By: Eunice Chon (Harvard University) | February 26, 2025
The demarcation of morality, or the difference between good and evil, is a blurred one, and the Manichaean façade of the question has baffled mankind for centuries. Philosopher and Enlightenment thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality explores this very question through conjectural history, using hypothetical peoples, both early mankind and indigenous Americans, and referring to them collectively as savages. However, what makes Rousseau’s discourse so fascinating is not the ambiguity of the label itself but rather his interpretation of what mankind should have been and his idealization of these savages. He describes these savages as those closest to man’s natural state, stronger, happier, and full of advantages lacking in modern man, yet he also reduces them by deeming them lacking in capabilities to be what Rousseau considers evil (8, 10). This reduction and patronizing idealization of the “Noble Savage” then raises another question: whether the savages were good or merely incapable of evil. The Dawn of Everything by anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow attempts to investigate what makes Rousseau’s and other Enlightenment works so compelling and reaches the conclusion that indigenous critique influenced Enlightenment perception that there were merits to Indigenous lifestyles. Graeber and Wengrow, about three centuries later, choose to not reduce Indigenous peoples as much as Rousseau and instead acknowledge Indigenous capabilities and conscious judgment, but I find this very contradiction between the two texts as a crucial reason to find their connection of indigenous critique’s influence on Enlightenment thought less convincing.
Rousseau’s ambiguous definition of the word savage reveals his invalidation of Indigenous peoples’ degrees of development, which Indigenous critique and modern philosophical sentiments rebut. Through his Discourse Rousseau refers to both primitive peoples and Indigenous peoples living in his time as savages, not only blurring the lines but also implying that Indigenous peoples are behind the west in terms of development and culture. Making things even worse, Rousseau builds upon a metaphor on the difference between animals and humans while arguing that the savage man is more animal-like than man-like. According to Rousseau, “the only evils [a savage] fears are pain and hunger. I say pain, and not death: for no animal can know what it is to die; the knowledge of death and its terrors being one of the first acquisitions made by man in departing from an animal state” (10). The primitive and animalistic descriptions of the savage partly drives the invalidating undertones behind Rousseau’s praise for Indigenous people and the like. On the other hand, Graeber and Wengrow concede that “When it came to questions of personal freedom, the equality of men and women, sexual mores or popular sovereignty – or even, for that matter, theories of depth psychology – indigenous American attitudes are likely to be far closer to the reader’s own than seventeenth-century European ones” (41). Knowing what we know today, we can see that Rousseau’s notion that part of the savage identity came from chronological or developmental differences is not entirely correct. Additionally, they write that viewing “individual liberty as animalistic” was a sentiment shared by seventeenth-century Jesuits and address the historically western-favored bias in the judgment of savage nations (41). Rousseau’s ambiguous label of savage and Graeber’s and Wengrow’s contradictions to historical sentiments suggest that Rousseau was not writing based on Indigenous judgments but rather his interpretations of the hypothetical savage.
Comparing Indigenous people with animals and primitive civilizations is bound to question the “Noble Savage’s” supposed lack of abstract thought and social institutions defining what is good and evil. Rousseau argues that the natural state of mankind is selfish, to which Graeber and Wengrow raise a convincing counterclaim. In fact, they write that the Wendat shared the punishment of a misdemeanor among his or her clan or lineage rather than the sole culprit to “make amends for the offences of individuals,” according to Lallemant, a Jesuit missionary (42). Clearly, Indigenous people were not as selfish as Rousseau seems to suggest, and they lived and structured their punitive laws in group collectives and societies. However, what is more important than selfishness is the question on morality, in the sense of social laws and ethical expectations. Rousseau claims that the formation of society led “morality [to begin] to appear in human actions, and every one, before the institution of law, was the only judge and avenger of the injuries done him” (25). Turns out, not only were the “primitive” savages socially inclined, but they also criticized the Europeans:
“You are always fighting and quarrelling among yourselves; we live peacefully. You are envious and are all the time slandering each other; you are thieves and deceivers; you are covetous, and are neither generous nor kind; as for us, if we have a morsel of bread we share it with our neighbour” (Graeber and Wengrow 38).
With this contradiction, how convincing would it be to argue that Indigenous people lacked capacity for abstract thought as well as defining and understanding the consequences for wrongdoing just because they did not have the same legal institutions as the Europeans? It appears they did not need lawsuits to maintain social expectations and ethics out of respect for each other, which suggests that there is a need to consider who is making this judgment and how that influences the validity of this view and how even a idealization can come across as a reduction. But more importantly, we need to acknowledge that good does not equal incapable of evil. Rousseau’s dismissing the capability of evil cheapens his reverence for the savage man, for society ironically praises capable sinners more than their saints.
Finally, in addition to disagreements on Indigenous capacity, one crucial contradiction between the two texts is the acknowledgment of Indigenous people’s deliberate choice making. Rousseau argues that the savage man is “destitute of every species of intelligence, can have no passions save those of the latter kind: his desires never go beyond his physical wants” (10). However, Graeber and Wengrow debunk this entire premise and reveal that Indigenous people deliberately chose to live the way they did. For instance, Rousseau writes that a native Caribbean would “improvidently sell you his cotton-bed in the morning and come crying in the evening to buy it again, not having foreseen he would want it again the next night” (10). Graeber and Wengrow counters with Lallemant’s admission that the Indigenous Americans were “in no wise inferior to Europeans” with regard to intelligence, and if anything, they could have been superior (45-46). They use arguments from Indigenous Americans like Kandiaronk, who was a skilled debater who argued that his community chose not to use currency and laws because “we are determined not to have laws – because, since the world was a world, our ancestors have been able to live contentedly without them” (54). Kandiaronk’s words, regardless of if they were filtered through westerners’ records or were properly attributed to him, if they were as influential as Graeber and Wengrow argue, must have negated the notion among Enlightenment thinkers that not only were Indigenous Americans capable people but that they also made conscious choices in determining their customs and systems. This is crucial to understanding the dynamic between the two texts because if the Indigenous critique was as influential to Rousseau as Graeber and Wengrow argue, then Rousseau’s Discourse would not have argued about savages being incapable of sophisticated reasoning or conscious choice.
Graeber and Wengrow argue that “indigenous Americans did indeed develop a very strong critical view of their invaders’ institutions” and that this critique inspired Enlightenment thought, using Rousseau’s work as an example of influential Enlightenment works (37). However, their conclusion tells only a part of the story. Rousseau’s Discourses did indeed suggest that savage peoples were superior to European way of life in several ways and revealed some truths that European society back then, and part even now, refused to acknowledge. Rousseau was effective at provoking questions that even my paper is unable to answer, such as why we take so much importance on pride and ability when evil is evil or why we need to examine who is making the judgment before deeming an observation or perspective as laudatory or deprecating. Graeber and Wengrow attempt to link Indigenous critique as an influencer of this savage argument by using Jesuit missionaries’ accounts and their attributions to Indigenous arguments, however their much-needed 21st-century contradiction to Rousseau’s points on chronological development, Indigenous capabilities, and the deliberate decision-making in these communities ironically weakened their claimed influential connection.
Works Cited
Graeber, David, and David Wengrow. Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021, pp. 37-67.
Rousseau, Jean Jacques. Discourse on the Origins of Inequality. 1755. Academy of Dijon. Translated by G. D. H. Cole, Excerpted and adapted by A. C. Kibel, https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/literature/21l-449-end-of-nature-spring-2002/readings/lecture10.pdf (Links to an external site.). Accessed 10 Feb 2022.