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Importance Of Rousseau's Ideal Government

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According to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the main problem of modern societies is that they do not promote equality and freedom. Rousseau strongly believes that the only way to avoid this is to create a government based on the “general will”, because only through the pursuing of a common good, a state is able to guarantee freedom and equality to everybody. Therefore, Rousseau’s ideal government is a directed democracy, where people are deciding the laws and obeying to them. In order to do so, people need to be educated to a common civic sense. However, in my opinion, this model of government ensures equality at the expense of personal freedoms, because it does not allow spaces for criticism, and it is destined to degenerate in a totalitarian regime. …show more content…

For him, governments are a solution to a problem that beings after humans lose “the state of nature”. In the state of nature there is abundance of resources, men are completely free and self-sufficient; they basically live on their own and provide for their own survival. Although he sees people as solitary creatures, he thinks that they are driven by a primary instinct: compassion. Compassion pushes human beings to help each other, even in the state of nature, because they have a natural disposition to preserve the whole humanity. Thus, Rousseau does not believe that in the state of nature there are natural sources of conflict, for instance competition, distrust, or glory, like Hobbes does; nor he believes that there are some people who are naturally immoral, who will create conflicts, like Locke, because humans in this state do not have a proper morality. In his view, philosophers like Hobbes and Locke are simply projecting their own societies in the state of nature. On the contrary, he thinks that conflicts begin when people start to cooperate, to develop the idea of property, and to want goods that they do not even need. These three factors corrupt men, make them selfish and unequal, and lead to conflicts. The only way to stop these conflicts is to create a

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