This is a dissertation chapter on “The Social Contract” by Jean Jacques Rousseau:
Throughout Rousseau’s work, The Social Contract, he reveals many theories and components of government. He continually brainstorms on the particular question of, “How freedom may be possible in civil society?” Rousseau believes that upon entering a civil society one leaves the state of nature. He argues that in the state of nature one enjoys the physical freedom of having no restraints on behavior. But by entering civil society, through the social contract, we place restraints on our behavior making it possible to live communally. By giving up our physical freedom, Rousseau suggests we gain the civil freedom of being able to think rationally.
Rousseau is not the only philosopher to define real freedom as the ability to think rationally. Rationally further defined by putting checks on our impulses and desires, and therefore learn to live morally. Enlightenment thinkers such as Kant, Smith, Voltaire and Hume believed that reason and knowledge were attainable in a state of nature under the constructs of “natural laws.” (more…)
