Origins Of Social Inequality
Why this is not the right question to ask
What seems to be a common question has its roots in a phenomenon that is rarely spoken of. This question was posed to the general public in 18th century France as an essay competition. The winner was a certain Jean-Jacques Rousseau whose essay explored a theme that was part social critique, part biblical narrative and part thought experiment. He spoke of mankind having lived most of prehistory in hunter-gatherer bands where societies were more or less egalitarian. Humans had no need, according to Rousseau, for creating complex social structures or dominance hierarchies of arbitrary power. He then takes a biblical dive depicting the fall of man and the rise of private property. The complex social structures mankind experiences today are a product of the evolution, enlightenment and development of modern man. His essay made Rousseau famous and till today it is analysed and cited as a source of social and political critique.
But, let’s hang on a minute. After all, this was an essay written for a competition. In the essay he admits several times that his words are not to be taken seriously for they are thought experiments in the history of mankind. But the curious question is, how did this question get asked in the first place?
In their recent book, The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow talk about this phenomena and what it means for the question – what are the origins of social inequality. For this we have to go back to 1754 where the Académie des Sciences, Arts et Belles-Lettres de Dijon announced an essay competition on the question: “what is the origin of inequality among men, and is it authorised by natural law?” The authors researched why this was an appropriate question for a group of scholars to ask in the first place.
The trail led them to rise of European colonialism where a few powerful kings suddenly found themselves in control of vast stretches of Earth. This was in the 1700s where European intellectuals were just rediscovering Aristotle and the ancient world and were in a knowledge bubble, unaware what people were thinking elsewhere. The discovery and interaction with China, India and South America introduced new and unimagined social, scientific and political ideas. This flood of new ideas came to be known as the “Enlightenment”.
When worlds collide: native wisdom meets European pride
The founding of New France where the “civilised” French came into contact with indigenous communities in the North American continent also heralded a change in thought. What struck them was the way these communities and societies were organised. They weren’t savages in a “state of nature” or uncivilised, unruly and stupid people. On the contrary, they were sophisticated and had organised their societies in a different way, one where their inequalities were suppressed rather than exaggerated. The conversations that took place between Europeans and indigenous Americans about the nature of freedom, equality, rationality and revealed religion were some of the themes that would feature prominently in political thought during the Enlightenment.
Statesmen from these societies such as the Miq’mak and Algonkians, had observed and interacted with the French and saw that their societies functioned on the tenets of private property and arbitrary power. Critiques of European institutions were surprisingly consistent among various indigenous critics. These critiques started to be taken very seriously in Europe. So much so that the fabric of European society began to be called into question. This led to the emergence of a pervasive narrative, which is now often taken as the standard narrative, where individual freedoms are lost because societies grow bigger and hierarchies and arbitrary power are natural consequences. This narrative was developed to neutralise the indigenous critique among the European society.
There was an underlying assumption in these narratives and Rousseau about the state of nature. The assumption, whether we look at Hobbes or Locke, was that humans existed as equals outside the confines of civilisation. Equally good or equally bad? This varied from author to author.
The issue with all these authors, namely Rousseau as the prime culprit is the development of a narrative centred around the “stupid savage”. That a human being outside civilisation is not civil, rational, logical or capable of any independent thought. Hobbes” state of nature and the “war of all, against all” exemplifies this more and more.
Where this narrative started from was a book called Jesuit Relations of New France. Missionary and travel literature had become popular during this time as a way for people to see that familiar ways of doing things were not the only ways. Societies in existence that arranged themselves differently were an inspiration to many key Enlightenment thinkers who admit (and insist) that their ideals of individual liberty and political equality were inspired by Native American sources and examples.
What we value today as personal freedom was to seventeenth-century
Jesuits scandalous. Father Lallemant who spoke with the Wendat in 1644
had this to say about them:
“I do not believe that there is any people on earth freer than they,
and less able to allow the subjection of their wills to any power
whatever - so much so that Fathers here have no control over their
children, or Captains over their subjects, or the Laws of the country
over any of them except in so far as each is pleased to submit to them.
There is no punishment which is inflicted on the guilty, and no criminal
who is not sure that his life and property are in no danger…”
Curious Dialogues with a Savage of Good Sense Who Has Travelled was written by Baron de Lahontan in 1703. He was French traveller who found himself in New France and had learned a few indigenous languages and was an intermediary for many years between the colonists and the natives. His book is a series of dialogues between himself and Kandiaronk, a Wendat statesman who takes a critical view of European society and its ideas at the time. Lahontan claimed to have based the conversations in the book on real life conversations he had with the eloquent Wendat statesman at Michilimackinac and as authors Wengrow and Graeber, who compiled this revealing research, point out “there is every reason to believe the basic arguments were Kandiaronk’s own.”
The empire strikes back: how Europe defended its ways
An example of the way the Native Americans, who had been to France, saw European society:
“They were continually teasing us with the faults and disorders they observed in our towns, as being occasioned by money. There’s no point in trying to remonstrate with them about how useful the distinction of property is for the support of society: they make a joke of anything you say on that account. In short, they neither quarrel nor fight, nor slander one another; they scoff at arts and sciences and laugh at the difference of ranks which is observed with us. They brand us for slaves, and call us miserable souls, whose life is not worth having, alleging that we degrade ourselves in subjecting ourselves to one man [the King] who possesses all the power, and is bound by no law but his own will.”
Along with criticisms such as the above on lack of mutual aid and blind submission to authority, natives also criticised the organisation of private property where Lahontan says: “They think it unaccountable that one should have more than another, and that the rich should have more respect than the poor. In short, they say, the name of savages, which we bestow on them, would fit ourselves better since there is nothing in our actions that bears an appearance of wisdom.”
Powerful words from a person who the French classified as a savage. Kandiaronk’s arguments stemmed from the fact that material interests were obstacles to some of the true values of humanity: “wisdom, reason, equity…” among others. While indigenous societies were not totally egalitarian, and the assertions of Kandiaronk were likely exaggerated for effect, this was not the only reason his arguments were dismissed. Scholars were ready to believe and insisted that Kandiaronk and his critique were entirely fabricated. They claimed no such person ever existed.
This psychological tendency to define ourselves in opposition to others - Schismogenesis - helps explain why European intellectuals found it so difficult to accept indigenous critiques: acknowledging the wisdom in Native American social organization would have meant questioning their own society’s supposed superiority.
Similar patterns emerged in British India, where colonial administrators encountered sophisticated traditions that challenged their philosophical assumptions about civilization. The British were particularly struck by village-based democratic systems and communal property arrangements. Warren Hastings, the first Governor-General of India, noted with surprise how local panchayats (village councils) maintained order without central authority. Meanwhile, Indian intellectuals like Ram Mohan Roy pointed out the contradictions in European claims to superiority, highlighting how British individualism and property rights often led to social breakdown rather than progress. This parallel critique from the East reinforced what Native Americans were saying in the West - that perhaps European “civilization” wasn’t as advanced as it claimed to be.
Another “put down” argument came from A.R.J. Turgot who acknowledged the growing interest in the idea of freedom and equality but urged readers to consider a larger context. He asserted that the freedom and equality of savages was not a sign of their superiority but a sign of their inferiority, since “it is only possible in a society where everyone is equally poor.” Turgot theorised that “we progress from simple societies like those of the Wendat to our own complex commercial civilisation, in which the poverty and dispossession of some is nonetheless the necessary condition for the prosperity of society as a whole.”
So Turgot took the opposite stance to Rousseau where he envisioned mankind in a “state of nature” as hierarchical and inherently unequal. Turgot would later on speak elaborately on these ideas in lectures on world history. His breakdown of societal progress into four stages was borrowed by his friend and Scottish economist Adam Smith. How curious that such ideas inspired the person who laid the foundations of economic free market theory.
Breaking free: rethinking how we live together
Coming back to Rousseau we see his model of human society, which lived free in bands of hunter-gatherers and avoided each other for fear of violence, was something he emphasised was not to be taken seriously. But it was. Rousseau was a crucial figure in the formation of left-wing thought. In the mid eighteenth century the political “left” and “right” themselves did not yet exist. They originally referred to the respective seating positions of aristocratic and popular factions in the French National Assembly of 1789.
Rousseau, with his essay, essentially reduced people outside European society, or savages, to people without any imaginative powers of their own; that their happiness is entirely derived from their inability to imagine things otherwise, or to project themselves into the future in any way at all; as a people completely lacking in philosophy. In this way, the authors of the Dawn of Everything, accuse Rousseau of a fundamental crime – that of the proclamation of the “myth of the stupid savage.” Even if he imagined these savages to be blissful in their stupidity.
The contrast between European and indigenous worldviews is perhaps best captured in poetry. William Blake, writing in the midst of European “civilization,” observed:
“Pity would be no more
If we did not make somebody poor;
And Mercy no more could be
If all were as happy as we.Mutual fear brings peace,
Till the selfish loves increase:
Then Cruelty knits a snare,
And spreads his baits with care.He sits down with holy fears,
And waters the ground with tears;
Then Humility takes its root
Underneath his foot.”
While centuries later, Joy Harjo of the Muscogee Creek Nation would write:
“Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth.”
These voices, separated by time and culture, speak to fundamentally different ways of seeing human society - one highlighting the artificial creation of inequality, the other reminding us of our fundamental interconnectedness.
Moving from poetry to anthropological analysis, these historical debates find fascinating supporters in modern research. Modern anthropologists have discovered that many hunter-gatherer societies actively maintain equality through what they call “reverse dominance hierarchies” - where the group works together to ensure no individual gains too much power. Studies of contemporary egalitarian societies show sophisticated methods for maintaining balance: excessive boasting might be met with public mockery, successful hunters are required to share their catch with specific family groups, and important decisions must be reached through group consensus rather than individual authority. A successful hunter who becomes arrogant might find himself the subject of playful mimicry around the evening fire, his boasts transformed into community entertainment until the lesson in humility is learned.
A French anthropologist in the 1960s called Pierre Clastres suggested the opposite. He questioned the standard narrative: “What if the sort of people we like to imagine as simple and innocent are free of rulers, governments, bureaucracies, ruling classes and the like, not because they are lacking in imagination but because they’re actually more imaginative that we are?” Although his argument has its limits, it reminds us that we have difficulty in imagining what a free society looks like but we have no difficulty imagining what arbitrary power and domination look like. It could be probably that these indigenous societies were the same and far from only imagining arbitrary power and domination, they arrange their societies in such a way as to consciously avoid it. He insisted that the people studied by an anthropologist are just as self-conscious, just as imaginative as the anthropologist themselves.
What all this aims to suggest is that a question seeking the “origins of social inequality” will have to also confront the “origins of civilisation” and a plethora of questions that seek to clarify what kind of equality we are talking about. As we know the standard narrative we have grown up with and carry in our school textbooks is one where we see ourselves as the proud product of civilisation and progress. We see ourselves as higher than those without civilisation. The ranking exists blatantly in the way the world is split. First-world countries and Third-world countries separate the colonisers from the colonised. But are we really still harbouring that kind of mentality?
Is our future to be determined by the prejudiced opinion of past scholars who, for better or for worse, never had to really face life outside their so called civilisation? There is no short answer for the origins of civilisation or for the origins of social inequality but the seeking of a short answer will land us into trouble and keep us confined to a narrative that disadvantages certain communities and even certain aspects of our own nature.
We are all Homo Sapiens and the difference between us are not as large as they used to be approximately 40,000-60,000 years ago. If we are to truly understand ourselves then we could best see all societies as equally unequal and that since the dawn of mankind, we have found different and creative ways to organise ourselves. That maybe this “state of nature” we so readily put prehistoric man in, is nothing but an argument that gives us comfort and helps us avoid facing certain facts about a society that could be arranged differently.