A Discourse on Inequality is one of the most revolutionary documents to have come out of eighteenth-century Europe.

The discourse sets out to demonstrate how the growth of civilization corrupts man's natural happiness and freedom by creating artificial inequalities of wealth, power and social privilege. Rousseau contends that primitive man is equal to his fellows because he can be independent of them, but as societies become more sophisticated, the strongest and most intelligent members of the community gain an unnatural advantage over their weaker brethren, and the constitutions set up to rectify these imbalances through peace and justice in fact do nothing but perpetuate them.

Probably the most influential of all Rousseau's works, the political and social arguments were to make the discourse a classic denunciation of the social conditions of his time.