Paper Summary:

This paper discusses Rousseau's "Discourses" and "Social Contract", in which he presents a philosophical debate on the failures, ideals, and realities of states and political livelihood. The paper details the ways in which he creates an argument for the social contract .

From the Paper:

"Rousseau defines freedom and equality through the integration of liberty in the Discourses. Rousseau argues that the onset of governmental forces exists, in its most nascent state, in a way that is at odds with citizens and thus under steady review if not threat. The basic, core freedoms of individual sovereignty are so undermined by a new republic that, despite its necessary quality, it is initially incomprehensible to those who it should rule; liberty is the key to the circumnavigation of this construction. "For with liberty," he purports, "it is like those solid and delicious foods or those robust wines which are appropriate to nourish and strengthen healthy temperaments which are used to them but which overwhelm, ruin, and intoxicate the weak and delicate who are not made for them." Those who have become used to the mastery of others and their own suppression are not able to make use of liberty in a conscious manner, be it viable or volatile."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Blum, Carol. Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue: The Language of Politics in the French Revolution. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986.
• Gourevitch, V. Ed. Rousseau: 'The Discourses' and Other Early Political Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
• Gourevitch, V. Ed. Rousseau: The Social Contract. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
• Monk, Ian H. "History of Modern Political Thought. Political Theory from Hobbes to Marx: Key Debates. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, Ltd., 1999.
• Plamenatz, John. Man and Society: Political and Social Theory, Vol. 1: Machiavelli through Rousseau. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1963.

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