The Savage State and Civil Society in Rousseau's Philosophy

(By Conrad Jalowski)

This is my short analysis of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's political philosophy regarding the state of Nature or the savage state and the multitudinous transformations from a pre-political state to modern society and civilization.

(Age of Enlightenment):

The seeds of the Enlightenment were planted during the Age of Reason in which scientific inquiry was relentlessly pursued in order to abolish all limitations to human exertions. It is within the context of the dichotomous relationship between rationalism and empiricism that the Enlightenment emerged. A philosophical efflorescence arose from the tensions, disharmonies and discordant views of previous epochs. It was during the Age of Enlightenment that Jean-Jacques Rousseau composed his philosophical treatises and offered the cultivated echelon (The Age of Enlightenment was marked with the nascence of the bourgeoisie) of society a means of nourishment that would later trickle into all facets of society and give birth to a whole new order of things as well as being portentous of things to come.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Julie or the New Heloise is the central structure of Rousseau's philosophical framework regarding the authenticity and autonomy of the human individual. The desire to follow one's own convictions is superior to the adherence to rational principles and to the slavish devotion to the capricious desires of the collective mass of society. In addition, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Social Contract attempts to extirpate the pernicious philosophy of the Divine Right of Kings. No longer would it be possible for a malevolent despot or an institution of avaricious oligarchs to establish a form of government that would exert a putrid despotism. In the course of Rousseau's political philosophy, there is a departure from the politically ossified, ostentatious, despotic and autocratic regimes of the Bourbon monarchy.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Rousseau
• savage
• primitive
• philosophy
• Enlightenment
• Romanticism
• Voltaire
• d'Holbach
• Montesquieu
• France
• civilization
• Athens
• Lacedaemon
• Sparta
• decadence
• effeminacy
• corrupt
• philosophes
• rationality
• despotism
• State
• (polity)