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? And the When we think about some of the deepest puzzles of politics we often start with a

what question so for, we could start by asking

what is politics? Or the question that I started the last series of history of ideas with,

Thomas Hobbs's question, what is the state? And then the

extension of that question with Hobbs, 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 Rules 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

rules his question and Hobbs his 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

acutely than why there how questions. How did we end up here? How did we end up ruling ourselves or being ruled like this, by

these people and often by implication? How did we end up with these idiots in charge? That's the question and sometimes it's also a

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