new human sentiments unknown before.

Russ Roberts: Okay. Here we go [Paragraph 15]:

Everything begins to change its appearance. Men who until this time wandered in the Woods, having adopted a more fixed settlement, slowly come together, unite into different bands, and finally form in each country a particular Nation, unified by morals and character, not by Regulations and Laws but by the same kind of life and foods and by the common influence of Climate. A permanent proximity cannot fail to engender at length some contact between different families. Young people of different sexes live in neighboring Huts; the passing intercourse demanded by Nature soon leads to another kind no less sweet and more permanent through mutual frequentation. People grow accustomed to consider different objects and to make comparisons; imperceptibly they acquire ideas of merit and beauty which produce sentiments of preference. By dint of seeing one another, they can no longer do without seeing one another again. A tender and gentle sentiment is gradually introduced into the soul and at the least obstacle becomes an impetuous fury. Jealousy awakens with love; Discord triumphs, and the gentlest of the passions receives sacrifices of human blood.

Well, that was going fine until it turned dark there at the end, didn't it?

Leon Kass: Right. Let's trace it.

Russ Roberts: Okay.

Leon Kass: Population grows, people have fixed settlements, they come together. The different families in the neighboring huts, they gather. The young people of different sexes meet. The passing intercourse of nature demanded--sorry--"the passing intercourse demanded by Nature"--sexual desire, casual sexuality--"soon leads to another kind no less sweet and more permanent through mutual frequentation. People grow accustomed to consider different objects and to make comparisons; imperceptibly they acquire ideas of merit and beauty which produce sentiments of preference. By dint of seeing one another, they can no longer do without seeing one another again." What's he talking about? Just to that point?

Russ Roberts: Mostly I think love. Some concept of romantic love as opposed to pure sexual attraction. But, the way he describes it is quite extraordinary. He's talking about the power of judgment, of what we would call discrimination--not the way the word is usually used with the pejorative way, but simply the idea that some things we might find more appealing or attractive than others: some sense of merit, some sense of beauty. When you're living by yourself, you've got nothing to compare yourself to. When you're hanging out with your family, you're all kind of close-knit and everything's hunky-dory. If you've got another family nearby who is more athletic, beautiful, has bigger fish than you catch, and whose hut has more bedrooms and bathrooms and a larger lawn, all of a sudden things change.

Leon Kass: That I think--that comparison is in his account a little later stage.

Russ Roberts: Okay.

Leon Kass: Here he's still talking in the realm of sexuality and love. And, the ideas of merit and beauty, he's talking about: there's more than one woman out there.

Russ Roberts: Yeah. More than one man.

Leon Kass: More than one man.

Russ Roberts: It's the birth of aesthetics. It's the birth of the idea that--I mean, it's a strange idea. We take it for granted that, shown two pictures, most people can say that one's prettier than that one. That one's more handsome than that one. But, why is that, actually, when you think about it? Why would you just say, 'Well, there's that one and there's that one and there's two of them now.'? But, evidently that's not the way we're made.

Leon Kass: Yeah. Something emerges as a result of the experience. This one seems more beautiful to me than that one. And, this one is--there's something about her qualities that I seem to like. And instead of it's being just about sex, it's: They want to keep seeing one another. As a result of having seen them, they want to see them again, over and over and over again. This is the transformation of lust to something like admiration and being admired.

And then, he says, "A tender and gentle sentiment is gradually introduced into the soul...." Very nice.

Russ Roberts: Yeah. Beautiful.

Leon Kass: Very nice, "...and at the least obstacle becomes an impetuous fury." Why?

Russ Roberts: Well, I think once on this show I mentioned that there is a kind of love that most of us are blessed to have, where when your beloved is absent, you don't just say, 'Oh: be nice to be with her or be with him.' but you have a physical longing, a stomach ache. The thought of seeing the beloved is so overwhelming--and that's one way of describing love--but also, if you're not allowed to see that person or if that person is not interested in seeing, it's of course devastating.

And, it's not obvious that the least obstacle becomes an impetuous fury, as Rousseau says. But, that's his description. And worse, not just a fury that you can't get to that person. There's jealousy, which is that someone else can.

Leon Kass: Well, if you can't get to them, she might be with somebody else.

Russ Roberts: Yeah.

Leon Kass: "Jealousy awakens with love." Is that true?

Russ Roberts: I think so. I'd have trouble explaining why. I think there's a possessiveness about love that certainly Shakespeare and many, many other observers of the human condition have noted. We don't have to go into my or your personal lives. But, yeah. Jealousy is--we are possessive, not just about our tools and toys, but about the people we care about.

Leon Kass: Yeah, and the jealousy, I think--the jealousy is in a way connected to the sense that this kind of love is exclusive. In other words, that I am my beloved and she is mine. And, it doesn't have to come simply to possession in a pejorative sense. But, there is something about this kind of love: if it's genuinely love, sort of excludes others--or so would hope. And therefore, if there is a sense that the love wanders or it is not exclusive, or if she's absent, I want to see her again lest she be lost, or lost to someone else, and so on. And, I don't think we're prone, I think--we're prone because we're such nice people--to think that true love would not know jealousy. But, that's probably an acquired education which is not primordial. This kind of experience of love is sort of exclusive. And, it seems to me that jealousy is right behind.

Russ Roberts: I'm sure even a mediocre evolutionary psychologist like myself could cook up a evolutionary reason for this.

33:31

Russ Roberts: But what I find interesting about Rousseau is he ends with a very dark, dark note. First he says, there's a "tender and gentle sentiment" that can lead to fury. That jealousy is next. "Discord triumphs"--that's a very negative statement. And, "the gentlest of the passions receives sacrifices of human blood"--meaning violence is the natural follower of the birth of love. It's a pretty dark image of the human condition.

Leon Kass: As you yourself said, there are lots of such stories. The Trojan War--pretty bloody enterprise for the sake of a woman.

You can go any way you want. I think the important thing here is not that he's got so much a dark picture, but he's showing how, of the things that make us miserable, they have to do not with things that were present to nature boy, but that they follow through the gradual stages of the emergence of our complicated humanity. And, there are no free lunches. The various things that are sort of improvement either soften us, or confine us, or enslave us, or make us vulnerable because: you give your life to someone else, you could lose that, if your happiness now depends on her presence and returning and on her staying alive. Love is exposed to all sorts of grief, and it's not for nothing that the ancient Epicureans told you to--the ancient Stoics told you to limit your desires to the things in your power so that you would be least likely to be disappointed, frustrated by things that are not under your control.

To fall in love is to be vulnerable. To fall in love is to be vulnerable; also, its being lost to you and especially being taken from you by a more worthy--so she thinks--suitor. I think he's just telling it like it is.

Russ Roberts: Yeah. I'm definitely sympathetic to that view of our nature. I don't think religion is designed to make us happy, but you could argue that some of the strictures of religion,--say, I'm thinking about the Ten Commandments' not to covet, which would be another example here--are ways to remove some of your options that might seem appealing but actually are difficult for you to process.

I couldn't help thinking--we were talking about the desire to see the person again: That's why people go to the movies more than once sometimes. They have a crush on a male or female film star, and part of that thrill is you can watch them all you want; and now you can take them home with you and watch them on their[?your?] phone, and you can use your imagination. And, those are unfulfilling thrills that weren't available to Rousseau's person in the hut next door. So, things have just in many ways just gotten more challenging.

Leon Kass: Yeah. Should we go on?

Russ Roberts: Sure.

Leon Kass: Or do you want do something more with this?

Russ Roberts: No.

36:33

Leon Kass: Let's do the next paragraph. This has also got to do--in the one we've just done, he talks about seeing and wanting to see again. Here we've got another aspect of the eyes, slightly different and much more potent in its effect. Let's do it: Paragraph 16.

Russ Roberts: [Paragraph 16]:

In proportion as ideas and sentiments follow upon one another and as mind and heart are trained, the human Race continues to be tamed, contacts spread, and bonds are tightened. People grew accustomed to assembling in front of the Huts or around a large Tree; song and dance, true children of love and leisure, became the amusement or rather the occupation of idle and assembled men and women. Each one began to look at the others and to want to be looked at himself, and public esteem had a value. The one who sang or danced the best, the handsomest, the strongest, the most adroit, or the most eloquent became the most highly considered; and that was the first step toward inequality and, at the same time, toward vice. From these first preferences were born on one hand vanity and contempt, on the other shame and envy; and the fermentation caused by these new leavens eventually produced compounds fatal to happiness and innocence.

Whooph! That's a heck of a paragraph.

Leon Kass: It's a terrific paragraph. It again begins now with leisure. There are more people. They gather in front of the huts or around a large tree. Instead of just digging for roots, they now sing and they dance. The "children of love and leisure"--we've got the love from before; now they're out there singing to each other, they dancing. And, each one begins to "look at the others and to want to be looked at himself." Because, having public esteem--being thought well of in the eyes of the others--is now valuable. Okay?

Now: "The one who sang or danced the best, the handsomest, the strongest, the most adroit, the most eloquent," they became the ones who were "most highly considered." And, "that was the first step toward inequality." That's obvious, right? You're making distinctions amongst abilities and talents. But also, "at the same time, toward vice." And, it's the part about vice that I think we want to work on because that's what he does in the end of the paragraph. Are we okay to this point?

Russ Roberts: Yeah. But, I have to comment on two things first.

Leon Kass: Please.

Russ Roberts: That's the first mention we've had of inequality in this section. As an essay contest entrant, I hope he referred to it earlier. I hope he didn't have to get through all of Part One and this far to Part Two before he starts talking about inequality. Or is that the case?

Leon Kass: He will talk about, in other places, some people might be stronger or faster than others, but it made no difference because if someone was strong enough to take away your food, you'd go find something else. The distinctions were not of the sort that mattered to you because you didn't feel humiliated. You just were sad that you lost your dinner and you went and found it elsewhere.

Here, it's inequality that now becomes registered and significant in the way people think about things. So the physical inequalities didn't matter; but the moral inequalities--the inequalities that emerge in society--they become toxic.

40:38

Russ Roberts: So, of course, listeners know what I'm thinking about, right? You guys out there know what I'm thinking about: "Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely." Perhaps my favorite quote from The Theory of Moral Sentiments. This idea that we want to be looked at, and we want to be admired, and we want to be respected, and we want to matter. And, Rousseau is giving us the dark side of that, which is that that impulse has some challenges to it.

I'm interested in, when I write about Smith and how that, hardwired--when he says "naturally desires," he's saying we're hardwired to care about what other people think of us. And that can induce good behavior.

Here it's the opposite. So, take me through the next part, Leon. What do we want to look at?

Leon Kass: Okay. He, by the way, will say--in a passage we don't have--that this concern for recognition is--I think he has a passage--it's responsible for some of our virtues and all of our vices. So, he does credit in other places that it's the source of the desire to be recognized for good.

But at this particular place, these preferences--from these preferences--two things are born[?borne?] in the soul.

This section is not being talked of in terms of social roles. He's talking about the developments that happen in the human psyche. And, that's what we want to concentrate on. From these first preferences, the last sentence: "We're born on the one hand vanity and contempt and on the other shame and envy." We should do something with these terms. And we'll do something more detailed on vanity because he's got an important footnote that we'll look at in a minute.

But, just for openers, what would you say are, on the one hand, vanity and contempt, and on the other hand, shame and envy, and how do you relate them to each other?

Russ Roberts: So, once we're dancing around the tree, some people are better dancers than others. Some are better singers than others. Some are better-looking than others. And it's a pleasant feeling to be one of those. That's the vanity.

And then, there's this horrible part that can come with that, which is its cousin or sibling, which is: not only do you feel that you're important and special, but that implies that other people are less so. And that's the contempt; and that's human.

And then, for those on the other side of the equation, the people who feel the contempt or who are not at the same level as the others in terms of dancing, handsomeness, etc., they've got shame: I'm inadequate. And, envy: I wish I were like that person over there who is getting all the rewards and honor and glory, and I'm inferior. And, that's an incredible level of inequality. Again, as you say, it's a psychic inequality. There's nothing here about that guy drives a better car than I have, or his watch is nicer, or his spouse is more attractive, or fill in the blank. Or his house. It's simply that I'm not as good.

Leon Kass: How does it strike you? Reasonable?

Russ Roberts: Well, not for me, Leon. I've never had contempt for anyone. No. I think it's--as a social scientist?

Leon Kass: Yeah. Does it strike you as anthropologically sound? Do you recognize this as somehow--after all, this is--we don't yet have books that teach you that pride is a sin. The original sin, in fact.

But, anthropologically speaking, before there's instruction, the recognition of one's superiority and the recognition and consideration you get from it, doesn't it produce a sense of one's superiority and some sense that the others are not as good? You look down upon them, you disdain them?

Russ Roberts: Well, once--one of the things you learn when you start meditating is how often you judge. And, one of the powers of meditation, when it's effective, is to help you be aware of that. It's kind of shocking when it first happens, because you realize that you judge every single person. Not necessarily in the way we're talking about here: 'That's an inferior person. That person is not as good as I am.' Not that. Simply that the human brain--this is the part that I'm going to agree with you anthropologically--the brain is constantly making distinctions. Sometimes with respect to myself, yes: That person is tall. I'll pick some relatively uncontroversial things. 'Oh, that person is taller than I am,' or 'that person is faster than I am,' or that person is thinner than I am,' or 'that person is younger than I am, or 'that person's hair is darker than mine.' It's totally unconscious. When you first start to notice it--which again is a gift from a good meditation practice--it's quite alarming. It's like, 'Wow. This has been going on the whole time and I'm just kind of noticing it.' And, that's what we do. And, I'm sure again, there's evolutionary reasons for it. There's maybe some good benefits from it. But it's jarring. And certainly, as you point out, I think a lot of civilization, religion, moral writing is designed to temper that; but with modest success, probably.

47:21

Leon Kass: Yeah. Let's add to this Rousseau's own treatment in the footnote on what is, in English, translated as vanity. It's Footnote 15.

Russ Roberts: Okay. So, there's going to be two French phrases here. Do you want to introduce those first, Leon? Amour-propre and amour de soi-meme, which are two kinds of self-love.

Leon Kass: Right. In English, if you say self-love and vanity, it sounds like they belong to two different species, but in French and in the original, they're both species of amour--Amour-propre and amour de soi-meme.

And this is--why don't I read the note? [Note XV]:

Amour-propre [Leon Kass: which we would translate as love of own] and love of oneself (amour de soi-meme), two passions very different in their Nature and their effects, must not be confused. Love of oneself is a natural sentiment which inclines every animal to watch over its own preservation, and which, directed in man by reason and modified by pity, produces humanity and virtue. Amour-propre [Leon Kass: translated 'vanity'] is only a relative sentiment, artificial and born in Society, which inclines each individual to have a greater esteem for himself than for anyone else, inspires in men all the harm they do to one another, and is the true source of honor.

There's the care for yourself--a love of yourself in terms of your biological neediness. And then there is the love of what is your own or appropriated to you. And, it's primarily your self-image and your regard for yourself. It's, in a way the first property that you have is what you think of yourself as it's been reflected to you in relation to others.

And the preoccupation with this--the preoccupation with this is in a way the source of the harm people do to each other, the source of much of our unhappiness.

It's very nice to say these are two different kinds of self-love. One of this is the self-love of the naturally given self, and the other is the love of the self, which is as close to you now to us as grown and civilized people as the other. But, in origin and its relation to our happiness and goodness, they're a very different valence.

What do you think?

Russ Roberts: Well, it's fantastically interesting. I don't--in economics, we talk about self-interest; and sometimes we talk about selfishness. And you know, I like to say that Smith's view of human beings is that they're self-interested and that no one can disagree with that. No one could disagree that we care about whether we survive, that we want food: that we put ourselves first. That's natural and human.

And what he's saying here, which is utterly fantastically interesting, is that there's this other kind of self-interest. Which could be called vanity. It's not a very good word for it because vanity gets tangled up--to me--with just appearance, often.

But he's saying there's this other self-love that comes from being amongst other people. Right? Man--nature boy--still needs a roof over his head and he needs food to survive, and he's got a natural urge and desire to feed himself, and procreate, and so on. So does nature girl, by the way--just to keep things more egalitarian here for a moment.

But, once we're mingling--once we have a social life--and by that I don't mean parties to go to. But, once we are interacting regularly with other people, these distinctions he's been talking about raise their relatively unattractive head and we start feeling a certain sense of where we fit in.

And, of course, he suggests that we all think we're better than average drivers. Which is not possible. But, he's saying we have a greater esteem for ourselves than for anyone else. So, I think that's true.

But the part I'm fascinated by is the next part: "Inspires in men all the harm they do to one another and is the true source of honor." Why don't you tell me what that means to you?

Leon Kass: Look, I think the harm that they do to one another is born out of rivalry and a sense of not wanting to be found inferior. I mean, the classic Biblical story of this. And, we'll tie also to the next paragraph, which I hope we can do very briefly, is the story of Cain and Abel in which Cain had a very exalted self-image of himself, but his sacrifice wasn't accepted and it gives rise to--well, that's really closer to the next paragraph. I'm a little ahead of myself.

But also, the true source of honor, which is in a way at least half positive--it's the desire to somehow conduct yourself, to deserve to be well thought of, and to be able to think well of yourself. The honor, of course, is received in the eyes of the community. Only a sufficiently self-confident person will honor himself and be content with that and not look for any other recognition.

But, this love of your reputation or this love of your self-image, of your self-esteem--that causes all kinds of terrible things to those who are your rivals but it also might inspire you to do something to be worthy.

Russ Roberts: Stepping outside, not as the anthropologist, but as the--I'll say as the mensch: What do you do with this, Leon? What do you do with this fact that we care--and this is again, going back to Adam Smith. I don't talk very much about this in my book on Adam Smith. But it's in the background. Which is: At its extreme, you might end up devoting much of your activity based on what other people think rather than on your own values or what you think is important. In fact, you start to think that what's important is whatever other people think is important. You couldn't even imagine there's something else other than in your social circle.

It's a very, I think, a dark part of ambition and achievement. Right? This pursuit of self-esteem, this pursuit of honor, this pursuit of a self-image or to make sure that your self-image is actually somewhat aligned--that you are lovely, not just loved as Smith said.

So, it fascinates me that it has this violent side, which I think is true: the harm that we do to each other, the sense of injustice that we feel if we're not sufficiently honored and treated with respect. It's an extraordinarily powerful part of the human experience that Rousseau is talking about here.

Leon Kass: Yeah. He concentrates on this in his educational writing and émile on how to cure people from an improper sense of amour-propre. His treatment of this subject is perhaps one of his greatest contributions to psychology and to social psychology. And, what interests me a lot about it--that[?] most people who think that the harm human beings do to one another has to do with oppression or social conditions or poverty or things of that sort--

Russ Roberts: Testosterone. Just for violent--

Leon Kass: Right. But, this sense that what matters so much to us is how we seem in our own eyes, and that we can only somehow know through the eyes of those who look upon us--this accounts for all kinds of sorting by opinion groups. People afraid to stand out in a different way. All kinds of herds are formed by people who need to have that kind of validation from others. And, if they don't get it in the proper way, there can be hell to pay.

57:04

Leon Kass: Look, I think we should fill this out with the next paragraph, where the whole question of injustice comes in. And it's still the same theme, but now not only--he's going to show you how this becomes sort of fatal to happiness and innocence. Let's do just the first few paragraphs of 17.

Russ Roberts: Okay. You don't want to finish the footnote?

Leon Kass: Basically the rest of the footnote says man in the state of nature does not have a soul sufficient to have amour-propre, because he does not yet have the mind capable of making the comparisons and those passions--he doesn't have hate or the desire for revenge because he doesn't have those kinds of relations and doesn't have a self-image to have been wounded. But, that's the subject of the text we're now going to do.

So, why don't you do--do the beginning of 17.

Russ Roberts: Okay. [Paragraph 17]:

As soon as men had begun to appreciate one another, and the idea of consideration was formed in their minds, each one claimed a right to it, and it was no longer possible--

Leon Kass: "Each one claimed a right to it." Sorry to interrupt. We're now moving into a moral territory and not just a psychological one. Do it again. First--

Russ Roberts: [Paragraph 17]:

As soon as men had begun to appreciate one another, and the idea of consideration was formed in their minds, each one claimed a right to it, and it was no longer possible to be disrespectful toward anyone with impunity. From this came the first duties of civility, even among Savages; and from this any voluntary wrong became an outrage, because along with the harm that resulted from the injury, the offended man saw in it contempt for his person which was often more unbearable than the harm itself. Thus, everyone punishing the contempt shown him by another in a manner proportionate to the importance he accorded himself, vengeances became terrible, and men bloodthirsty and cruel. This is precisely the point reached by most of the Savage Peoples known to us, and it is for want of having sufficiently distinguished between ideas and noticed how far these Peoples already were from the first state of Nature that many have hastened to conclude that man is naturally cruel, and that he needs Civilization in order to make him gentler. On the contrary, nothing is so gentle as man in his primitive state when, placed by Nature at equal distances from the stupidity of brutes and the fatal enlightenment of Civil man, and limited equally by instinct and reason to protecting himself from the harm that threatens him, he is restrained by Natural pity from harming anyone himself, and nothing leads him to do so even after he has received harm. For, according to the axiom of the wise Locke, where there is no property, there is no injury.

So, that was a long paragraph. But, the key part is this idea that the physical harm we get is not comparable to the injustice--that it has befallen us, this harm--and unmerited obviously, because: 'Look at me. I don't deserve that.'

Leon Kass: Yeah. This is the beginning of--he says the beginnings of "duties of civility." You better be nice to other people and show respect because if you don't and you diss them, there will be hell to pay.

And, the beginning of justice--the beginning of a concern with justice--is not some lofty sense of the other fellow's good. The beginning of a sense of injury--of injustice, iniuria, injustice--in addition to the harm that you've caused me, you have not treated me the way I know I need to be deserved. And, there is an injustice. And, the only thing to settle this is I take revenge on you for having shown me disrespect.

And, the size of--the measure of what's coming to you is the fatness of your sense of self-worth. You know: each person has his own measure of what he thinks is coming to him. He'll punish you according to the contempt in a manner proportionate to the importance he accords himself. And then people take vengeance, and life becomes bloodthirsty and cruel.

What do you think?

Russ Roberts: Well, I think about codes of honor, which are ways to constrain this from its most dangerous forms. Dueling is the way that--when you're perceived to have been treated unjustly, there's this stylized way which eventually I think became mostly just a show--I hope, I think, maybe, kind of. But, this emotion, this emotion of injustice that one has been treated unfairly is unbelievably prevalent in our human interactions. It is everywhere.

And, I'm fascinated by this idea of civility, right? This idea of trying to temper this very potent urge. What are your thoughts?

Leon Kass: I mentioned the Cain and Abel story before, but Cain is the first human being born of woman. Okay? So, Adam and Eve have a different origin. Cain is the first person born into the world. Cain is the inventor of sacrifices. He's the older brother. He's the proud farmer. And it turns out God disses his sacrifice. And he gets enraged; and he treats Abel as if Abel was trying to outdo him, and he eliminates the rival. That's--the first human being has anger and a sense of having been wronged to the point of fratricide. That's the primary human story.

Russ Roberts: Wait: He takes it out on the wrong actor. He's really mad at God, and yet he kills Abel.

Leon Kass: He kills Abel, but it's partly the displaced anger because he treats Abel--who is a mere imitator--he's a mere imitator: This no-good brother who wanders out with a sheep when I'm planting crops and producing things from the ground. He treats Abel's success as if he were trying to outdo him. That's a perfectly normal kind of human reaction. Somebody perfectly going about their business doing well, and you lose, and you basically attribute bad intent to the fact that they've gotten ahead of you. And especially, God is invisible, and it would be pretty dangerous to get angry with Him anyhow.

Russ Roberts: But I do think it's a fascinating thing that, whether you believe in God or not, I think ill fortune--which implies a certain randomness, but it sometimes just means a bad thing happening to you--can make you angry. That's not rational. It is clearly a manifestation of what Rousseau is talking about.

Leon Kass: Yeah. But, there's a big difference. If you're a normal person walking down the street and if a flower pot falls off the ledge and hits you and you got a slight bruise on the forehead, you're hurt, you're annoyed. But, only if you think the universe is arranged so that no bad thing will happen to you, are you going to get angry.

Russ Roberts: I don't know.

Leon Kass: If you think your neighbor up there was waiting for you to come by and pushed it off on purpose, much more a source of fury is his intention than the harm.

1:06:00

Russ Roberts: That's true. But, I do think there is the 'why me?' aspect of misfortune and the sense of injustice, I think is born out of this amour-propre--this love of one's own that Rousseau is on to. And it's giving me a different way to think about some of my own shortcomings--which we will not go into.

But, I do want to tell the Soviet joke that I know you know--of the two Russian peasants under communism. And, one's got a goat; and the other one doesn't. And the guy with the goats, he's got some extra benefits because he's got a goat. And one day the guy without the goat finds a little lamp and he rubs it, and the next thing he knows there's a genie, and the genie offers to grant him a wish. And, what does he wish for? He says, 'I wish that my neighbor's goat would die.'

And that is an extreme version of what we're talking about here. Right? It's a desire for schadenfreude--a desire for misfortune to befall your inferior neighbor rather than what has become your lot. And Rousseau is on to something here, clearly.

Leon Kass: And, with respect to the people who basically get angry at every misfortune, I think Rousseau would say that their anger is somehow proportionate to the importance they attach to themselves. And, if they have a very inflated view of what is coming to them from the universe--only good things--then yeah, sure, every least misfortune is a source of a temper tantrum in one form or another.

But, ordinarily, we can distinguish from intentional harm done to us to simple accidents and so on, or at least most reasonable people, I think can.

Russ Roberts: I'm not sure. I remember, more than once, when someone has been cruel, I have tried to give them the benefit of doubt and said maybe something unfortunate has happened to their loved one. And, sometimes that's true; and people lash out in those circumstances.

1:08:32

Russ Roberts: Actually, I want to ask you about two things. I assume you have something else you want to do, but I want to ask you about two things.

We didn't talk about the last line of Paragraph 16. In the last phrase, he says--after he says "vanity and contempt" are born and "shame and envy." This idea that when you start to see other people being more successful in social settings, you start to get jealous and you look down on people and you feel good about yourself. He says, "The fermentation caused by these new leavens eventually produced compounds fatal to happiness and innocence." And, leavens, meaning yeast, meaning things that work on other things and grow. In this case, compounds that are fatal to happiness and innocence. How do you read that?

Leon Kass: Yeah. I don't know what the compounds are. So, it's wonderful of you to raise that. I've never slowed down over that.

What I would say is these are new passions in the soul: vanity and contempt, shame and envy don't exist in the pure state of nature. They don't exist until man becomes social and then becomes concerned with how he stands with respect to others.

But, I think he wants to say that these comparative considerations of superiority and inferiority relative to others--envy and disdain and so on--they infect so many things, so many aspects of our lives that they tend to destroy our happiness. We're always envying somebody or feeling ashamed because we're not measuring up. Or, they give rise to the coveting and taking what is not ours; or of lording it over other people because we think they don't deserve the superior positions we have.

In other words, it's those particular passions relative to others that wind up destroying our happiness because they infect absolutely everything else. Every way in which we look at the world are in danger of doing that. And, they destroy our happiness; and they contribute to our being bad people toward others. I can't specify the compound, but it's basically this yeast goes everywhere.

Russ Roberts: And, we all can understand some of that, or we can relate to it. We can say that seems plausible. But of course, it doesn't have to be that way. Why wouldn't it be the case when I'm out in the public sphere and I see people who are more attractive or more successful than I am: Okay? So that's that. I make a note of it, perhaps I observe it; and I go back to my own hut and I have my own family and my own successes. So, I'm not as great as so-and-so. But, it eats at you.

That's why I like the "compounds" and the "leavens." It's hard to put it down. And then even stranger: Shouldn't, at least, the successful people who have the vanity and the contempt, shouldn't they be happy? But of course, there's only one, perhaps, who can see themselves at the top, the alpha of the tribe. Even the most successful people are often thinking, 'Yeah, I'm successful, but I wish I could have had that. And you don't. So even they suffer.

Leon Kass: Yep. Yep.

1:12:24

Russ Roberts: One more thing--

Leon Kass: We'll probably try to pull a couple--

Russ Roberts: One more thing I want to ask.

Leon Kass: Please.

Russ Roberts: One more thing I want to ask, and then you can bring us home.

In my experience, some of the most vain people, the most arrogant people, the most pretentious people are insecure. They use their public image of vanity and contempt for the people they see as less than themselves as a form of armor. A fear that they're not measuring up. A fear of--maybe it's envy--toward the people who are maybe content, even though they don't have the gifts or the wealth or the accomplishments of those people. Does Rousseau have anything to say on that? Do you want to reflect on that? Because I think that's true.

Leon Kass: I think it's true. I don't think he speaks about that in here. But, no: these are often covers and roles and postures that people invent for themselves in the dark of the night. In fact, there's a wonderful saying attributed to the pianist, Arthur Rubenstein: 'When I compare myself, I feel proud. When I regard myself, I feel humble.' When there aren't the others, when he really looks at himself--

In any case, look, I love these paragraphs, because they go to the root of certain very primordial things in the human psyche before morality and culture come along to try to instruct them. They give you the unvarnished view of the human being not in the primitive condition when he's little distinguished from an ape, but with possibilities. But, when certain anthropological things deeply rooted, come into view, and then one begins to see what culture has to address in a deep way and not think you jiggle around these institutions or provide these new incentives, if you don't somehow understand what the potential demons are in the soul for yourself and for the people you live with, you'll get it all wrong.

Rousseau is in a way bothered by bourgeois society in particular because it feeds those kinds of vanities and those senses of inequalities and those pursuits of advantage over others. The very thing which makes capitalist prosperity and the ease of our life go, turns out to be, in some ways, from a Rousseauan point of view, corrupting of the soul. Also in the sense that our needs now are vastly greater than one would really need to live cheerfully and well at a much lower plane.

The solutions--he doesn't offer you solutions. He's offering you a kind of insight to look into the mirror and have a really good look at what it means to be a human being, top to bottom. And then, begin to think about what kind of social arrangements might leave people freer than they were and less culpable of cruelty and vice towards their neighbors. There's no simple Rousseauan answer, but to set you the table and to help you think about it, there are fewer better people.

Russ Roberts: My guest today has been Leon Kass. Leon, thanks for being part of EconTalk.

Leon Kass: Thanks for being with you, Russ.

Leon Kass on the Wisdom of Rousseau

Michael Easter on the Comfort Crisis

Kevin Kelly on Advice, AI, and Technology

READER COMMENTS

Adam

Jun 17 2025 at 9:51am

Gregory Gingeleskie

Jun 17 2025 at 10:44am

Fazal Majid

Jun 17 2025 at 2:10pm

Nick Ronalds

Jun 17 2025 at 6:42pm

Eloise

Jun 18 2025 at 6:56am

Shalom Freedman

Jun 19 2025 at 8:54am

Leon Kass on the Wisdom of Rousseau

Michael Easter on the Comfort Crisis

Kevin Kelly on Advice, AI, and Technology

READER COMMENTS

Adam

Jun 17 2025 at 9:51am

Gregory Gingeleskie

Jun 17 2025 at 10:44am

Fazal Majid

Jun 17 2025 at 2:10pm

Nick Ronalds

Jun 17 2025 at 6:42pm

Eloise

Jun 18 2025 at 6:56am

Shalom Freedman

Jun 19 2025 at 8:54am

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