Rousseau, Douglass, both prose writers; Whitman, Tennyson and Wordsworth, all three, poets. What bind them together, what is their common denominator? Nationalism, democracy, love for the common man, singing praises for the ordinary man on the street, fighting for the rights of the poor, seeking the liberation of the downtrodden from oppression, glorifying the human being - man! These are elements that are common to them.
Jean Jacques Rousseau
Consider Jean-Jacques Rousseau who according to Lillian Hornstein of New York University. (The Reader's Companion to World Literature. New York: Dryden Press, 1956), was not even a thinker nor a writer at the beginning but ending up writing words that inspired worlds. It is bandied around, that the totality of the theme of his writing is man and his role in society. Many ideas about modern democracy came from his writings. He powered the Romantic Movement. He could and did express certain hidden feelings about man and society which were a reflection of the feelings of his fellowmen, their well-kept secret longings and their desire to improve their lives.
In essence, Rousseau argued that the "natural man is good and happy but it is humankind that abuses and depraves him. He advocated the acceptance of man's true nature and he decried society's indifference to human suffering and misery.
Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass, the second prose writer in the group of five is an American Visionary, the foremost leader of the Abolitionist Movement. Brilliant, he was the voice which helped propel the American Civil War.
Unknown to many, he was an adviser to President Abraham Lincoln. He worked for civil liberties, he rebelled against racial injustice, he delivered lectures from one end of the nation to the other end. He was one of the first great black speakers. A very brilliant man, he always had the plight, the suffering of the black people at the back of his mind. He fought for...
Jean-Jacques Rousseau Section From Confessions The primary confession that Jean Jacques Rousseau makes in this excerpt from his work of literature entitled Confessions is the fact that he was inadvertently responsible for the death of his mother. Evidently, his mother died during or shortly thereafter giving birth to him, because the author writes, "I was born, a poor and sickly child, and cost my mother her life. So my birth was
Jean-Jacques Rousseau Personal Background Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born on June 28th 1712, in Geneva, a French-speaking city-state within Switzerland. He received little formal education and, in 1728, left Geneva to live an unsettled existence, travelling throughout Europe. Although mainly self-taught, Rousseau became a respected novelist, composer, musicologist, and botanist, in addition to his most commonly recognized contribution, as a moral, political and educational philosopher. He first came to prominence as a writer
" Rousseau on Political Representation, Democracy, Law, and the Need for Legislators: In Book II, Chapter 3, Rousseau expresses the position that a representative form of democratic government undermines a true democracy where each individual maintains his own point-of-view without aligning himself with any sub-group or political party, because: when factions arise, and partial associations are formed at the expense of the great association, the will of each of these associations becomes general
Jean-Jacques Rousseau is one of the European theorists who has been cited as an inspiration for the Founding Fathers as they wrote the U.S. Constitution and created the American form of government. In some ways, however, they were using what Rousseau wrote as a beginning point and then finding a governmental form to refute some of Rousseau's concerns for what representative government might become if not controlled. The authors of
Martin Luther King can also allude to Rousseau in the formation of the concept of civil disobedience. As Scott notes, "Rousseau argues that civil society is based on a contractual arrangement of rights and duties which applies equally to all people, whereby natural liberty is exchanged for civil liberty, and whereby natural rights are exchanged for legal rights." Legal rights are a natural extension of natural human rights. If
For Smith, however, the development of a commercial and economic society leads to the existence of a social structure. This social structure is furthermore divided into three classes - the landowners, the capitalists and the laborers. This is considered by Smith to be the three great constituent that exist in every single civilized society. For him, the introduction of social structures like government and economic classes are the major causes
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