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Why Was Rousseau Important During The Enlightenment

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Rousseau was an influential figure during the Enlightenment because of his idea of general will and natural innocence. General will is the idea of people having more influence on governmental decisions and how a nation or society is run. There are many reasons why this was important during the Enlightenment and is important today. Rousseau’s ideas reshaped the concept of government and society for years to come. The first reason why Rousseau reshaped politics is because he was the first to suggest that people were naturally decent people, and were not evil themselves. He believed that this innocence was tarnished by social issues, cultural problems, and politics. His solution was a society that had some controls, but the controls were to be just enough to maintain order. Also, he proposed the idea of freely elected government, much like our government is today. His main idea is expressed in this statement from Book 1 of his book The Social Contract: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains” How was this idea influential? Before Rousseau published The Social Contract and his other works, people believed that observation was the key to knowledge. A new idea arose called rationalism, in which the basic idea was (and still is in many cases) that the foundation of knowledge is logic and reason. Before this idea, people were just expected to watch society and events as they happened. They …show more content…

“It is wrong therefore to wish to make political institutions so strong as to render it impossible to suspend their operation.” He believed that a government could be too powerful as well as too weak. A government that is too powerful will force people’s allegiance and affect the general will. People will be told what to think, and therefore be misled to believe that whatever the government does is right. This would affect their votes and decisions, if they were allowed to make any in the first

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