In this manner, Rousseau impeaches Hobbes and Locke for failing to understand the true
human nature by ascribing to man innate rationality. As he puts it ‘They spoke about savage
man and they described civil man’. 15 By asserting that in this animal state humans had no
concept, hence, no fear of death, Rousseau refutes Hobbes’ argument about fear of death
being the most forceful aspect of human psychology. In the same vein, he attacks Locke on
the grounds of underesti mating man’s abilities to provide for himself in a solitary life and on
his claims on the existence of prolonged sexual and familial relations in the state of nature. 16
Also, contrary to Hobbes’ assertion that when man does not know good is evil, Rousseau
maintains that man in his pure State of Nature is good and that he has thereby justified
nature. 17 And good not in the moral sense but rather meaning simple since ‘one could say
that savages are not evil precisely because they do not know what it is to be good’. 18
Therefore, it is the formation of societies that degenerated man (who is now everywhere in
chains) by cumbering him with the burden of moral passions whose driving force is self-
interest. In that respect, Rousseau shares the same conviction with his predecessor in social
contract theory that this condition of self-interest and war must be overcome by a
convention.
Here lies the first influence of human nature in his theory. Although, for Rousseau,
human race of one age is not the same as another and the soul and human passions, which
can never be adequately satisfied, change their nature, this does not abolish that the current
condition is still part of human nature which he aims to alter. Thence lies the second
connection since altering means a promise that the human condition under his social contract
15 Rousseau, pp. 102-103. 16 John T. Scott, ‘The Theodicy of the Second Discourse: The "Pure State of Nature" and Rousseau's Political Thought’, The American Political Science Review, 86.3 (1992), 696-711 (pp. 700-703).
17 Rousseau, p. 193. 18 Rousseau, p. 128.
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