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The Social Contract & The Prince

This essay is a ôreviewö of RousseauÆs The Social Contract, and includes a comparison and contrast with MachiavelliÆs The Prince, in terms of their being utterly opposing views of the nature of government and governmental authority.

Rousseau, like John Locke, was a founder of modern liberal democratic political philosophy. Before their era, it had normally been assumed that kings, nobles, and the like ruled because they had the power to do so, and that was how it had to be. Rousseau proposed instead the concept of the ôsocial contractö should be the central concept of political theory, arguing that a society exists only because its members have agreed on a certain set of rules by which their society should be governed, and have surrendered some portion of their own individual, absolute sovereignty to the society in agreeing to be bound by whatever sanctions can enforce these rules. The translator points out that the concept of the social contract had been around since the time of the Greek sophists, and had been especially important in some medieval thought. Rousseau innovation was in making it the central concept of his political philosophy, explicitly rejecting all other supposed sources of authority.

Rousseau particularly argued that even in a society ruled by a hereditary nobility, the nobility could rule only because everyone else continually gave a tacit consent to the unwritten social contract that existed between the nobles and the common people. Rousseau, like Locke, cast his argument in an historical form, talking about the state of primitive man, and the formation of the state by a compact among its members as being an historical event. However, where Locke tended to argue for the reality of that event, Rousseau clearly did not believe it had ever happened as a discrete event.

RousseauÆs argument was, in fact, that it made no difference whether that compact had been an historical event or not. In e...

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The Social Contract & The Prince. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 21:52, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1711825.html