Questions tagged [rousseau]
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 – 1778) was a Genevan philosopher.
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Why does Williams quote Napoleon calling Rouseau a madman?
In truth and truthfulness, Bernard Williams spends quite some time discussing the life of Rousseau, including his apparent inauthenticity. At one point, he Williams briefly gets into his relation to ...
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Can someone expand Rousseau's proper definition of war?
Rousseau, in his 'Of the Social Contract', chapter IV, 'Slavery', puts that:
Men, from the mere fact that, while they are living in their primitive
independence, they have no mutual relations ...
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Which English translation of “The Social Contract” is better?
I was trying to read Rousseau's The Social Contract and Discourses. On archive.org I found a copy of the Everyman's Library version translated by G.D.H. Cole (1913). However, on amazon.com, a reviewer ...
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What is “State” for Rousseau?
I guess this simple question has a simple answer, but I have not found it.
I am reading "The Social Contract" and am really loving it. I understand Rousseau's distinction of sovereign and government....
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Natural sociality in Rousseau and Aristotle
Are we social or solitary by Rousseau's reckoning? How do his arguments stand in relation to Aristotle's idea of humans as essentially social or political?
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what does Bertrand Russell mean by saying this
he said on the preface of "history of western philosophy":
"the student of Rousseau may have difficulty in doing justice to his connection with the Sparta of Plato and Plutarch."
what does this mean?
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Can we separate ideas (utilitarianism, social contract) from their primary associated philosophers (Mill, Rousseau)?
I've run into some difficulty discussing utilitarianism and the social contract because the typical response is something specific to Mill or Rousseau. It's not quite ad hominem argument -- they're ...
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On Rousseau's consent and legitimacy
Right now I'm reading Rousseau's Second Discourse and Discourse on Political Economy. Rousseau describes the founding of civil society in the Second Discourse as a step that everyone agrees to, and ...
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Did Rousseau say that equality of conditions is not possible without slavery?
I just read What is Property, written in 1840 by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.
At the end of the book he attributes a paraphrased quote to Jean-Jaques Rousseau:
The communistic republic of Plato ...
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Rousseau and civil society
How does Rousseau account for the emergence of civil society?--what is the change, or more precisely, the transformation of material relations, that accounts for the founding of society in a robust ...
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What major innovations in social contract theory did Rousseau make compared to that of Plato's Crito?
In Plato's dialogue, Crito, where Socrates is urged by Crito to flee before he is executed, Socrates refuses and outlines a theory of social contact between a citizen and the city.
I had understood ...
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Is the Republic of Thiascala a figment of Rousseaus imagination?
In the notes to Book II of the Social Contract, Rousseau remarks:
"The Republic of Thiascala, enclosed by the Mexican Empire, preferred doing without salt to buying from the Mexicans, or even getting ...
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Does the history of modern Europe bear out Rousseau' assertion that the rule of the many cannot follow that of the few?
Rousseau writes, in Book 3, section 10 of the Contract (The abuse of government and its propensity to degenerate):
There are two general courses by which government degenerates: i.e., when it ...
