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Analysis Of James Fordyce's Sermons To Young Women

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which citizens under law are as free as in the state of nature. However, within the household, he held, the man must rule and the woman must submit to this rule. Rousseau also maintained that women must be trained from the beginning to ‘serve’ and to ‘submit’ to men. Since the essence or spirit of being fully human was for Rousseau being free from submission to the will of another, women were to be denied the essential condition for being fully human. Rousseau felt that if women were accorded equality with men in the household which was the only domain open to them, it would bring about the dissolution of society. These are just a few illustrations of the andocentric thinking of Rousseau who is upheld as one of the founding fathers of conventional social science theory. For Rousseau women are closer to nature than men. Women are caught up in their biology because of their attachment to the family they are both the source of devoted inspiration and …show more content…

Apparently inspired by an ‘unfeigned regard for the Female Sex; and a fervent zeal for the best interests of society’, the Sermons outlines, at considerable length, a feminine ideal which, in established conduct book tradition, promises to get better the female character and thereby repair the nation’s moral fabric. Unlike other conduct manual writers, however, Fordyce disregarded the form of the familiar letter and instead turned to the heart-felt sentiments and grand theatrical flourishes characteristic of the eighteenth-century sermon. In addition to its more noble aspirations, the Sermons constituted an intriguing common and literary experiment designed to satisfy the author’s ‘secret desire … of trying whether that style of preaching, which to him appears, on the whole, adapted to an auditory above the vulgar rank, might succeed on a subject of this

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America is a country whose ideals are based on freedom and democracy. However these ideas are not original, in fact many of the common ideas found in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence resemble the writings of people in the past. Even early documents pivotal to American independence such as Common Sense by Thomas Paine and the Virginia Declaration of Independence can be traced down to these early documents. The age of enlightenment brought several philosophers with new ideas, such as John Locke, Baron de Montesquieu, and Jean Jacques Rousseau. The works of these men helped to inspire a new way of thinking, towards freedom and democracy, the founding fathers embraced these ideas.

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He based his beliefs off of the ideas that all men are created good-natured, but society corrupts them. Unlike some other French Enlightenment thinkers, Rousseau believed that the Social contract was not a willing agreement. He also said that no man should be forced to give up their natural rights to a ruler. He came up with the solution that people should “give up” their natural rights to the community for the public’s good. He believed in a democratic government.

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Book One of The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau focuses on the reasons that people give up their natural liberty in order to achieve protection from threats to themselves and their property. This results in the formation of a legitimate sovereign where all members are equal. Rousseau believes that no human has authority over another individual because force cannot be established. He argues that no individual will give up his or her freedom without receiving something in return. I will focus my analysis on how the social contract states that we must give up our individual rights in order to obtain equality and security.

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What, according to Rousseau, were the worst effects of socialisation? Jeans-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men is a defence of the original man in a state of nature and an attack on the corrupt and elitist European society of his day. Rousseau sought to ‘go back to an earlier point and try to piece together[… the] slow succession of events’ in order to pinpoint where humanity degenerated from the state of nature to today’s “civilised” society. In this sense, Rousseau seems to be attributing the process of socialisation to ‘all the evils’ in the world.

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However, I think it is important to remember Rousseau’s concept of perfectibility and understand that because of this trait it was almost inevitable that humans would eventually become social. Yet, it is not inevitable that humans would become politically unequal, as that is a direct result of government institutions. As well, Rousseau himself in further writings even expresses the hope that a new form of social contract could help to ease some of the political inequalities that plague contemporary society. This then suggests that the cause for these issues is not rooted in being social, for it is possible to live among others in a setting where equality has been institutionalized. Rather, the problem lies with corrupt and capitalist governments that serve to perpetuate inauthenticity and private

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Within this document, Rousseau talked about their consequences from sex and their differences like how men are men at moments and women are women their whole life. He then transferred over to how women’s sex recalls back to their responsibilities or roles in life and how they are different than men’s. For example, Rousseau believed that men should have a traditional role while women should have a conservative one. In addition to Rousseau’s vision, he also believed women’s social activities should include the caring and raising for her children and the process of satisfying men. Also, he viewed that women should be excluded from politics and were relegated to the domestic sphere.

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INTRODUCTION Jean Jacque Rousseau was born in the city state of Geneva, Switzerland in 1772. Rousseau is primarily known for major works like- The Social Contract, Emile, Discourse on the origin of Inequality, the Constitutional Project for Corsica, and Consideration on the Government of Poland. What makes Rousseau such an important figure in the history of philosophy is because of his contribution to both political and moral philosophies and his concept of ‘general will’, which also gained him a lot of criticism. Apart from his philosophical and political contribution, he was also a novelist, an autobiographer, botanist, composer and also a music theorist.

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