POLSCI 2O06 Lecture Notes - Lecture 30: Free Republic
24 Sep 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Rousseau himself was from geneva, switzerland: geneva was an incredibly backward, highly religious, very small and very poor place, not under a king, it was a free republic. He managed to pick up an education by using rich people"s libraries: education in not just the classics, but also in music, he wrote music, wrote an opera, also europe"s first best selling novelist of the 18th century. 2nd discourse: he entered another competition 5 years later. Within europe there is a lot of literature circulating about people who live primitively: they were interested people who seem to be closer to nature. Rousseau is interested in what is our nature: interested in people closer to nature than the europeans are. Whereas hobbes and locke think nature as something as thankfully we have pulled ourselves out of: for rousseau, the closer to nature the better.
