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Published on "Liberty and Justice for All" (http://www2.evergreen.edu/libertyandjustice)

Ian Clement

Ian Clement

Fall 2007

Rambling or Rhetoric?.............You decide

 

In the book; On The Social Contract by: Jean Rousseau , The author begins his work by saying that people (men, or maybe just men?) are born free but that they are in chains everywhere. Rousseau compares a family unit to the structure of a political system. Relating the "father" to the Political leader and the Child to the governed person. He seems to validate the ruling class structure by saying that a child only needs the parent until it can do without it, and that if a child stays connected to the father it is done only because of convention. This part of the authors work is where I start to shut down my thinking process because it seemed so patriarchal and outdated, but by re-reading and focusing on what I thought were the main points I was able to think about how the family hierarchical social structure might have evolved when the social structures got larger.

 

Another point of thought that I derived from what I first observed to be just a widely offensive and abrasive section referring to slavery.

 

 

The reasoning of Caligula agrees with that of Hobbes and Grotius. Aristotle, before any of them, had said that men are by no means equal naturally, but that some are born for slavery, and others for dominion.

Aristotle was right; but he took the effect for the cause. Nothing can be more certain than that every man born in slavery is born for slavery. Slaves lose everything in their chains, even the desire of escaping from them: they love their servitude, as the comrades of Ulysses loved their brutish condition.2 [1] If then there are slaves by nature, it is because there have been slaves against nature. Force made the first slaves, and their cowardice perpetuated the condition.

Chapter 2

While I don't agree that it is the best way to get to the point, I do agree that human nature, "is what it is" so to speak. That while the enslaving of people is an unnatural act. That people who might be born a slave would be more settled into that social roll. I do disagree that a slave loses the desire to shake off the chains of bondage. I think that maybe, because of the way that nature has treated the first generation of slave (or industrial worker) that might have instilled a feeling of hopelessness in one generation or group. But that the adaptive nature of the human social structure prevents us from making any of these hopeless ruts too deep for the next generation to at least make an attempt at change.

It seems that what Rousseau theorizes, is that human society seems to have evolved from a hierarchical family structure to that of a political one. He also seems to think that some people are born with an inherent ability to lead or exploit but that the only true difference between people are their history or their "natural State" which has been predetermined by the hardships and deprivation of recent history and history from many generations ago.

 


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