In his Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau posits that early social contract theories establish unjust social and politics arrangements that provide only the appearance of legitimacy and equality. In Rousseau's accounting, the beginnings of the social contract lie in the fears of the rich. In a state of nature, one in which there is no government or law to control the interactions of people, the rich would have great difficulty protecting the property that they possess. Thus, the rich turn to the mechanism of the social contact to shore up the holdings Rousseau views as "hoarded." The concept of a social contract is appealing to the poor, because the poor fear death in a state of lawlessness and thus seek protection. To obtain assent to the contract, the rich focus their rhetoric on a seeming equality of obligation by creating rules that apply equally to all members of society. This system, however, simply systematizes the "theft" the rich had perpetrated on the poor in the pre-law state of nature. Rousseau then begins to develop his own vision of a social contract, through which he attempts to right these injustices. His first departure from earlier theorists is in the formation of the sovereign. Rather than members of the state surrendering their rights to another person – an irrational course of action tantamount to surrendering oneself into slavery – they surrender their right to all members of the society and thus to no one. Rousseau refers to this sovereign as the "general will" and it has the task of legislating for the new civil society that is created in the contract. Unlike early social contract theories, Rousseau's version conceives of property rights that allow for rights of first occupancy to justify claims, rather than rights of the strongest. In this system, property can be taken only if it has not been previously occupied and only to the degree necessary for the subsistence of those taking it, measures intended as a check to the hoarding of property by force enshrined in earlier contract theory.