Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Hobbes were 18th and 17th century thinkers with similar, yet opposed theories about human nature. While Rousseau lived in an era of relative peace, Hobbes wrote his masterwork Leviathan during the English Civil War, this would have a great influence on his writings. Hobbes’s theory is based upon the supposition that human nature is naturally aggressive and selfish; whereas Rousseau believes that men only become evil once they join society, which corrupts them.…

The 15th through the 18th centuries was a time for major changes in the way the people viewed the world. It was the beginning of a movement that would forever change the way of life. I am going to discuss the major intellectual developments of Europe in the 15th through the 18th centuries. I will talk about whom some of the great thinkers were and what their new ideas were. I will also analyze how these new ideas changed the way the European people viewed their world and themselves. Starting in…

children express their feelings. For the first time, Rousseau introduces a new concept to the movement, which is not all about being rational, but a having balance between sentiment and reason. This idea made him the father of Romanticism, another movement that became prominent in Europe at the beginning of the 19th century. Eventually,the novel became one of the Enlightenment’s most influential books on education. However, some of the things Rousseau wrote in his novel were often sexist, which…

ideas of one another even though both Enlightenment and the rise of communism are in different time periods. The three enlightenment philosophers that greatly inspired Marx in creating communism and his book were Voltaire, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. These three philosophers believed in the ideas of individual freedom, popular sovereignty, and political plus legal equality between the different social classes and the government that rules over them. Karl Marx tries to use the western…

Property in Society In the Second Discourse on Inequality, Jean Jacque Rousseau outlined the origin and development of private property. The formation of the hut was the first step towards the ultimate creation of society as families and communities formed. Unlike savage man who’s primary motivation was self-preservation, civilized man embraced amour propre as he started to compare his strengths and abilities to others. Although Rousseau argued that the invention of private property was not…

their inclusion within structured societies. Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau are both political theorist who wrote their works based on their perspective on the state of nature extensively, we are able to distinguish their different point of views. Human nature by definition is “the general psychological characteristics, feelings, and behavioral traits of humankind, regarded as shared by all humans” (Oxford). Hobbes and Rousseau wrote about their views and interpretations of human…

original ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau, a famous French politic and philosopher of the 1700s during the French Revolution, was an individual who believed in the development of a government…

going to summarize Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality” in which Rousseau theorizes that inequality is not a natural event, but an unfortunate byproduct of modern life. I will then provide a criticism of Rousseau’s argument, focusing on his decision to not discuss the relationship between natural and moral inequality. This criticism will then be countered by a theorized response from Rousseau’s perspective. The general argument presented by Rousseau is that the…

When examining the question of whether John Rawls would consider Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ideal society in the Social Contract fair, it is important to not only understand Rousseau’s ideal society more closely, but also understand what Rawls defines as being fair. First, the society that Rousseau proposes as the ideal one is based off of his concept of the nature of men. Men are born free and it is society that enslaves them, therefore, the goal of his ideal society is one that protects the…

John Stuart Mill, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau all addressed the issue of freedom and law within a society. Mill's “On Liberty”, and Rousseau’s discourse “On the Social Contract” are all absorbing fictional works which underline the concept of the ideal state of each in the eyes of both these men and present different visions of the very nature of man’s freedom and the law. The three have distinct views regarding how much freedom man ought to have in political society because they have different…