Free Essay: Equality and Liberty in Rousseau, Calhoun and King.
According to Rousseau, what man loses by the social contract is his natural liberty, but he gains civil liberty and moral liberty in return. Explain Rousseau’s ideas of liberty. How natural liberty lost Through social contract, people lost their natural liberty, but acquired moral liberty and civil liberty in return.
During the time of Rousseau these ideas we just taking off, with thinkers like Hobbes and Locke were carrying the idea forward. However, what Rousseau provided in his works, in particular piece The Social Contract challenged those notions of individualism, highlighting holes in reasoning as well as exposing the inherent flaws that lie in a hyper-individualist society.
Positive liberty is the possession of the capacity to act upon one's free will, as opposed to negative liberty, which is freedom from external restraint on one's actions. A concept of positive liberty may also include freedom from internal constraints.
Book II of Rousseau’s Social Contract discusses problems related to the sovereign and the general will. Rousseau asserts that sovereignty is inalienable, that is, it cannot be represented by a different group, but by itself. The sovereign represents the general will. Hence, no smaller group or individual can be able to represent the general will.
In Rousseau’s work he focuses on several key terms in order to define this transition clearly, they include: state of nature, social contract, civil society, general will, and the sovereign. It would be impossible to define the latter terms without first analyzing Rousseau’s definition of state of nature.
Rousseau’s perceptive observation on the peculiar predicament of man is revealing in at least two important ways for civil liberties law assignment.Firstly, it talks about the essential precondition of human being, i.e. the need to be free and secondly it also alludes to the restrictions placed upon the exercise of such freedoms from various quarters.
Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality is one of the strongest critics of modernity ever written. Rousseau describes the ravages of modernity on human nature and civilization inequality are nested according to the Genevan thinker. This speech, unlike an essay, is written with a pen passionate, even fiery at times, making reading a pleasure.