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Analysis Of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “The Social Contract” is one of the essentials of the western political thought, interpreted in an extensive and different ways. It encompasses Rousseau’s all-inclusive account of his explicitly political theory where he presents his philosophy in an intangible, legalistic manner far from examination of human essence and changes and developments peculiar to people. As stated by Strauss, the Social Contract is a breakthrough in the course of development of political philosophy, which needs to be estimated accurately because of its content and its further repercussion for the modern history of humanity.
The Social Contract is not only about an idealistic and utopian just state, but about a state which leads to a remarkable transformation of each person in a society; however, book is significantly less concrete about workable and realistic ways of creating this alteration. A largely held opinion of Rousseau’s manuscript is that when writing it he was mainly preoccupied with developing an abstract normative perfect model which can serve as criteria for assessing the lawfulness of other existing societies and states, so it was not aimed at suggesting feasible and very explicit ways of achieving that goal.

Contentiousness of the masterpiece, taken together with its differing explanations complicates the analysis and interpretation of its key postulates. However, despite debatable content and its further ramifications, Rousseua’s Social contract is very
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