Heritage Quote by Niall Ferguson

However, it was the great 18th century social philosophers John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau who brought the concept of a social contract…

— Simon Mainwaring

The theory of social contracts extends as far back as Plato. However, it was the great 18th century social philosophers John Locke, Thomas Hobbes,…

— Simon Mainwaring

“Contra Hobbes and Locke, Rousseau refused to believe that the obligations to civil society could be derived from self-interest, the preservation of life or…

— Pankaj Mishra

“Meanwhile, two other great currents in political thought, had a decisive significance on the development of socialist ideas: Liberalism, which had powerfully stimulated advanced…

— Rudolf Rocker

“In reality, the source of all these differences is, that the savage lives within himself, while the social man lives constantly outside himself, and…

— C.J. Box

“There are two ways to make people richer, reasoned Rousseau: to give them more money or to restrain their desires.”

— Alain de Botton

“It is passing strange that our philosophers of the Revolutionary period should have formed their conception of a free society by reference to societies…

— Bertrand De Jouvenel

“Though Rousseau writes about the General Will in terms of liberty, it is essentially an authoritarian instrument, an early adumbration of Lenin’s ‘democratic centralism’.…

— Paul Johnson

“Wasting the valuable time of others, thought Rousseau, was a bureaucrat’s ultimate revenge.”

— Daniel Silva

It was Rousseau who was largely responsible for the problem by giving currency to the idea that freedom can exist without responsibility and discipline.

— Colin Wilson

“What’s crucial about Rousseau, and many of his ideological successors, is that politics was always personal for him, unlike those whom Tocqueville faulted for…

— Pankaj Mishra

“Most of us know, now, that Rousseau was wrong: that man, when you knock his chains off, sets up the death camps. Soon we…

— Randall Jarrell