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Rousseau first exposes in this work his conception of a human state of nature (broadly believed to be a hypothetical thought exercise) and of human perfectibility, an early idea of progress. He then explains the way in which, in his view, people may have established civil society , and this leads him to conclude that private property is the ...
Locke describes the state of nature and civil society to be opposites of each other, and the need for civil society comes in part from the perpetual existence of the state of nature. [7] This view of the state of nature is partly deduced from Christian belief (unlike Hobbes, whose philosophy is not dependent upon any prior theology).
Rousseau refers to the united will of the people as the general will. [2]: 85 The general will, to be truly general, must only legislate laws with general form, i.e., laws that apply equally to all. For Rousseau, collective self-rule would increase freedom if the people to whom laws applied were also the ones prescribing them.
Because laws represent the restraint of "natural liberty", [19] they represent the leap made from humans in the state of nature into civil society. In this sense, the law is a civilizing force. Therefore Rousseau believed that the laws that govern a people help to mould their character.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (UK: / ˈ r uː s oʊ /, US: / r uː ˈ s oʊ /; [1] [2] French: [ʒɑ̃ʒak ʁuso]; 28 June 1712 – 2 July 1778) was a Genevan philosopher (), writer, and composer.. His political philosophy influenced the progress of the Age of Enlightenment throughout Europe, as well as aspects of the French Revolution and the development of modern political, economic, and educational ...
Rousseau claimed that the state of nature was a primitive condition without law or morality, which human beings left for the benefits and necessity of cooperation. As society developed, the division of labor and private property required the human race to adopt institutions of law.
Among Rousseau's definitions of law, the textually closest variant can be found in a passage of the Lettres écrites de la montagne summarizing the argument of Du contrat social, in which law is defined as "a public and solemn declaration of the general will on an object of common interest."
In the period of the eighteenth century, usually called the Enlightenment, a new justification of the European state developed.Jean-Jacques Rousseau's social contract theory states that governments draw their power from the governed, its 'sovereign' people (usually a certain ethnic group, and the state's limits are legitimated theoretically as that people's lands, although that is often not ...