equality, of which that of Herr
Duehring is only a feeble and false plagiarism, has no existence
unless the Hegelian negation of the negation serve it as a midwife,
although it originated twenty years prior to the birth of Hegel. Far
from being ashamed of this it bears in plain sight the stamp of its
dialectic derivation in its earliest manifestation. In a state of
nature and savagery men were equal, and, since Rousseau regards speech
as a falsifying of natural conditions, he is quite right in
predicating equality of animals of one species as far as this reaches,
and the same also with regard to those speechless animal-men, recently
hypothetically classified by Haeckel as Alali. But these equal animal
men had one quality beyond the other animals,--perfectibility, the
power of further development and this was the reason of inequality.
Rousseau sees therefore in the existence of equality a step forward.
But this advance was self contradictory, it was at the same time a
retrogression. "All further advances (beyond the primitive stage) were
so many steps, seemingly in the development of individual men, but
actually in the decay of the species. Working in metals and
agriculture were the two arts whose discovery brought about this great
revolution" (the transformation of the primitive forests into
cultivated lands, but also the introduction of poverty and slavery
together with private property). "The poets hold that gold and silver,
the philosophers that iron and corn have civilised men and ruined the
human race." Each new advance of civilisation is at the same time an
advance of inequality. All contrivances with which society endows
itself by means of civilisation are in direct opposition to their
original purpose. "It is beyond question and a foundation principle of
the entire public law that people made rulers to defend their
liberties, not to destroy them." And yet these rulers become of
necessity the oppressors of the people and they carry the oppression
to the point where inequality is brought to a climax and, then,
transformed into its opposite, again becomes the reason of equality,
for to despots all are equal, that is equally of no account. Here is
the extreme of inequality, the crowning point which closes the circle,
and touches the point from which we have proceeded; here all private
individuals are equal, since they are of no account, and subjects have
no law other than the will of their master. "But the despot is