Rousseau’s The Social Contract: The Philosophical and Political Self
  1. Background: Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke
    1. Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527): Founder of Political Science
    2. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679): The Contract with the Sovereign

      3. "Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man, the same is consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently, no culture of the earth, no navigation, nor building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, nasty, poor, brutish, and short."

    3. John Locke (1632-1704): Life, Liberty, and Property
  1. Rousseau’s On the Origins of Inequality: A Bad Contract
    1. The Real State of Nature
    2. The Evil of Property
    3. Geneva as the Ideal
  1. The Remedy in The Social Contract: Conditions of Servitude
    1. "Man was born free, but he is everywhere in chains"
    2. The Right of Force
    3. The Right of Conquest
  1. The Self-contradiction of Slavery
    1. Inalienable Freedom
    2. Slavery as Historical Fact
    3. The Right to Self-definition
  1. The Original Contract
    1. The Social Pact: Chapter 6
    2. The Body Politic and the State
    3. The General Will and the Sovereign
  1. Natural Man and Universal Principles
    1. Natural Freedom and Civil Freedom
    2. The Problem of Universal Principles
  1. The People
    1. The Problem of Cultural Difference
    2. Foreshadowing the Revolution
  1. Laws
    1. Freedom
    2. Equality
  1. The Social Contract and the Individual
    1. The Idea of a People
    2. The Idea of a Revolution
    3. The Break with the Past
    4. The Romantic Will