Whether the restoration of the arts and sciences has had the effect of purifying or corrupting morals?

- Man is by nature good and that only our institutions have made him bad
- Institutions = Education = arts & sciences (born from our vices)
- Arts & sciences (Astronomy from superstition, Eloquence from ambition hate flattery, Physics from vain curiosity,
Moral philosophy from human pride)
- The attack on sciences continues as Rousseau articulates how they fail to contribute anything positive to morality.
They take time from the activities that are truly important, such as love of country, friends, and the unfortunate.

Rousseau argues that they create a false sense of need for luxury, so that science becomes simply a means for making
our lives easier and more pleasurable, but not morally better.
Artists, Rousseau says, wish first and foremost to be applauded. Their work comes from a sense of wanting to be praised
as superior to others.

Social Contract
Agreement with which a person enters into civil society
Contract binds people into a community that exists for mutual preservation
People sacrifice physical freedom of being able to do what they please and gain civil freedom of being able to think ad act
rationally and morally
Entering into social contract can we become fully human

Freedom/Liberty
State of nature – people have physical freedom, actions are not restrained but they are a little more than animals, slaves
to their own instinct and impulses
Modern societies – lack physical freedom, obey an absolutist kind of government
Social contract secures civil freedom – freedom is tempered by an agreement not to harm citizens but leads people to me
moral and rational
Civil freedom is superior to physical freedom, people are not slaves to their impulses

Sovereign
Voice of the law, absolute authority within a state
Sovereign as all the acting citizens acting collectively. Together they voice the general will and laws of the state

General will
Will of the sovereign that aims at the common good
It expresses what is best for the state as a whole

Common good
What is in the best interests of society as a whole
What the social contract is meant to achieve, and it is what the general will aims at

Will of all
The sum total of each individual's particular will
Differ from general will, in a state where people value their personal interests over the interests of the state

State of Nature
What human life would be like without the shaping influence of society
In the state of nature, we are free to do whatever we want, but our desires and impulses are not tempered by reason.
We have physical freedom but we lack morality and rationality

Civil Society
Opposite of the state of nature: it is what we enter into when we agree to live in a community. With civil society comes
civil freedom and the social contract.
Learn to be rational and moral, and to temper our brute instincts.

“Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains”

What Rousseau is saying in this quote is that people deserve to be free but that they are chained by the societies in
which they live. What he is trying to do in this book is to discuss when it can be legitimate for a society to put its people
in "chains."
For Rousseau, a society may legitimately coerce its people only when they agree to be ruled by that society.
Amour propre
Self love that centered around pride, jealousy and vanity
Compare themselves to others and created identities solely by reference to their neighbours
Stopped thinking bout what they wanted and instead imitated other people enterting into competitions

Amour de soi is a natural form of self-love in that it does not depend on others. Rousseau claims that by our nature,
each of us has this natural feeling of love toward ourselves. We naturally look after our own preservation and interests.
By contrast, amour-propre is an unnatural self-love that is essentially relational. That is, it comes about in the ways in
which human beings view themselves in comparison to other human beings. It is the source of vice and misery, and
results in human beings basing their own self worth on their feeling of superiority over others.