Rather, civil society is the product of force and coercion, primarily as it relates to property as the second discourse goes on ad nauseam explaining. The second discourse begins with Rousseau’s secular depiction of the fall of man, “The first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, though of saying ‘this is mine’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.” For Rousseau, civil society is not founded on a social compact in the manner by which Hobbes, Locke, and Spinoza described it.

The second discourse is Rousseau’s telling of the story of the enslavement of man, which was the task before him in explaining the origins of inequality which his discourses set out to achieve. The second discourse contains his famous depiction of the noble savage, how man loses his freedom and equality through the establishment of property and society, and his ruminations about how reason corrupts human living and how knowledge is used as a tool of oppression and violence. Rousseau’s second discourse on inequality builds from his first.