Rousseau's Social Contract

JeanJacques Rousseau has been one of the most influential philosophers of the modern era. His ideas played an important role in bringing about the Romantic movement, and many of his ideas are still very much with us. Modern popular attitudes toward Native American Indians, for example, as exemplified in movies like "Dances with Wolves," owe as much to Rousseau's "noble savage" as they do to the actual Native American people. The ferment triggered by Rousseau's thought also played a role in setting the intellectual stage for the French Revolution.

Yet his thought was by his own admission based upon very few facts, but almost entirely on what we would now call anthropological speculations. "Let us begin by laying all facts aside," he wrote (Origin of Inequality, 45), "as they do not affect the question." He continues:

The investigations we may enter into, in treating this

subject, must not be considered as historical truths,

but only as mere conditional and hypothetical reasonings,

rather calculated to explain the nature of things, than

to ascertain their actual origin; just like the hypo

theses which our physicists daily form respecting the

In Rousseau's view, what we would call primitive man was devoid of inequality; which began with the invention of the concept of property (Origin

. . .
ptimism and ushered in the cynical present age, could lend itself to the notion of decline and fall. But Spengler began to develop his theory long before the war. It was fundamentally rooted in an event which has always shadowed the minds of Western thinkers: the civilization of classical antiquity, its collapse, and the Dark Ages that followed. Looking at classical history, Spengler  like many before him  saw correspondences to the history of the West. ... the phase of Hellenism, and its present culmination, marked by the WorldWar, corresponds with the transition from the Hellenistic to the Roman age. (p. 26) We might have found the constant alter ego of our own actuality in establishing the correspondence, item by item, from the "Trojan War" and the Crusades, Homer and the Nibelungenlied, through Doric and Gothic, Dionysian movement and Renaissance, Polycletus and John Sebastian Bach, Athens and Paris, Aristotle and Kant, Alexander and Napoleon, to the worldcity and the imperialism common to both Cultures. (p. 27) This correspondence inspired in Spengler the idea th
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1654
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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