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The Social Contract
Critique and selected quotes. ... Referring to the social contract in particular and omitting most everything else.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau The Social Contract
Translated by Maurice Cranston, Penguin Books 1968
" The social order is a sacred right which serves as a basis for all other rights. ... Humans are social animals; just as in wolf packs, families and extended families gather together and a natural hierarchy develops based on dominant traits. This concept of man being animal-like was probably alien to Rousseau because of his era. ... This is the fundamental problem to which the social contract holds the solution. ... But, I think Rousseau is trying to define his idea of the evolution of society.
The social pact involves: " The total alienation by each associate of himself and all his rights to the whole community" p.60
" If, then, we eliminate from the social pact everything that is not essential to it, we find it comes down to this: Each one of us puts into the community his person and all his powers under the supreme direction of the general will; and as a body, we incorporate every member as an indivisible part of the whole. ... 62
"What is unique about the alienation entailed by the social contract is that the community in accepting the goods of an individual is far from depriving him of them; on the contrary it simply assures him of of their lawful possession; it changes usurpation into valid right and mere enjoyment into legal ownership. ... 68
" The social pact, far from destroying natural equality, substitutes, on the contrary, a moral and lawful equality for whatever physical inequality that nature may have imposed on mankind; so that however unequal in strength and intelligence, men become equal by covenant and by right. ... 68
Apparently Rousseau separates his idea of soverneign/state (body politic) from the government that rules the state.
BOOK 2 " It is what is common to those different interests which yields the social bond; if their were no point on which separate interests coincided, then society could not conceivably exist.
Approximate Word count = 1677
Approximate Pages = 6.7
(250 words per page double spaced)
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