He fully addresses that in the book. Don't take my word for it, I don't have his explaining skills.

But what he addresses is radical equality, as a fundamental value, as opposed to "less inequality". Equality under a ruler or rebellion against abuses is not the same as thinking the whole society as composed of equals. Think of no-slavery, equality among genders, sexual freedom, etc. Even thinkers that thought about equality before Iluminism (e.g. Thomas More) didn't go that far.

I strongly recommend you reading, at least, chapter 2 in the book. Is way deeper than what I explain.

> But what he addresses is radical equality, as a fundamental value, as opposed to "less inequality".

Typical Graeber. Total nonsense. Radical equality has multi-origins in religious cults for 1000s of years. It has been part of 'Western' history writing for almost as long as we have historical narratives.

Pretty much as far as we can tell these ideas are resurfacing over and over in every big culture. For most we have no documentation but its clear there and has been documented lots of time.

How would contact with “First Nations” in any way help European elites to come to the concept of the radical equality you are describing? They neither had nor believed in any of these things.

To give one example, the leaders of the Münster Rebellion of 1534 certainly weren't content with "less inequality."

Having read too much history for fun and jobs, the comment sounds wrong. You can go back to the Roman republic to find people concerned about this (Gracchi brothers).

As clarified in the other reply by the other commenter here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29195026

The claim isn't actually that inequality wasn't a topic, the claim is that discussing inequality within the framing that equality might actually be the natural state of thing, or at least just as natural… that was a novel topic at the time of Rousseau.

And sure, it's probably more fair to talk about why even that topic was burgeoning in popularity rather than to imply that it was truly novel.

Or the Book of James about 2000 years ago (in the Roman Empire).

Or some parts of Jewish scripture and the New Testament.

I haven't read the book but I assume here Rousseau is serving as an emblem for the Enlightenment (or an aspect of it at least), which is generally regarded as uhh kind of a big deal. That there were earlier Europeans here and there who discussed some of the same concepts is of little significance.

The Enlightenment didn’t grew out of concerns for inequality, it wasn’t even its big point even though the Enlightenment was a very intellectually diverse movement. Read Kant’s essay on the Enlightenment, it contains the word “equality” exactly zero times.

Also, it is quite ironic to mention the thought of Rousseau as an exemplar of the Enlightenment when he is often put into the camp of Counter-Enlightenment.