Hello, I'm Catherine Carr, producer of Talking Politics. This is the first episode in our

new series of the history of ideas brought to you in partnership with the London Review

of Books. In it, David explores the thinking behind some of the most important books in

the history of political thought. Today, he looks at Jean-Jacques Rousseau's arguments in his

second discourse about the origins of inequality. If human beings were once at peace with one another,

how did we end up with so much misery and so much strife?

When we think about some of the deepest puzzles of politics, we often start with a what question,

so for instance, we could start by asking what is politics? Or the question that I started

the last series of history of ideas with Thomas Hobbes' question, what is the state, and then

the extension of that question with Hobbes, what is peace, what counts as peace, what counts as

order or security, what makes us safe. But those aren't the only what questions by any means,

and later in this series I'm going to talk about a 20th century political philosopher John

Rousseau who said explicitly that the starting point for thinking philosophically about politics,

the first question, as he said, is what is justice or his extension of that question,

what is fairness, what counts as a fair society, and sometimes Rousseau's question and Hobbes'

questions that set against each other. So sometimes it's presented as a sort of choice either you're

a what is justice kind of philosopher or you're a what is peace or what is order kind of philosopher.

But there are very different kinds of fundamental questions that we could ask about politics,

and in this series of history of ideas I want to start with and focus on these other kinds of

questions, and I'd characterize them as not the what questions but the why questions, not what is

politics, but why the hell do we have this as politics, why is this our politics, or sometimes

even more cutely than why they're how questions, how did we end up here, how did we end up

...