In the beginning, Rousseau argued, man lived in harmony with nature, comfortable and “indolent,” until he formed societal bonds. Those societal bonds were formed in an attempt to perfect human nature—to develop human nature itself. Human beings gathered together and lived as communities in “the happiest and most stable of epochs” before greed came to the fore, pushing men to create surplus rather than surviving at subsistence levels. Property was the death of the natural man. “The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people
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