---
title: "What the Enclosure Does Not Take"
sousTitre: "Rousseau makes property the founding act of inequality; Epictetus refuses to let any greater good ever define who we are."
description: "Rousseau distinguishes natural inequality from that instituted by property; Epictetus holds that another’s wealth never measures the person."
date: 2026-07-11
lang: en
tradition: philosophie-occidentale
auteurs: ["Jean-Jacques Rousseau", "Epictetus"]
---
# What the Enclosure Does Not Take

A man plants stakes, stretches a rope from one tree to another, fills a ditch. He says: this is mine. No one contradicts him—or no one strong enough, early enough, to stop him. Rousseau locates precisely there, in this gesture and not in any contract or decree, the birth of civil society.

> The first man who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say, “This is mine,” and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, how many miseries and horrors might have been spared the human race by the one who, tearing up the stakes or filling in the ditch, had cried out to his fellows: “Beware of listening to this impostor; you are lost if you forget that the fruits belong to all, and the earth to no one!”
>
> — **Jean-Jacques Rousseau**, *Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes*, § Seconde partie. éd. after the original French text, ed. 1823 (Wikisource).

The sentence has become an aphorism, often cited while its underlying argument is forgotten. Rousseau does not merely date an origin: he establishes, before the anecdote itself, a distinction on which everything else depends.

> I conceive of two kinds of inequality in the human species: one, which I call natural or physical, because it is established by nature and consists in the difference of age, health, bodily strength, and the qualities of the mind or soul; the other, which may be called moral or political inequality, because it depends on a kind of convention and is established, or at least authorized, by the consent of men.
>
> — **Jean-Jacques Rousseau**, *Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes*, § Première partie. éd. after the original French text, ed. 1823 (Wikisource).

## What does Rousseau distinguish between natural and moral inequality?

Natural inequality stems from age, health, bodily or mental strength—it belongs to each individual without anyone’s intervention. Moral or political inequality stems from rank, wealth, the power to command obedience from others—it exists only through a convention that men have authorized, and can revoke.

The first requires no explanation: it is what it is. The second demands a history, and it is this history that the *Discourse* undertakes—to show how a privilege arising from nowhere in nature takes root, is transmitted, and comes to pass for the natural order. The enclosure does not merely create a field; it invents the fold by which a factual difference—I plow here, you plow there—becomes a right taken for granted.

This fold has an engine, and Rousseau names it.

*[amour-propre]* Rousseau sharply distinguishes [self-love](https://viasophia.org/lexique/amour-de-soi/), the natural instinct for self-preservation, from [vanity](https://viasophia.org/lexique/amour-propre/), a “relative, artificial sentiment born in society,” which arises from comparing oneself to others and seeks to dominate rather than merely to live.

In the [state of nature](https://viasophia.org/lexique/etat-de-nature/), a man is self-sufficient and measures himself against no one: self-love concerns only his own preservation. As soon as men live together, see one another, compare themselves, a second impulse awakens—one that no longer seeks merely to live, but to surpass. The enclosure is but the perfected form of this impulse: comparison turned into a title of ownership.

Epictetus begins elsewhere, untroubled by origins. A former slave turned teacher in Nicopolis, he does not write to trace how a difference takes hold, but to show what it can never touch.

> It is poor reasoning to say, “I am richer than you, therefore I am better than you; I am more eloquent, therefore I am better.” To reason better, one should say: “I am richer than you, so my wealth surpasses yours; I am more eloquent, so my speech surpasses yours.” But you yourself are neither wealth nor speech.
>
> — **Epictetus**, *Manual*, § XLIV. éd. after the French translation by Jean-Marie Guyau, Librairie Ch. Delagrave, 1875"
  maison
  langSource="grec.

*[proairesis]* What Epictetus calls *proairesis*—the faculty of judgment and choice—is for him the only thing truly “ours.” Wealth, eloquence, rank are distinct from it: they can be compared, surpassed, without the person being implicated in the least.

The argument fits into a single line, almost a lesson in logic: from a comparative premise (“richer”), one cannot draw a conclusion about the person (“better”) without shifting from one term to another. The rich man has more wealth; he is not, for that reason, more. Epictetus isolates what, in a man, cannot be compared—because it is neither wealth, nor speech, nor any good that can be accumulated.

These two positions cannot be reconciled. Rousseau writes a political genealogy: he traces how a factual privilege came to pass for a right, and summons convention to justify itself before nature. Epictetus judges no institution; he moves the question elsewhere, toward what no convention, just or unjust, could ever reach. One prosecutes the enclosure; the other disregards it, having already placed what matters beyond its grasp. They are not two answers to the same question—they are two questions.

And yet, beneath this divergence, a single refusal animates both texts. Rousseau denies that an enclosure, a fortune, a rank, gives anyone a natural title to command: wealth is not proof of superiority, only its social disguise. Epictetus denies, more radically still, that another’s wealth says anything at all about who he is or who I am: comparison does not even touch the person. One denounces the passage from fact to right; the other cuts short the passage from fact to value. Two heights, one gesture: not to let any greater good decide what a man is worth.

The enclosure remains, and the ditch that might be filled. The question is not to choose between the geometer and the sage—it is simpler, and it waits, silent, before every difference we encounter: does this measure a good, or a person?

---

**À lire aussi**

- [Ce qui dépend de nous](https://viasophia.org/articles/2026-06-06-ce-qui-depend-de-nous/)
- [Chacun appelle barbarie](https://viasophia.org/articles/2026-06-30-chacun-appelle-barbarie/)
- [Le moyen sans fin](https://viasophia.org/articles/2026-07-03-le-moyen-sans-fin/)

## Sources

- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, *Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes* — texte original, éd. 1823 (Wikisource) (https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Discours_sur_l%E2%80%99origine_et_les_fondements_de_l%E2%80%99in%C3%A9galit%C3%A9_parmi_les_hommes)
- Épictète, *Manuel* — Librairie Ch. Delagrave, 1875, trans. Jean-Marie Guyau (https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Manuel%20d%E2%80%99%C3%89pict%C3%A8te%20%28trad.%20Guyau%29)


Canonical source : https://viasophia.org/en/articles/2026-07-11-ce-que-l-enclos-ne-prend-pas/