Locke, Rousseau, Dewey
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Philosophers have held different ideas about the nature of freedom and human beings' responsibility for their own liberty. A review of three conceptions of freedom, held by Locke, Rousseau, and Dewey, demonstrates how such ideas were often developed in direct relationship to the writers' own times and circumstances. Locke was an Englishman living in a nation where certain rights were guaranteed but a balance had to be maintained between the rights of individuals and the power of the crown. Rousseau wrote in the shadow of the despotism inherent in the absolute monarchy of France. And Dewey lived in the world's first representative democracy, where freedom had long been guaranteed and its exercise was the responsibility of the individual. John Locke (1632-1704) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78), who held that freedom was an innate possession of human beings, argued that it derived from God and/or natural law. This led them to devise historical explanations or parables describing the likely evolution of constraints on natural liberty. Both of these philosophers saw human organization as entailing a deliberate surrender of some degree of freedom--by means of a social contract or compact--in order to reduce conflict and assure the safety of individual rights in property of various kinds and other freedoms. Locke saw this as a positive process, susceptible to the influence of reason and leading to improved forms of social organization. Rousseau, however, believed that
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of justice inevitably followed (66). Once human beings were in possession of property they began to see that their ownership, and, therefore, their livelihood, could be threatened by others. But even with the rise of the concept of property things might have remained in a state of equilibrium except that there were innate differences in human beings that began to acquire importance: "the strongest did the most work; the most adroit turned theirs to better advantage; the most ingenious found ways to shorten their labor" and natural inequality gradually manifested itself in combination "with inequality occasioned by the socialization process" (67). As human faculties developed and were employed to serve egocentric interests the principal factors of human inequality in civilized societies began to emerge and provide dominance to those who possessed them. Thus the "rank and fate of each man [was] established not only on the basis of quantity of goods and the power to serve or harm, but also on the basis of mind, beauty, strength or skill, on the basis of merit or talents" (67).
This inequality also meant that human beings began to pursue greater shares of wealth because it ensured the basic safety of their own original shares.
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Approximate Word count = 2633
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)
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