Rousseau is commonly called a `radical` thinker. Does the term plausibly describe his approach to law?

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Rousseau is commonly called a `radical` thinker. Does the term plausibly describe his approach to law?

Rousseau was the presenter of challenging idea about human beings, nature, politics and history. Whether he was found interesting or disturbing, it is impossible not to be affected by his ideas. In this essay it is necessary to explore whether these ideas make him radical as some would suggest or merely makes him , like other thinkers a renowned philosopher, with ideas that he believed would make the world a better place.

Rousseau was very definitive about his views of how the world should have been, which is why he was most likely labelled a radical thinker, he heavily attacked the new science of politics that was headed by the likes of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke.

In the Discourse on Inequality he rejected the previous attempts to account for the origins of government describing what human beings must have been like in the state of nature. Hobbes had recounted the progress of mankind from a `horrible state of war` with each other and Locke’ had said it was a `very precarious, very unsafe` existence that had led to a more secure and organised way of life.

Rousseau argued that writers before him had been unable to understand the natural conditions of man, because they `carried over to the state of nature` ideas they had acquired in society, they spoke about the savage man but were actually describing the civil `man`. For Rousseau, the earliest human was a simple animal like creature `wholly wrapped up in the feelings of [his own] present existence`, he was not inherently dangerous to his fellows as Hobbes suggested. Rather he has led a solitary indolent life, satisfying his basic psychical needs, mating casually without formal ties and possessed a natural feeling of compassion for the suffering of other conscious beings that made him unwilling to harm others unless his own self-preservation was at stake. He was not naturally endowed with reason and existed in a state of pure being, for Rousseau then, the step into civil society from the primitive state represented a `loss of real felicity` rather than a unambiguous step forward.

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For Rousseau what had drawn humans out of their primitive state was not the agreement for self-preservation as Hobbes and Locke though, but rather a quality that he calls `perfectibility` according to him previous thinkers such as Hobbes and Locke, did not pay enough attention to the distinctive human capacity to change and develop, to transform oneself. In other words, they failed to consider the implications of the fact that human nature itself can to an extent shape history.

It is important to note here that although it could be said that this is an aspect of ...

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