In my teaching prep for my political philosophy course this fall, I’ve been rereading Rousseau and I’ve run across a passage that articulates a concern that moved me away from traditional natural rights libertarianism. In the second discourse (second part), the Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men, Rousseau engages in an extended description of how civil inequality arises from a state of natural liberty and equality. Along the way, someone took the crucial step of inventing property claims. But Rousseau thinks that these first claims are subject to a rather simple challenge:

[The rich] could very well say: “I am the one who built that wall; I have earned this land with my labor.” In response to them it could be said: “Who gave you the boundary lines? By what right do you claim to exact payment at our expense for labor we did not impose upon you? Are you aware that a multitude of your brothers perish or suffer from need of what you have in excess, and that you needed explicit and unanimous consent from the human race for you to help yourself to anything from the common subsistence that went beyond your own?” Bereft of valid reasons to justify himself and sufficient forces to defend himself; easily crushing a private individual, but himself crushed by troops of bandits; alone against all and unable on account of mutual jealousies to unite with his equals against enemies united by the common hope of plunder, the rich, pressed by necessity, finally conceived the most thought-out project that ever entered the human mind. It was to use in his favor the very strength of those who attacked him, to turn his adversaries into his defenders, to instill in them other maxims, and to give them other institutions which were as favorable to him as natural right was unfavorable to him.

Just in case you don’t recall, Rousseau thinks the rich go on to invent the state to protect their property claims in the name of justice and equality for all. And since the people are duped, they rush to “chain themselves” because they failed to anticipate the inevitable abuse that would arise from inegalitarian property claims. And so Rousseau say:,

Such was, or should have been, the origin of society and laws, which gave new fetters to the weak and new forces to the rich, irretrievably destroyed natural liberty, established forever the law of property and of inequality, changed adroit usurpation into an irrevocable right, and for the profit of a few ambitious men henceforth subjected the entire human race to labor, servitude and misery.

The social and political orders, as Rousseau observed in his day, were rooted in mass deception by the rich of the poor.

So where’s the objection? So far it looks like Rousseau has just fabricated a just-so story to justify his political views. We know that his history is hilariously oversimplified if not completely false.

Dismissing Rousseau on these grounds misses the deeper normative challenge. Rousseau asks us to imagine someone who is not convinced of natural rights to property, at least as interpreted by the richer laborers in society. The responder has a rational complaint: who made you [the rich, the “haves] judge of where your property rights begin and end? It’s a dangerous juridical power, one that can easily be used to keep people hungry and powerless. In light of the suffering of the property-less, why should they ever think that the claims of the rich and powerful are naturally legitimate? What could justify the haves in using coercion to protect their property when the have-nots have so little?

What Rousseau brings into focus is that, at the most fundamental level, property rights are coercive and so trigger a requirement of justification to those who are putatively disadvantaged by the property system. Obviously there are lots of classical liberal replies, mostly revolving around the claim that the putatively least-advantaged will benefit enormously from the coercion required to institute and articulate private property rights.

But those considerations are largely consequence-based ones, and ones that a great many people think cannot justify the standard non-aggression principle based property-rights scheme that many libertarians endorse.

I am willing to concede that, despite reasonable pluralism, people who deny that any private property system can be justified to the least advantaged are both wrong and unreasonable. But it seems that the very strong property rights claims that libertarians endorse still raise Rousseau’s worry. How can we justify the coercion involved in delineating and enforcing property rights to those least favored by those arrangements?

Here’s how Rousseau helped lead me away from traditional libertarian theories of natural property rights. Imagine that the rich in Rousseau’s case are Rothbardians, and cite the non-aggression principle as the justification for their greater claims in the face of enormous need. Is this supposed to be a sufficient justification for coercing the poor? Obviously Rothbardians will offer consequentialist arguments as well, but is the non-aggression principle sufficient to answer the complaints of the poor? If it isn’t, then the non-aggression principle seems to me a poor foundation for libertarianism, as it cannot answer a complaint which is, well, rather obvious to non-libertarians.

But what do you think? Obviously there’s much more to be said. What’s an adequate answer to the poor and the least favored by a libertarian property regime?