Rousseau on Self-Government and Self-Education John Zumbrunnen Department of Political Science

“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. He who believes himself the master of others does not escape being more of a slave than they. How did this change take place? I have no idea. What can render it legitimate? I believe I can answer this question.”

"The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before."

auto-nomy

“each of us places his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will; and as one we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole.” “the general will is always right and always tends towards the public unity.” “There is often a great deal of difference between the will of all and the general will. The latter considers only the general interest, whereas the former considers private interest and is merely the sum of private wills.” “whoever refuses to obey the general will be forced to by the entire body. This means merely that he will be forced to be free.”

“He who dares to undertake the establishment of a people should feel that he is, so to speak, in a position to change human nature.”

State of Nature   SOCIAL CONTRACT/CIVIL SOCIETY “…since all the progress of the human species continually moves us away from its primitive state, the more we accumulate more knowledge, the more we deprive ourselves of the means of acquiring the most important knowledge of all.”

“self-perfection … resides among us as much in the species as in the individual.”

“…since all the progress of the human species continually moves us away from its primitive state, the more we accumulate more knowledge, the more we deprive ourselves of the means of acquiring the most important knowledge of all.” “self-perfection … resides among us as much in the species as in the individual.” “Let my readers not imagine, then, that I dare flatter myself with having seen what appears to me so difficult to see … I have hazarded some guesses.”

“Let us conclude that, wandering in the forests, without industry, without speech, without dwelling, without war, without relationships, with no need for his fellow men, and correspondingly with no desire to do them harm, perhaps never even recognizing any of them individually, savage man, subject to few passions and self-sufficient, had only the sentiments and enlightenment appropriate to that state….”

“The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.”

“This repeated appropriation of various beings to himself, and of some beings to others, must naturally have engendered in man’s mind the perceptions of certain relations.”

“God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil … Yet things would be worse without this education, and mankind cannot be made by halves. Under existing conditions a man left to himself from birth would be more of a monster than the rest.”

Rousseau on Self-Government and Self-Education John Zumbrunnen Department of Political Science