Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

by Francis Fukuyama

Rousseau says that private property emerged with the discovery of metallurgy and agriculture; while making humans incomparably richer, the ability to accumulate property also vastly exaggerated natural differences between individuals and raised jealousy, envy, pride, and shame to new heights. Hence Rousseau’s famous injunction at the beginning of the second part of the Discourse: The first person who, having enclosed some land, took it upon himself to say “This is mine,” and found people simple-minded enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society … How many crimes, wars, murders, miseries and horrors, would that man have saved the human species, who pulling up the stakes or filling up the ditches should have cried to his fellows: Don’t listen to this imposter; you are lost, if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong equally to us all, and the earth to nobody!