Jacques Rousseau's "The Social Contract"

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that Rousseau was the first philosopher to endow the so-called masses with a particular expressive character and a set of inherent, inalienable rights. The author believes that Rousseau is a true democrat, almost in the Greek Athenian sense. The paper contends that Rousseau's significance as a philosopher is inextricably linked to his stress upon his deflation of the necessity of a monarch to govern a nation state.

From the Paper:

"Rousseau proclaims at the beginning of his text "The Social Contract" that man is free, yet everywhere he is in chains. In other words, man in his natural state is free and possessing of an inherent and inexorable right to freedom. But because of the structures of governance that have evolved over time, conditions have been placed upon the will of human beings that limit their freedoms. These limitations are, to a certain extent, endemic to the nature of the human animal as expressed in the form of the first social unit family. Rousseau notes in Part One of "The Social Contract", that the father of the family, the basic social unit of the family, extends both dominion and protection over his children."

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