“The Social Contract” by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains” (p.2; Book One: The Subject of the First Book). This famous declaration from Book One, of one of his most famed works “The Social Contract” most aptly expresses Rousseau’s philosophy, and the subsequent impact that it would reverberate for the centuries to come. For Rousseau, it is civilization that has led to humanity's corruption. Unlike the other philosophes of his time, Rousseau did not believe more progress, rationality and civilization was to be the thing that was to make humanity better, but just the opposite. That on the contrary, this drive for too much civilization, too much rationality was not what would lead freeing of mankind, but its further enslavement. Unlike Hobbes, Rousseau did not believe in the savagery and barbarity which entailed the state of nature, but ultimate freedom. Though Rousseau believed humans were ultimately born free, and that civilization was the source of all corruption, he did not believe that was necessarily ordained one over the other. Neither a Luddite or firm believer in the ability of technology or reason alone to save us, Rousseau believed that civilization, with all the progress it had created for mankind, held the ability of, if democratically run by
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Citing Aristotle’s idea, that “some men are born for slavery, and others from domination”, Rousseau aptly points out the flaw in the logic, noting, that Aristotle mistook the result for the cause. “If then they are slaves by nature, it is because they were made slaves against nature”. However, contrary to all this, Rousseau firmly continued to pontificate his belief of the rule of the patriarch to not be quirk of civilization - but instead it’s first and principal