In this desired social contract, everyone will be free because they will all lose the same number of rights and impose the same obligations on all. Rousseau argues that it is absurd for a man to give up his freedom for slavery; Therefore, participants must have the right to choose the laws under which they live. Although the treaty imposes new laws, including those that protect and regulate property, there are restrictions on how these assets can be legitimately claimed. His example with the earth includes three conditions; that the land is uninhabited, that the owner claims only what is necessary for subsistence, and that work and culture give legitimacy to the property. The Social Contract, originally published as On the Social Contract; Français ou Principes du droit politique by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is a 1762 book in which Rousseau theorizes the best way to establish a political community in the face of the problems of commercial society that he had already identified in his Discourse on Inequality (1755). The French philosopher Voltaire uses his publications to criticize and mock Rousseau, but also to defend freedom of expression. In his Idées républicaines (1765), responding to the news that the social contract had been burned in Geneva, he said: “The operation of burning was perhaps as despicable as that of writing. […] To burn a book of arguments is to say, “We don`t have enough mind to answer.” [2] [3] The work was also banned in Paris. [4] The work received in 1794 from the Jesuit Alfonso Muzzarelli in Italy a refutation entitled The Confusion of the Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. [5] The inscription of the work reads as follows: “foederis aequalis / Dicamus leges” (Virgil, Aeneid XI.321-22).
The stated purpose of the Social Contract is to determine whether there can be legitimate political authority, since the interactions of the people he saw in his time seemed to put them in a much worse state than the good state in which they were in the state of nature, even if they lived in isolation. He concludes the first book, chapter three: “Let us then admit that violence does not create justice and that we are obliged to obey only legitimate powers”, that is, that the capacity for coercion is not a legitimate power, and that there is no legitimate duty to submit to it. A state has no right to enslave a conquered people. The social contract has helped to stimulate political reforms or revolutions in Europe, especially in France. The social contract opposed the idea that monarchs are divinely empowered to legislate. Rousseau claims that only sovereign peoples have this all-powerful right. The Social Contract and Discourses by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, translated with an introduction by G.D. H. Cole (London and Toronto: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1923). Rousseau argues that the size of the territory to be governed often determines the type of government.
Since a government is as strong as the people, and this force is absolute, the larger the territory, the more the government must be able to exert force on the people. According to him, a monarchical government is capable of exercising the most power over the people because it must devote less power to itself, while a democracy is the least. In general, the greater the bureaucracy, the more power is needed for government discipline. Usually, this relationship requires the state to be an aristocracy or monarchy. When Rousseau uses the word democracy, he is referring to direct democracy rather than representative democracy. Given the relationship between population size and government structure, Rousseau argues that, like his native Geneva, small city-states are the form of nation in which freedom can best thrive. For states of this size, an elected aristocracy is preferable, and in very large states a benevolent monarch; But monarchical rule must also be subordinated to the sovereign rule of law in order to be legitimate. Rousseau postulates that the political aspects of a society must be divided into two parts.
First, there must be a sovereign composed of the entire population, who includes women (in a way that has not been practiced by almost all countries and therefore quite revolutionary to suggest), who represents the general will and who is the legislative power within the state. .
