He's got that a bit wrong, government doesn't grant rights, they just take them away.
So being French he also has the right to surrender (in the first 20 minutes of a war), eat cheese, smoke really stinky cigarettes, break wind, and drink wine. We got a couple thousand Occupoopers who should move to France and live the good life.
He should read John Locke, then Charles de Montesquieu, then Alexis de Tocqueville, then shut the f*** up, then sit the f*** down!
This is one of the "thinkers" who influenced Marx and the radical socialists who came after him. Didn't he eventually go insane? Shocker there.
Eventually?
Good point.
I thought it was God who granted my rights? So I actually get them from a frenchman, eh? Good to know, and now I know why things are such a mess now!
"God is the state, the state is god." Been there, done that, went to the gulag.
Interesting site, well worth further exploration. But yeah, scary stuff. I agree that in forming ourselves into a civil society there is an implicit social contract under which we cede a small amount of our individual interests for the common good, but I would assert that it is an entirely voluntary process and very narrow, not "'the absolute surrender of the individual with all his rights and all his powers to the community as a whole'; as the textbook over there states.
The more power we cede to the government, the less we have for ourselves.
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He's got that a bit wrong, government doesn't grant rights, they just take them away.
So being French he also has the right to surrender (in the first 20 minutes of a war), eat cheese, smoke really stinky cigarettes, break wind, and drink wine. We got a couple thousand Occupoopers who should move to France and live the good life.
He should read John Locke, then Charles de Montesquieu, then Alexis de Tocqueville, then shut the f*** up, then sit the f*** down!
This is one of the "thinkers" who influenced Marx and the radical socialists who came after him. Didn't he eventually go insane? Shocker there.
Eventually?
Good point.
I thought it was God who granted my rights? So I actually get them from a frenchman, eh? Good to know, and now I know why things are such a mess now!
"God is the state, the state is god." Been there, done that, went to the gulag.
Interesting site, well worth further exploration. But yeah, scary stuff. I agree that in forming ourselves into a civil society there is an implicit social contract under which we cede a small amount of our individual interests for the common good, but I would assert that it is an entirely voluntary process and very narrow, not "'the absolute surrender of the individual with all his rights and all his powers to the community as a whole'; as the textbook over there states.
The more power we cede to the government, the less we have for ourselves.
Yeah Rousseau can kiss my behind.