¶ … John Locke's understanding of freedom and equality is the essential basis of any happy and prosperous society." How would the following individuals react to this quote: Rousseau, King Louis the Fourteenth, and Napoleon
Rousseau
Rousseau is most famous for saying that "Man was/is born free; and everywhere he is in chains." (Social Contract, Vol. IV, p. 131 in Ashcraft, 22). We are born good but are essentially not free since we are forced to live in a pretentious society with conventions and masquerade. The most liberated and content people, according to Rousseau, were primitive people since they had no manmade convictions and social niceties to bind them.
Locke's account of the social republic was one of people freely choosing to segregate in bands and create rules for their protection. These obligations are willingly entered into and represent bonds of natural law where people choose a ruler to impose and maintain order and where citizens choose to impose a shared system of rights to life, liberty and property. To Rousseau, however, this mass web of social structure only spoiled individuals of their essential naturalness and goodness and confined them in a cell that was not of their choosing. Society is an invention that only stunts and warps our development.
Contrary to the popular notion which saw primitive people as 'savages' and modern people as 'advanced' and civilized, Rousseau opined that it was the primitive people who actually were enabled to be most natural and, therefore, 'themselves' whilst we, moderns, are imprisoned by the need to conform to a social pressure and a host of confining and person-eroding laws.
Natural man is isolated,...
According to Locke man is born with a natural liberty that means he should be free from subordination to any "superior power on earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but to have only the law of nature for his rule." (1632-1704) Man's liberty in society is such that should not be ruled by a legislative power but instead "by consent, in the commonwealth…what
This body then has the right and duty, especially if elected to represent to build the laws and enforce the judgment of those laws, as a reflection of the will of the consensus. Locke, having developed a keen sense of a rather radical sense of the rights of the individual and the responsibility of the civil government began his work with the development of what it is that constructs the
Question 2: The goals of the philosophies were meant to exercise a set of ideals. Which common tenets of enlightened thinking do writers Mary Wollstonecraft and Denis Diderot advance in "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" and the selection from "Encyclopedie." Contemporary connections: Discuss how you see the tenets you identified in these works as having informed/influenced our contemporary experience. Although Mary Wollstonecraft speaks about the rights of women specifically,
Locke and Rousseau on the Question of Inequality John Locke's Second Treatise of Government argues that "men are naturally free" (55). In other words, Locke believed that humans, in their natural state, and prior to the creation of civil society, would have been a kind of sovereign entity, possessing a set of natural rights prescribed by God and nature, and those rights would have afforded individuals the opportunity to protect themselves
To achieve his ends man gives up, in favour of the state, a certain amount of his personal power and freedom Pre-social man as a moral being, and as an individual, contracted out "into civil society by surrendering personal power to the ruler and magistrates, and did so as "a method of securing natural morality more efficiently." To Locke, natural justice exists and this is so whether the state
And thus much shall suffice; concerning what I find by speculation, and deduction, of Soveraign Rights, from the nature, need, and designes of men, in erecting of Common-wealths, and putting themselves under Monarchs, or Assemblies, entrusted with power enough for their protection. Hobbes & Waller 143-144) There would then seem to be little question as to the divides between Hobbes and Locke, with Hobbes stating firmly that they are very different
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