By Jamie Chase, Manuel Alonzo, Mario Carrasco and Greg Bartley

In what ways is Rousseau diametrically opposed to Hobbes?

How accurate is his statement that “Man was born free, but everywhere is in chains? Were we really “born free? Have we ever been “free”?

Is it accurate to describe “society” (a general term indeed) as nothing but a system of oppression?

The first part of the topics addresses the different stances of two great thinkers on the basis of their published work. This is a quantifiable… a direct comparison that can have (at least relatively) correct answers. The second and third portions of the topic, however are not as simple. These are subjects that are at the center of a centuries-long debate. Even in out relatively small group, the answers are not always the same. So we strove in this presentation to offer a continuation of this debate, including our humble perspectives on the subject.

Hobbes and Rousseau both used the idea of the “savage” man in a state of nature in an attempt to analyze human nature.

Each tried to hypothetically separate man from the influences of culture, religion, government and society … imagining what life would be like without externally imposed values.

The conclusions they made based on their flights of fancy are very different, however.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau:

Man in a state of nature is essentially peaceful; society is the corrupting influence.

Thomas Hobbes:

Man in a state of nature is selfish; sovereign keeps man from war of all against all.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau:

To unite populace under the “General Will”.

Government concerned with the best interests of the citizens.

Sovereign only does what benefits the people.

Thomas Hobbes:

To prevent the state of war by enforcing law and order.

Government protects the people from themselves.

Sovereign has absolute power, not subject to laws.

Rousseau and Hobbes took things to unnecessary extremes. Humans are more complex than either of them accounted for in their theories.

“The two most basic purposes of life are to live and to reproduce, it should do everything it can to avoid dying through a lack of resources.” (Tafflinger) Instinct causes animals to fight and compete against one another. They cannot consciously react in a less savage way.

Humans also have such instincts.

Humans have Reason in addition to instinct, the ability to think rationally.

Theoretically reason should be able to overcome instincts, but that isn't always what happens.

Instinct and Reason do not always agree, and sometimes greed and power get the better of us.

Hobbes and Rousseau were both right and both wrong. Humans are never consistently one way or the other but a mix of both.

Humans are a mix of both good and bad, instinct and reason, avarice and empathy. The amount of each varies from person to person and in the individual can vary from moment to moment.

Societies are human creations. They are a reflection of the people who create them and so are also mixed.

Society and government can either moderate our bad behavior or encourage it. Which it does is dependent on both the type of organization and the qualities of the people from which it is made.

Good people do not need a state to tell them how to act and the bad ones will do as they wish. So what is the point of having a government?

Hobbes believed it was for the protection of those that are good. People who want to do “bad” things may ignore the laws, which is why a government must have the power and strength to enforce them.

But how much power should they have? What form of government is best?

Democracy, monarchy, socialism, communism … it’s a matter of how much human rights you’re willing to give up.

There is no perfect, universal form of government.

Rousseau states in “Social Contract” that “all forms of government do not suit all countries.”

Hobbes points out the weakness of democracies, aristocracies AND monarchies in “Leviathan.”

The popular variant on a quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln fits the theory of government; "You can please all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot please all the people all the time.”

“Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty.” - Plato

“At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.” –Aristotle

"It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong." – Voltaire

"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under." - H.L. Mencken

“Government can easily exist without laws, but law cannot exist without government.” - Bertrand Russell

“Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others”. – John Rawls

"So what is government?... Very simply, it is an agency of coercion. Of course, there are other agencies of coercion … such as the Mafia. So to be more precise, government is the agency of coercion that has flags in front of its offices." - Harry Browne, Libertarian

"Both of our political parties, at least the honest portion of them, agree conscientiously in the same object: the public good; but they differ essentially in what they deem the means of promoting that good. One side believes it best done by one composition of the governing powers, the other by a different one. One fears most the ignorance of the people; the other the selfishness of rulers independent of them. Which is right, time and experience will prove." - Thomas Jefferson

“If the average man had had his way there would probably never have been any state. Even today he resents it, classes death with taxes, and yearns for that government which governs least. If he asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbor needs them; privately he is an unphilosophical anarchist, and thinks laws in his own case superfluous. In the simplest societies there is hardly any government.” - Will Durant

"Any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well developed . . . as in man." —Charles Darwin, “Descent of Man”

“Although humans are animals, we also have something that no other animal has: the most complex social structure on Earth. […] The combination of biology and society is what makes us what we are and do what we do.” -Richard F. Taflinger

“We are all civilized people, which means that we are all savages at heart but observing a few amenities of civilized behavior.” - Tennessee Williams

If we are going to determine whether man is ever free, we must first understand … What does free really mean?

Merriam-Webster defines the word, as it pertains to the state of being for a person, as:

a : having the legal and political rights of a citizen

b : enjoying civil and political liberty

c : enjoying political independence or freedom from outside domination

d : enjoying personal freedom:not subject to the control or domination of another

We have a birth certificate issued by the government. We are given a social security number and many other governmental controls and laws are placed upon us, such as being required to attend school, laws on drinking, and smoking. Where I live there are weekends, especially holiday weekends that, when pulled over, if you are suspected of drinking and driving you are required to give a blood sample. How is that being free? – Gregory Bartley

Part of the definition is ‘not subject to the control or domination of another’ and by that definition I would say that man is never free. As children, we are dependent on our parents to protect and provide, but this means we are subject to their control, susceptible to their influence. As parents, we are not free either because we are obligated to care for our children. When you add in all of the things that Rousseau tried to remove in hypothesizing about a state of nature ... social conventions, religious dogma, government ... all inform the way we think and feel about the world we live in, so even if they were removed from our lives they would still be a part of us … from birth we are the property of our society. – Jamie Chase

I don't think we were ever born free. We have the natural instinct to survive as a species and take care of our own. In order to be able to survive, we need order in society. – Manuel Alonzo

I think that Rousseau meant that we are born free, not slaves or servants. We are born with a right to choose who we are, what we become, where we go and with who we go with. We are born free to make such choices. However, we remain chained and not totally free because we can only be that person that is accepted, we can only go where we are allowed to go, we can only choose those friends that choose to be with us. So at the end we remain chained to the society and constraints that we as human created. We have set our own limits and now we must live by and within them. – Mario Carrasco

“Our thoughts are free.” - Cicero

“Freedom is a possession of inestimable value.” – Cicero

“No man is free who depends on his government for his sustenance, job, home, or hope.” - John Perkins

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation." - Oscar Wilde

“If you want to love you must serve, if you want freedom you must die.” - Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

“When liberty is mentioned, we must always be careful to observe whether it is not really the assertion of private interests which is thereby designated.” - Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

1 : companionship or association with one's fellows : friendly or intimate intercourse

2 : a voluntary association of individuals for common ends; especially an organized group working together or periodically meeting because of common interests, beliefs, or profession

3 a: an enduring and cooperating social group whose members have developed organized patterns of relationships through interaction with one another

b : a community, nation, or broad grouping of people having common traditions, institutions, and collective activities and interests

4 a: a part of a community that is a unit distinguishable by particular aims or standards of living or conduct : a social circle or a group of social circles having a clearly marked identity

b : a part of the community that sets itself apart as a leisure class and that regards itself as the arbiter of fashion and manners

1 a : unjust or cruel exercise of authority or power b : something that oppresses especially in being

an unjust or excessive exercise of power

2 : a sense of being weighed down in body or mind

When looking at society as American society, with government and laws, that it is oppressive. However most people are willing to give up some of their rights as a means of protection . – Greg Bartley

I feel that no matter what kind of government you have, there will always be someone dictating your mannerisms/life. Don’t do this, don’t do that. It’s never going to end. Society is will always be oppressive in that way ... but if that is the norm, can we really call it oppression? – Manuel Alonzo

Society is a system of oppression in some ways but I think it an over exaggeration to say that it is "nothing more than" that. People are social by nature, we want to be loved, accepted, to belong ... so we create divisions between us so that we have a place to call our own, we set standards for ourselves in order to meet our personal needs then judge others who do not conform. But like children who are dependent on parents, we need the support of our created societies. –Jamie Chase

I really think that society is nothing but a system of oppression. Although it is through the formations of societies that we can say that human kind has advance it is also through the formation that it has been oppressed. I would have to agree with Hobbes when he say that a society is nothing more that the powerful convincing those of less power to unite for the greater good, when in reality it is to assist those in power to remain in power. – Mario Carrasco

“Biology guides our responses to stimuli, based on thousands of generations of ancestors surviving because of their responses. Our social structures dictate restrictions on and alterations in how we carry out our biological responses.Neither biology nor society stands without the other. For some people, this is a contradiction -- either nature (biology) controls people, or nurture (society) does. But in fact we filter everything through both to determine how we react to stimuli.” - Richard F. Taflinger

“Society is not really made to be a purely competitive operation. […] There is dominance, hierarchy. They sometimes fight. They sometimes even kill each other. But they stick together because they survive together much better than alone.” - Frans De Waal

“Society is inside of man and man is inside society, and you cannot even create a truthfully drawn psychological entity on the stage until you understand his social relations and their power to make him what he is and to prevent him from being what he is not. The fish is in the water and the water is in the fish.” – Arthur Miller

“The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought.” – Emma Goldman

“Man seeketh in society comfort, use, and protection.” –Francis Bacon

“Hitherto, every form of society has been based ... on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes.” – Karl Marx

“Just as there is no society or group that is not a collective view of persons, so there is no individual who may not be regarded as a particular view of social groups. He has no separate existence; through both the hereditary and the social factors in his life a man is bound into the whole of which he is a member, and to consider him apart from it is quite as artificial as to consider society apart from individuals.” – Charles Horton Cooley

“The citizen's life is made possible only by due performance of his function in the place he fills; and he cannot wholly free himself from the beliefs and sentiments generated by the vital connections hence arising between himself and his society.... To cut himself off in thought from all his relationships of race, and country, and citizenship -- to get rid of all those interests, prejudices, likings, superstitions, generated in him by the life of his own society and his own time -- to look on all the changes societies have undergone and are undergoing, without reference to nationality, or creed, or personal welfare; is what the average man cannot do at all, and what the exceptional man can do very imperfectly.” – Herbert Spencer