The "Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men" is one of the greatest texts ever written, one of the most beautiful of the Enlightenment, and one of Rousseau's two great essays with "The Social Contract". For Chomsky, it is a fundamentally revolutionary text avant la lettre. Rousseau sees inequality as the origin of social ills: wars, poverty, violence of all kinds. From the persistence of inequality comes the loss of freedom, selfishness, and this society obsessed with the accumulation of material wealth to which he compares natural society. In this, contrary to what some wrongly claim, Rousseau does not, any more than Diderot, advocate the noble savage, but he denounces the illusion of material happiness, which constitutes the fabric of our modern society.