Apologies for Oppression

Critique of Rousseau’s Social Contract, part 12

In this part, we’ll be covering Book 3, chapters 7 and 8. Chapter 7 is a fairly short and straightforward set of definitions marred by Rousseau’s trademark vagueness and pseudo-mathematical gibberish. Chapter 8 is, as best I can tell, a monstrous apology for several of the major problems with colonization.

Get full show notes here.

Rousseau explains that only certain people can handle liberty. We’ve all heard the arguments that only a virtuous people can maintain liberty, but Rousseau takes it a step further, stating that free peoples should hold the best lands, and other groups are used to relative poverty, so there’s no need for colonizers to deal with them on a voluntary basis, so long as they aren’t made even more impoverished.

It’s a massively confusing chapter for several reasons: Rousseau’s shaky connection between the applicability of liberty and climate of all things; his insistence on measuring all government functions along a very limited number of axes; and his inability to think beyond autarkic and subsistence-farming economy.

This video is available on Odysee, YouTube, and BitChute.

Return to the table of contents for this series.

References:

Intro quote by Frederic Bastiat
https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/bastiat-the-collected-works-of-frederic-bastiat-vol-1-the-man-and-the-statesman-the-correspondence-and-articles-on-politics

Intro music by Noru, courtesy Dova Syndrome
https://dova-s.jp/EN/_contents/author/profile437.html

Thumbnail art from a painting by Charles Davidson Bell
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Charles_Bell_-_Jan_van_Riebeeck_se_aankoms_aan_die_Kaap.jpg