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Jean-Jacques Rousseau And Thomas Jefferson's Views Of Human Nature

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The Enlightenment French philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, once said that, “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.” Is man really born free? That is the question many men have pondered on for centuries—the role of nature in one’s life. Some men believed they knew the answer to this lifelong question and proclaimed their belief to all. Many men even made rules and had ways of living accordingly in this battle over the flesh. Groups like the Founding Fathers and Transcendentalists believed mankind to be inherently good, while the Puritans believed all humans were born to be inherently evil. Each group had a different, unique perspective on the laws of nature and how life should be lived. While the Founding Fathers and Transcendentalists …show more content…

Thomas Jefferson had a Christian, classical understanding of human nature as faulty but capable of goodness and worthy of trust. They established many safeguards and precautions to control the human nature, like the electoral college and the division of power, for they knew selfishness could overtake any one man in power. In Thomas Jefferson’s A Declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress Assembled on page 340 in our textbook, Jefferson says, “When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume…the powers of the earth…and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them[.]” In those words, Jefferson clearly states that in the happenings of human history, one has to throw their power bondage between others away in order to maintain the ordinances of nature. Jefferson believed in the laws of nature, meaning the natural world had certain ways of operating. Jefferson and the Founding Fathers thought that nature could produce any good man to be in power, they only had to be enlightened of the oppressions of the body. There, nature met logic and man was

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