Social Contract: Essays by Locke, Hume and Rousseau.
The Essay on The Social Contract: Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau. The three philosophers, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were three key thinkers of political philosophy. The three men helped develop the social contract theory into what it is in this modern day and age.
The point of the Social Contract theory, as Rousseau states it, is that legitimate society exists by the consent of the people, and acts by popular will. Active will, and not force or even mere consent, is the basis of the “republican” State, which can only possess this character because individual wills are not really self-sufficient and separate, but complementary and interdependent.
Men and women of Madame Geoffrin’s Salon, we must support our fellow reformer, Jean-Jacques Rousseau! His recent treatise, The Social Contract, outlines the solution to our need for government. He bravely proclaims in the very first sentence of his treatise, “Man is born free; and everywhere he is chains.”.
Suggestions for essay topics to use when you're writing about The Social Contract. SparkNotes is here for you with everything you need to ace (or teach!). Rousseau suggests that climate, soil, and the type of population determine the kind of government a state will have.
Rousseau's Social Contract had a primary goal of showing how although man apparently has to be governed and abide by laws, liberty can be regained and political institutions can be made legitimate. Rousseau believes that Natural Liberty is an impossibility at this point but that man can regain another type of liberty, Moral Liberty.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau had two complementary social contract theories. The first one, clearly expressed in his Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men (Second Discourse), and the second one on The Social Contract published in 1762. According to Rousseau, the State of Nature was some sort of peaceful idealistic place.
Rousseau argues for the preservation of individual freedom in political society. An individual can only be free under the law, he says, by voluntarily embracing that law as his own. Hence, being free in society requires each of us to subjugate all our desires to the collective good, the general will.