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Essay / John Locke and Rousseau's theory of freedom - 1201
At the beginning of the Social Contract, Rousseau declares that “man is born free and everywhere he is chained” (Rousseau, 1762). This sentence perhaps shows the perplexing state of Rousseau's subject under discussion: men are supposed to be born to have certain rights, but men cannot leave the natural state, and at the same time they are in certain social relations particular. At this point, Rousseau takes up some of Locke's ideologies in that Locke held that natural law is an innate and inadvisable right of men. However, Rousseau does not stay at the same level of thinking, on the contrary he attempts to go beyond Locke's idea of natural law. According to Rousseau, for men to have social relations, they must give up a certain freedom, which logically means that, under Rousseau's ideas, there are possibilities that men's freedom will be strangled. By establishing his own reasoning on the social contract, Rousseau attempts to eliminate this