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[2]: 79 Rousseau, who objected to extreme wealth inequality, also argued that equality is essential for the attainment of liberty, and concluded that legislation ought to preserve equality. [3] [2]: 80 Rousseau argues that the sovereign power must be separate from the government, which in Rousseau's terminology refers to the executive power ...
In this sense, the law is a civilizing force. Therefore Rousseau believed that the laws that govern a people help to mould their character. Rousseau also analyses the social contract in terms of risk management, [20] thus suggesting the origins of the state as a form of mutual insurance.
The phrase "general will", as Rousseau used it, occurs in Article Six of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (French: Déclaration des droits de l'Homme et du citoyen), composed in 1789 during the French Revolution: The law is the expression of the general will.
Rousseau, in the Social Contract [30] argued, "the growth of the State giving the trustees of public authority more and means to abuse their power, the more the Government has to have force to contain the people, the more force the Sovereign should have in turn to contain the Government," with the understanding that the Sovereign is "a ...
The government is composed of magistrates, charged with implementing and enforcing the general will. The "sovereign" is the rule of law, ideally decided on by direct democracy in an assembly. Rousseau opposed the idea that the people should exercise sovereignty via a representative assembly (Book III, chapter XV). He approved the form of ...
Popular sovereignty in its modern sense is an idea that dates to the social contract school represented by Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), John Locke (1632–1704), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). Rousseau authored a book titled The Social Contract, a prominent political work that highlighted the idea of the "general will".
Rousseau's critique of civil society is primarily based on psychological features of civil man, with amour propre pushing individuals to compare themselves with others, to gain a sense of self corresponding to this, and to dissolve natural man's natural pity: "the savage lives within himself, sociable man, always outside himself, can only live ...
"Consent of the governed" is a phrase found in the 1776 United States Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson.. Using thinking similar to that of John Locke, the founders of the United States believed in a state built upon the consent of "free and equal" citizens; a state otherwise conceived would lack legitimacy and rational-legal authority.