The author of The Social Contract was an influential 18th-century Enlightenment philosopher and proud citizen of the city-state of Geneva. In this book, which builds on his earlier Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau attempts to…
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Hugo Grotius
Grotius was an early 17th-century Dutch political philosopher who is best remembered for his theory of international law. Rousseau contrasts his own picture of the legitimatestate to that of Grotius, who thought that the…
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Thomas Hobbes
Hobbes was a prominent 17th-century British philosopher who is best remembered for helping formulate the theory of the social contract in his book Leviathan. Hobbes famously argued that the state of nature is a…
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Servius
Servius was one of Rome’s last kings before the formation of the Roman Republic, and he ruled from 575 to 535 BCE. He famously did away with the existing class system in Rome, which…
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