The genealogy of property in Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Abstract

In the Discourse on the origin and foundations of inequality among men, Rousseau develops a kind of genealogy of property, with reference to the passage from the state of nature to the civil state, without failing to clarify that it is a reading of the historical human process developed hypothetically. Unlike the liberal tradition, represented by John Locke, who argues property is an extension of the individual, what he puts in nature through work, Rousseau, in his interpretation, shifts the foundation of property to social security, in addition to imprinting characteristics that will lead him to the assertion that the institution of property represents the element that institutionalizes civil society and directly implies the emergence of inequality between men and in the main ills of social coexistence.