Rousseau And The Ideal Society Essays (202 words) - Deists

Rousseau And The Ideal Society Rousseaue and the Ideal Society Has the progress of the arts and sciences contributed more to the corruption or purification of morals? Rousseau criticized social institutions for having corrupted the essential goodness of nature and the human heart. Rousseaue believed that by becoming civilized, society has actually become worse because good people are made unhappy and are corrupted by their experiences in society.. He viewed society as articficial and corrupt and that the furthering of society results in the continuing unhappiness of man. He also argued that the advancement of art and science had not been beneficial to mankind. He proposed that the progress of knowledge had made governments more powerful, and crushed individual liberty. He concluded that material progress had actually undermined the possibility of sincere friendship, replacing it with jealousy, fear and suspicion. In his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality he elaborated on the process of how social institutions must have developed into the extreme unequal rights of aristocratic France where the nobility and the church lived in luxury while the poor peasants had to pay most of the taxes. And in his Discourse on Political Economy he suggested remedies for these injustices. Political Issues