3.5 stars would have been very suitable for this book.

When interpreting works that belong to this kind of history with ideological suggestions and concerns, one must never neglect its era. However, the parts that seem inconsistent, like the ones that made me very hesitant.

When describing society and governance, especially the fact that the concept of "dictatorship" is positioned in a different place from today's concept, the expression of its being needed in the right places, and the descriptions that directly point to democracy, such as the meaninglessness of the existence of elected representatives in the selection system with everyone having a sense of duty in an ideal society along with the reality of situations like slavery, seem to be in contradiction with each other. Maybe it's because Rousseau divided the book into 4 parts as he put it himself. When we come to the last parts from the topics he described at the beginning, the examples he gave related to Roman history seem to be moving away from the context.

This sentence, in my simple view, it is important to evaluate according to its era.

Dull AF is a term that is often used to describe something that is extremely boring or uninteresting. It can refer to a variety of things, such as a movie, a book, a job, or a conversation. When something is dull AF, it lacks excitement, energy, and engagement. It can make you feel tired, unmotivated, and even frustrated.

There are many reasons why something might be dull AF. It could be because the subject matter is too dry or technical, the presentation is lackluster, or there is no clear purpose or direction. Sometimes, it can also be due to personal preferences or expectations. For example, if you are interested in action movies and you watch a slow-paced drama, you might find it dull AF.

However, just because something is dull AF doesn't mean it's not valuable or important. Some things that are initially dull AF can become more interesting and engaging as you learn more about them or approach them from a different perspective. It's important to keep an open mind and be willing to give things a chance, even if they seem dull AF at first.

The average man of each new generation has said to himself more clearly and consciously than his predecessor:

"My neighbor is not my enemy, but my friend, and I am his, if we would but mutually recognize the fact. We help each other to a better, fuller, happier living.

And this service might be greatly increased if we would cease to restrict, hamper, and oppress each other. Why can we not agree to let each live his own life, neither of us transgressing the limit that separates our individualities?"

It is by this reasoning that mankind is approaching the real social contract.

This social contract is not, as Rousseau thought, the origin of society, but rather the outcome of a long social experience, the fruit of its follies and disasters.

It is obvious that this contract, this social law, developed to its perfection, excludes all aggression, all violation of equality and liberty, all invasion of every kind.

We should all strive to understand and abide by this social contract, for it is the key to a more harmonious and prosperous society.

Only by treating our neighbors as friends and respecting each other's individuality can we truly achieve a better life for all.

Let us work together to build a world based on mutual respect, cooperation, and love.

One of the unpopular opinions I have is that I don't usually want to read the original works of classical theorists. I think you understand their theories and their work better when an expert explains to you what they said, why they said it, what the background was, what the reactions were, etc. I came into contact with the social contract as a student at the university, where, of course, the material did not include the original text. So I learned about it through lectures and textbooks. Reading it now, I can say that if I hadn't had those lectures, I wouldn't have understood and wouldn't have been able to identify the essence of Rousseau's theory. So in part, I think I was right.

However, the book had a lot to offer me in terms of my knowledge of political systems and how they work. How power is justified by the respective leader and what views there were on the role of monarchs, oligarchies, and democracies. It also had an interesting prediction about the fate of Russia that surprised me with its accuracy.

The courage of the author in writing such a book in that time when the royal rule and aristocratic control prevailed in various aspects of life in France must be emphasized.

The French Revolution made this book like its Bible. It laid the principles of human rights and governance systems not only in France but throughout Europe.

Criticizing absolute rule, the control of a certain class over affairs, and slavery, all these ideas make this thinker visionary and ahead of his time.

Also, his criticism of the exploitation of religion in controlling governance. Religion should be a national religion to govern, not for a particular country, but rather comprehensive for all countries that follow this religion. And it should be a spiritual religion for the people only and not used to control governance and people.

It is a wonderful book.

Please provide the article that needs to be rewritten and expanded so that I can help you.

What are laws? Instead of starting with this question, Rousseau begins with the social contract, which is the first law that emerged when people came together. From there, he examines laws, the people, and forms of government one by one.

Laws play a crucial role in society. They are the rules and regulations that govern our behavior and interactions. Without laws, there would be chaos and disorder. Rousseau believed that laws should be based on the general will of the people, rather than the interests of a particular group or individual.

The social contract is the foundation of Rousseau's theory of law. It is an agreement among the people to form a society and abide by its laws. According to Rousseau, the social contract gives the people the right to participate in the making of laws and to hold the government accountable.

In conclusion, Rousseau's ideas about laws and the social contract have had a significant impact on political philosophy and the development of modern democratic societies. His work continues to be studied and debated today.

For more details about the book, please visit http://kitapokurum.blogspot.com/2018/...

"The Social Contract" is part of that red thread of original texts of political philosophy that I keep reading: I was and remain convinced that it can be an important tool for developing a mature idea also of contemporary politics.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau has never convinced me, not even when I studied him at school. I have never found in this figure either the cold and effective lucidity of Montesquieu or Montaigne, nor the amused sarcasm in the service of the civic sense typical of Voltaire. Rousseau I have always seen as an idealist, a blind man who does not want to see, an exalted, a romantic in the pejorative sense of the term, in short. The reading of his most important work in recent years has confirmed this youthful impression of mine: Rousseau marks the passage point from enlightened despotism to democracy without being up to it. The result will be the Terror.

At the end of the fair, what is wrong? Tito Magri explains it very well in his introduction, but Albert Camus explains it even better in his "The Rebel" (in my opinion, "The Rebel" is the first book that any reader should read to approach political philosophy): the social contract that gives birth to the state cannot be thought of as a超越 of a state of nature in which the conflict of man against man makes survival impossible. This is because such a state could not be either egalitarian or democratic. How could those who come out victorious from the conflicts of the state of nature be convinced to totally alienate the advantages of their victory to give birth to an egalitarian state? It is a question without an answer, exactly as insoluble is the ambivalence between Liberty and equality (fraternity in politics is a fairy tale for children that no one has ever believed in), between which the French Revolution oscillated and from which the great evils of contemporary Europe, liberalism and communism, were born.

Among other things, from here it is also understood why instead Hobbes felt perfectly at ease within the contractualist theory. The Hobbesian social state is a powerful Leviathan that imposes itself out of necessity given the perverse human nature, and does not care about either equality or even less about liberty. If enlightened despotism still finds room for manoeuvre within this loop, democracy marks the end of contractualism.

The contradiction between contractualism and democracy (which is translated into the contradiction between liberty and equality) is so crushing that in fact Rousseau throughout "The Social Contract" struggles to find a way out without finding it. At the moment when he begins to define the organisms of the state, the conflict situations of the state of nature seem to cease to exist, replaced by a not well-defined "Situation of need" that only with collaboration can man overcome. Dreams. All of history shows that the situations of anarchy and material need that always precede the birth of new forms of state never prescind from the conflict situation, which excludes the coexistence of equality and liberty (the winners must be FORCED to be equal, as the communists will well understand).

The very governing institutions that hold power in the Rousseauian state suffer terribly from this unresolved dichotomy. The sovereign power in the democratic republic is made of nothing. One speaks of a hypothetical "general will" that should arise from the conjunction of the individual wills of the citizens, and that guarantees the univocity of its action simply by dealing not with specific questions but only with general principles, leaving the power of management in the hands of the executive power. What hypothetical bulwark could protect at this point the citizens from the tyranny of a corrupt executive power (power corrupts and gives habituation, as has always been known), Rousseau does not explain. The consequence? The right that Maximilien Robespierre will arrogate to himself of being the only interpreter of the general will in the Jacobin dictatorship that will embody Rousseau's "democratic" state, and that will roll the heads of those who dissent and break the social contract. In the effort to be totally egalitarian, the Jacobin dictatorship will shed rivers of blood. And a century and a half later the communist regimes will do the same.

Albert Camus has explained it well: the conflict between equality and liberty is total, and he who hypothesizes contracts that give birth to democratic states lies to himself. "All political regimes are oligarchic," the socialist parliamentarian Lelio Basso will say in the middle of the twentieth century. A general will that does not submit to an institution that regulates it by the hand of a ruling class is condemned to bow its head before a tyrant. Moreover, it is one of the reasons why I distrust the Five Star Movement and its idea of one man one vote in politics. It is a thought that leads to tyranny, and I'm not even entirely sure that Casaleggio doesn't know it (I challenge that many nostalgics of fascism like this political movement).

It is paradoxical that precisely the difficulties and distortions of a political idea constitute the greatness of the book that exposes it. Reading Rousseau's "The Social Contract" makes a huge step forward in understanding the crisis and the end of contractualism (the end of the feudal system gives birth to the desire for democracy, but democracies are not born from contracts), in understanding the nightmare of the Jacobin Terror and its guillotines, in understanding how a ruling class anyway corrupt (even if as little as possible) is in reality a necessary evil. Rousseau's unforgivable mistake lies perhaps only in confirming after Hobbes that the use of violence and state murder are legitimate tools of government. We have already said the use that Robespierre will make of this beautiful idea, with the aggravating circumstance that already in those years Cesare Beccaria and many others were beginning to deny the death penalty.

In the end, it is an obligatory book, but not only in a negative sense. Jean-Jacques Rousseau shows to have an awareness of the functioning of democracies that is impressive for the nineteenth century (a century in which democracies did not exist). The need for the separation of powers and the superiority of parliament over the government; the tension between liberal right and egalitarian left, the warning not to try to regulate all of civil life through laws for fear of the birth of a suffocating bureaucracy, the distinction in war between states and war between peoples, in "The Social Contract" we find them all. And many Italian governors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would have done better to read these things twice, if the good of Italy interested them at all.

In conclusion, "The Social Contract" puts in black and white the end of an era (Contractualism and enlightened despotism) and the birth of another (the revolution and democracy); and all its difficulties only explain this fracture. The real drama is that Western politics has never been able to completely overcome that fracture, as the blood of the Jacobin Terror but also of the communist and fascist dictatorships, but also of the horrors of the liberal peripheries, is there to prove. Reading books like this would be important at least to make an attempt.

I am from the diverse paths of Western thought.

Rousseau took it much further than before.

And we still need a book on our hands.

But it rises on our living heritage.

Western thought has a long and complex history, with many different thinkers and ideas contributing to its development. Rousseau was one of the most important figures in this history, and his ideas had a profound impact on subsequent generations. Even today, we continue to study and be influenced by his work. We need to have a good understanding of this heritage in order to build on it and continue to progress. By looking at the diverse paths of Western thought, we can gain a better appreciation of the richness and complexity of our intellectual history.

**Du Contrat Social = Principes du droit Politique = The Social Contract = Principles of Political Rights, Jean-Jacques Rousseau**

The Social Contract, originally published as On the Social Contract; or, Principles of Political Rights by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1762, is a significant work. Rousseau theorized about the ideal way to establish a political community in the face of the issues of commercial society, which he had earlier identified in his Discourse on Inequality (1754). This book had a profound impact, inspiring political reforms and revolutions in Europe, especially in France. It argued against the notion that monarchs were divinely empowered to legislate. Instead, Rousseau asserted that only the people, as the sovereign, possess that all-powerful right.

Rousseau's work is based on two fundamental pillars. Firstly, he believed that the state of nature had been destroyed by civil society. Secondly, he argued that a civil society is acceptable and sustainable only if it is based on a social contract. He desired a fair and just contract that includes the common good and is shaped by the general will of the people. Otherwise, a people who are subject to their own will and desires will not obey anything. A one-sided contract by governments means the deprivation of the will of the individuals in society and has no legal value.
In his book, Rousseau criticized the special interests that conflict with the formation of society. He also explained the moral problem based on social structures. His argument for establishing a fundamental contract, by replacing moral equality and legality with a contract and legality that nature has caused among humans due to physical inequality, is a critical view. He was aware of the world's situation in the 18th century and emphasized the importance of a moral unity at all times. He believed that society forms a unified whole where individuals are interconnected. To defend this view, he used various arguments. His arguments, in several fields such as human nature, religion, morality, and law, revolve around the main idea that the various interests shape the "social relationship." Therefore, there is a common denominator, and if there were no such thing to which common interests are related, no society would exist. Based on this common interest, society must be managed, and the "social contract" has effects without which it is impossible for society to continue its life.
Rousseau's argument takes a logical path starting from the earliest societies and their only natural form, which is the family. He tried to show that with the fulfillment of the children's need for their parents, the natural relationship changes, and all members of the family become equally independent. To reach this point, he concluded that if the members of the family continue to stay together, it is not natural but optional, and the family is maintained only by a contract. This common freedom is a result of human nature. According to Rousseau, the family is the first model of society, where the father plays the role of the ruler, and the people play the role of his children, and all come into the world freely and equally. According to his view, it is a transactional relationship that not only includes specific citizens but also relates to the creation of a connection between the classes of society, which is defined as a social principle and is a "real foundation" for "social relations" that continues to expand in Rousseau's "The Social Contract."
Another important topic is the interdependence of the members of society. According to Rousseau, if the government is like a person whose life depends on the unity of the members of society, and if its most important thing is its own survival, it also needs a public force to be able to move each group in proportion to others. Since nature gives all humans equal abilities, by accepting society as a natural structure, society will also be capable. Rousseau also considered the concept of rights. He believed in three types of rights: "citizens' rights," "ruler's rights," and "natural rights," which should be based on the characteristics of humans. His argument is that all criminals who revolt against social rights are regarded as troublemakers and traitors. By violating the laws, they become members of society and are even in a state of rebellion against it. He concluded that such enmity cannot be a moral individual. For him, pardoning a criminal is a special contract. He called those pardons "natural law," without which society cannot continue its life. Therefore, morality is necessary for a society where everyone respects the rights of others. After presenting his arguments, Rousseau returned to the view that the establishment of a society requires a change in its members. Therefore, the individual entity of each human must be changed to the entity that each of us has received from nature. This change is an explanatory for the formation of society.

The book details important and precise aspects in the construction of the modern state and society, as well as rights and duties that follow from rulers and the ruled. It vividly embodies the concerns of this profound philosopher, who was preoccupied with the problems of his era and the struggle he waged for equality, freedom, and social justice in the face of the tyranny of absolute rule and the tutelage imposed by the Church or any religious institution on man.

He emphasized in all his books and works his rejecting and indignant stance towards the political, social, and cultural conditions that characterized French society during the 18th century.

The philosopher who often acknowledged the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on his political thinking said: "There was a time when I considered the search for truth alone sufficient to be the honor of humanity... and I despised the ordinary man who knew nothing... and Rousseau led me on the right path... I explored this most general rule and learned to respect human nature, and I considered myself much less useful than the simple worker, for I did not think that my philosophy could help people prove their human rights."

After this, Rousseau faced many difficulties, expulsions, and rejections in all European countries and lived a difficult life until the end of his days because of his ideas, which were the spark that scientifically and practically established the foundation of the French Revolution, which at its core expressed the cries of man against the tyranny of oppression and dictatorship.

Rousseau regarded property as a negative factor in human history, as the ownership of land gives rise to inequality and leads to the conflict of interests, exploitation, and slavery.

From this, his political thought was characterized by continuous construction, as he said: "I would be ashamed to speak about my subject without proving its importance. And if one of them asked me whether I am a prince or a legislator to write about politics? I would answer that I am neither, and for that I write about politics. If I were a prince or a legislator, I would not waste my time saying what should be done. I would do it or I would remain silent."

He said at the beginning of his book on inequality: "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains."

Therefore, for Rousseau, the social contract is the essential condition for any legitimate authority, which indicates the transition of historical development from a state of nature to a civil society.

He said that what man loses as a result of the social contract is the freedom he enjoyed in nature and the unlimited right... and what he gains in return is civil freedom, by which he acquires moral freedom... for submitting to desire is slavery, and submitting to the law that we ourselves have prescribed is freedom.

And thus he places man and society in a state of transition from the natural stage to the civil stage.

The aim of the social contract is to ensure the preservation of the lives of the contracting parties and the defense of their rights against the encroachment of others. Rousseau said: "Every law that the people have not personally consented to is, by the very fact, null and void; it is not a law."

Rousseau, who, like other French thinkers, participated in sowing the seeds of vengeance against the tyranny of the ruling class in France in his time, is one of the pillars who planted the concepts of individual rights and human rights in the modern era.

**The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau**

The Social Contract, or Du Contrat Social in French, was written by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It was translated by Akram Zeaiter.

Rousseau famously said, "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains."

The concept of the social contract refers to an actual or implied agreement between two parties, such as the government and the people, or the ruler and the ruled. It defines the rights and obligations of each group. This idea has been around since ancient times when human life began in a state of chaos and disorder. The human mind then established an agreement or contract to organize society and government.

Rousseau's theory of the social contract suggests that there are a set of moral principles and obligations that are shared among a group of people in order to form a society. These obligations are part of an agreement among the individuals, along with the determination of the characteristics of their environment. The term "social contract" dates back to the emergence of philosophy and is closely related to both political and moral theory.

Rousseau believed that in the state of nature, people lived in a state of chaos. He argued that the establishment of laws was necessary to increase people's sense of responsibility and morality, as well as to strengthen their civil commitment. The goal of the social contract, according to Rousseau, is to create a political system based on the social contract, where individuals must give up some of their freedoms and rights for the sake of the general will.

The book is divided into four parts. The first part discusses the early societies and the right of the stronger. The second part focuses on the general will and sovereignty. The third part deals with government and the division of governments. The fourth part explores the general will further.

Some of the questions raised in the book include: How does human nature affect politics and government? What is the social contract? What are our obligations towards it? Is the general will infallible? What are the limits of sovereignty? What are the characteristics of good governance? How does a breakdown of the social contract lead to the death of the nation?

Rousseau's ideas have had a significant impact on political philosophy and continue to be relevant today.