Book 1 Flashcards
‘Man is…
Born free, and everywhere he is in chains’
‘To renounce one’s freedom is to renounce one’s quality as man, the rights of humanity, and even its duties. …
There can be no possible compensation for someone who renounced everything. Such a renunciation is incompatible with the nature of man: and to deprive one’s will of all freedom is to deprive one’s will of all morality.’
‘The right to slavery is null, not only because it is illegitimate but because it is absurd and meaningless. These words..
slavery and right are contradictory; they are mutually exclusive.’
‘There will always be a great difference between subjugating …
a multitude and ruling a society.’
‘The law of majority rule is itself something established by…
convention, and presupposes uniamity at least once.’
‘Each of us puts his person and his full power in common under the …
supreme direction of the general will: and in a body we received each member as an indivisible part of a whole.’
What is the struggle in finding a social pact?
‘To find a form of association that will defend and protect the person and goods of each associate with the full common force, and by means of which each, uniting with all, nevertheless …
obey only himself and remain as free as before.’
‘The sovereign, by the mere fact that it is, is…
always everything that it ought to be.’
‘Whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be constrained to do so by the entire body…
which means nothing other than that he shall be forced to be free.’
‘The impulsive of mere appetite is…
slavery, and obedience to the law one has prescribe to oneself is freedom.’
‘The fundamental pact, rather than destroying natural equality in the contrary substitutes a moral and legitimate equality for whatever physical inequality..
nature may have placed between men, and that while they may be unequal in force or in genius, they all become equal by convention and by right.’
Rousseau aims at an alliance between what ‘right permits’ and
‘Interest prescribes’
In order that justice and utility should on no account be opposed to one another
‘I make the assumption that there is a point of development of mankind at which the obstacles of men’s self-preservation in the state of nature are too
great to be overcome by the strength that any one individual can exert… the original state can then subsist no longer, and the human race would perish if it did not change its mode of existence.’
‘(The social contract entails) the complete transfer of each associate, …
with all his rights to the whole community.’
No rights objection
‘The right that each individual has over his property is always subordinated to the right that the community has over everyone, …
the social bind would be lacking in firmness and the exercise of sovereignty would lack true power.’
No rights objection
