Analysis Of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Discourse On Inequal

Adam Smith states that, “No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.” Smith is meaning that not every society is fair; there will be people who are “flourishing and happy” and some of the people will be “poor and miserable.” It is very difficult to have a society in which every person is happy. There is a large gap between the rich and the poor in America. The rich makes up one percent of America’s population. That one percent makes over four hundred thousand a year. While the poor makes up fifteen percent of America’s population, and only makes eighteen thousand per year. The gap between the two groups can shrink and make the economy better if the rich focus more on the rest of society rather than just their own income and profits. After reading, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, and Karl Marx’s Das Capital I have learned that there is a separation between a our wants and needs, and how difficult it is to create a fair and equal economic system for everyone. In Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s, Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau states that man has a mentality of “This is mine” (Rousseau, 249). Rousseau believes that mentality is the reasoning for the many crimes, …show more content…
Karl Marx writes about the economic system of capitalism. Marx goes on to say, “The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as ‘an immense accumulation of commodities,’ its unit being a single commodity” (Marx, 294). Marx is implying that in capitalistic societies the rich only want to get richer. That is one of the main reasons why I think the “flourishing and happy” have lost sight of the “poor and