Rousseau offered multiple rival causes for humanity’s fall into history

Evidence

His narrative, however, evidently requires a new kind of causal concept — a detonator — in order to reverse itself and to explain the beginnings of History as such, in the sense of the dynamism of Levi-Strauss’s “hot societies” or the origins of state power in the Marxian sense. It is clearly incorrect to attribute to Rousseau any univocal (and thus quasireligious) vision of this Fall, or any single form of causality or determination. The Second Discourse indeed posits or hypothesizes a variety of local starting points, which at various moments include sexuality (which stimulates fights among men by way of love and jealousy, and thus not merely institutes inequality but also generates the need for language [RSD134, 147]) and, more famously, private property itself (“the first person, who having fenced off a plot of ground, took it into his head to say, this is mine.”…[RSD141]). What is, however, dialectical, or at least protodialectical, in Rousseau is the double valence of “perfectibility” itself, which defines everything distinctive about human beings as such and also determines the well-nigh inevitable fatality of their fall into degradation, corruption, and civilization (RSD114-15). — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 496

Categorization

• QUESTION: The ‘detonator’ concept of causal explanation — worth pursuing how Jameson uses this idea of a single switch-point cause across his readings.