ABSTRACT
Like other social institutions, property is analyzed by Rousseau from two opposing perspectives. Looking at humanity’s evolution away from the state of nature, he judges the invention of property to have marked a decisive step in the corruption of mankind. In the famous opening lines of the second part of the Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality (1755), he declares:
The first person who, having fenced off a plot of ground, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, what wars, what murders, what miseries, what horrors would the human race have been spared by someone who, uprooting the stakes or filling in the ditch, had shouted to his fellow-men: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are lost if you forget that the fruits belong to all and the earth to no one! 1
