Social Contract

Rousseau was an irresponsible rogue who treated his bastard children shocking bad, however his writings got taken seriously.  Burke got it right; Society is an implicit contract, a living contract between the dead, the living and the unborn. It is our duty to keep England in good heart for our descendants. It is a duty grossly breached by Blair, War Criminal, destroyer of liberty, on the make, Brown, financial hooligan, Asset stripper, malevolent weirdo, on the make, Cameron, a slimy salesman on the make, Jack Straw a Stalinist Jew et cetera. The Wikipedia puts a very different view, one which sounds much like an excuse for tyranny. Read for yourself. Think for yourself. Decide for yourself. Before taking the Wiki seriously on this one look at #Bellum omnium contra omnes, said by Hobbes, he of the Leviathan (1651) was on the ball long before the Wiki turned up.

On The Social Contract ex Wiki
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Of The Social Contract, Or Principles of Political Right (Du contrat social ou Principes du droit politique) (1762) by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is the book in which Rousseau theorized about the best way in which to set up a political community in the face of the problems of commercial society which he had already identified in his Discourse on Inequality (1754)...........

The stated aim of the Social Contract is to determine whether there can be a legitimate political authority. In order to escape from either a conflictual state of nature or illegitimate forms of tyranny, man must enter into a Social Contract with others. In this social contract, everyone will be free because they all forfeit the same amount of rights and impose the same duties on all. Rousseau argues that it is illogical for a man to surrender his freedom for slavery; thus the participants must have a right to choose the laws under which they live. Although the contract imposes new laws, including those safeguarding and regulating property, a person can exit it at any time (except in a time of need, for this is desertion), and is again as free as when he was born.
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You might be disposed to feel that Rousseau was what Lenin called a Useful Idiot; a better term is Dangerous Idiot. NB that he was highly influential because of his ideas. So were Karl Marx & dear little Adolf.

 

Social Contract ex Wiki
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In political philosophy the social contract' or political contract" is a theory or model, originating during the Age of Enlightenment, that typically addresses the questions of the origin of society and the legitimacy of the authority of the state over the individual.^[1] Social contract arguments typically posit that individuals have consented, either explicitly or tacitly, to surrender some of their freedoms and submit to the authority of the ruler or magistrate (or to the decision of a majority), in exchange for protection of their remaining rights. The question of the relation between natural and legal rights, therefore, is often an aspect of social contract theory. The Social Contract, created by Jean Jacques Rousseau was a book about government reforms and how it should change to suit the people instead of the government.

Although the antecedents of social contract theory are found in antiquity, in Greek and Stoic philosophy and Roman and Canon Law, as well as in the Biblical idea of the covenant, the heyday of the social contract was the mid-17th to early 19th centuries, when it emerged as the leading doctrine of political legitimacy. The starting point for most social contract theories is a heuristic examination of the human condition absent from any political order that Thomas Hobbes termed the “state of nature”.^[2] In this condition, individuals' actions are bound only by their personal power and conscience. From this shared starting point, social contract theorists seek to demonstrate, in different ways, why a rational individual would voluntarily consent to give up his or her natural freedom to obtain the benefits of political order.

Hugo Grotius (1625), Thomas Hobbes (1651), Samuel Pufendorf (1673), John Locke (1689), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762), and Immanuel Kant (1797) are among the most prominent of 17th- and 18th-century theorists of social contract and natural rights. Each solved the problem of political authority in a different way. Grotius posited that individual human beings had natural rights; Hobbes asserted that humans consent to abdicate their rights in favor of the absolute authority of government (whether monarchial or parliamentary); Pufendorf disputed Hobbes's equation of a state of nature with war.^[3]

Locke believed that natural rights were inalienable, and that the rule of God therefore superseded government authority; and Rousseau believed that democracy (self-rule) was the best way of ensuring the general welfare while maintaining individual freedom under the rule of law. The Lockean concept of the social contract was invoked in the United States Declaration of Independence. Social contract theories were eclipsed in the 19th century in favor of utilitarianism, Hegelianism, and Marxism, and were revived in the 20th, notably in the form of a thought experiment by John Rawls.
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We have seen where Marxism led. Karl Marx was influenced by Hegel, a dismal rogue who also helped Adolf Hitler's political development. Should we take them seriously? Yes, just the way we do with Joe Stalin, Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Nero, the Anti-Christ, Blair et al.

 

A Righter Shade Of Green
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This explains why crimes committed in left-wing causes tend to be excused or overlooked, while misdemeanours on the Right, however identified, are impossible to live down. Compare the careers of Georg Lukács [ a Jew ] and Martin Heidegger [ German ]. Lukács was a very clever literary critic, who took part in the Communist revolution in Hungary after World War I and joined the government of Béla Kun [ also a Jew ]. As a political commissar, he was responsible for purges, executions, and cultural suppression. When Kun’s government was overthrown, he fled to Vienna, returning after World War II to assist the revolutionary Communist government in purifying Hungary of dissident intellectuals. His career is one long history of crime and deception, yet he has been consistently revered as a leading left-wing thinker: the person who showed us how to apply Marxism to literary criticism and how to understand literature as a genuinely revolutionary force.

Heidegger was also involved in totalitarian movements, though never in government. He joined the Nazi Party and was made a rector of his university by the Nazis. After the war, he was disgraced for this and has never really been rehabilitated. Given the left-wing myth that Nazism was “on the right,” the explanation is simple: Heidegger belonged to the wrong set of criminals. In response to Rousseau's doctrine of the Social Contract, Burke agreed that society is, indeed, a contract. But it is a contract between the living, the unborn, and the dead. We mistreat the unborn when we take away the legacy that they are entitled to inherit, and we mistreat the dead by regarding ourselves as the sole proprietors of the things that they have left to us. In ignoring and despising the dead, we traduce the unborn: such, for Burke, was the lesson of the French Revolution, and it is a lesson repeated in our times by the revolutionary movements of the 20th century.
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There are some very clever liars out there manipulating us through corrupt politicians. Do your own thinking before believing any of them.

 

Bellum omnium contra omnes  ex Wiki
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Bellum omnium contra omnes, a Latin phrase meaning "the war of all against all", is the description that Thomas Hobbes gives to human existence in the state of nature thought experiment that he conducts in De Cive (1642) and Leviathan (1651). The common modern English usage is a war of "each against all" where war is rare and terms such as "competition" or "struggle" are more common.^[1]

Hobbes' use:-
In Leviathan itself,^[2] Hobbes speaks of 'warre of every one against every one',^[3] of 'a war [...] of every man against every man'^[4] and of 'a perpetuall warre of every man against his neighbour',^[2][5] but the Latin phrase occurs in De Cive:

[...] ostendo primo conditionem hominum extra societatem civilem, quam conditionem appellare liceat statum naturæ, aliam non esse quam bellum omnium contra omnes; atque in eo bello jus esse omnibus in omnia.^[6].....................

In chapter XIII of Leviathan,^[12] Hobbes explains the concept with these words:

Hereby it is manifest that during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called War; and such a war as is of every man against every man.^[13] [...] In such condition there is no place for Industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continual Fear, and danger of violent death; And the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.^[14]

The thought experiment places people in a pre-social condition, and theorizes what would happen in such a condition. According to Hobbes, the outcome is that people choose to enter a Social Contract, giving up some of their liberties in order to enjoy peace............

Hobbes distinguishes between war and battle: war does not only consist of actual battle; it points to the situation in which one knows there is a 'Will to contend by Battle'.^[15]...........

Sometimes the phrase is used by Marx and Engels.

• In On the Jewish Question (1843-4):

Religion has become the spirit of civil society, of the sphere of egoism, of bellum omnium contra omnes.^[17]

See also
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An interesting, important idea.