Summary Of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Discourse On The State Of Nature

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Imagine a time were humans lived in a primitive state were they were free and independent. A time before humans became civilized and everything was peaceful. Would we be able to revert back to a time were we wouldn’t be highly dependent on electricity, industrialization, infrastructure, the food industry, and most importantly the dependency on other people? Would we be able to survive and thrive? In this paper, I will be writing about Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s work Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men, where he extensively wrote about the State of Nature.
Before an explanation of the state of nature really is given, first this question must be addressed. How can we define the natural law that is supposed to authorize inequality? The matter of the fact is that we cannot provide an accurate answer of knowing equality without knowing man. So, in order to answer this question we cannot reflect on man as he is now, corrupted by civilization, but as man was in its optimal state, the natural state. Now, if we were to take …show more content…

Rousseau explains, “The first man who enclosed a plot of ground and thought of saying, ‘This is mine,’ and found others stupid enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.” With this he is expressing that the development of civilization was actually founded in injustice. So, most of our issue that we experience even now in the present day can be attributed to this fundamental flaw in our system. If we are truly to live in harmony with nature then we need to return to what is natural to mankind. We need regress back to the organic state of man. In all honesty, if we were to ever revert back to the state of nature I believe we would die. Humans have become so dependent on all the artificial development, that without it we wouldn’t know how to overcome and endure. Civilization has become the natural state of

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