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pain and suffering is the sort caused by comparisons with other human beings, and those
comparisons are possible only if human beings share standards and frames of reference that all
are understood to accept. Rousseau’s natural man regards the actions of other human beings as
like the effects of the wind and the rain -- sources of potential suffering, to be sure, but not
something that is ultimately worth protesting about, because for protest to be effective, there has
to be an audience that shares the protestor’s standards of judgment, and there are no such shared
standards between human beings in Rousseau’s state of nature, any more than there are between
human beings and clouds. To raise a protest is to make a normative claim, and there is no
normativity in the state of nature.
The point here is not to explain the origin of normativity, because Rousseau’s account
cannot explain it any more than Hobbes’ or Locke’s could. The point is rather to insist that the
earlier accounts could not successfully account for the origin of political society in terms of
mutual exchange, because that model assumes a notion of normativity that it was supposed to be
explaining. For individuals to see themselves as benefiting from the transition to common rules,
they have to see the destructive actions of other human beings as susceptible to criticism, and this
is possible only if we already do accept common rules. Whatever physical benefits we get from
the transition to civil society, the movement from the state of nature to civil society cannot itself
be described as an intentionally beneficial transaction, because we cannot engage in intentionally
beneficial transactions until we already have the shared rules that are only possible in civil
society. Within the model of mutual exchange, there can be contracts, but no original contract.
Now let’s look at the way that Kant, following Rousseau, breaks with the model of
mutual exchange. Kant never describes the transition from the state of nature to what he calls a
Convention