- Jean Jacque Rousseau --- the Social Contract --- people will listen to reason because they are free
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Jean Jacques Rousseau was an important intellectual of the eighteenth century, for him Rousseau, man would be born good, but society would corrupt him. In the same way, man would be born free, but everywhere would be chained by factors such as his own vanity, fruit of the corruption of the heart. The individual would become a slave to their needs and those around them, which in a sense refers to a constant preoccupation with the world of appearances, pride, search for recognition and status. Hence the importance of the social contract, since men, having lost their natural liberty (when their hearts had not yet been corrupted and there was natural piety), would need to gain civil liberty in return, and such a contract was a mechanism for this. The people would at the same time be an active and passive part of this contract, that is, an agent of the law-making and fulfillment process, realizing that obeying the law that is written for oneself would be an act of freedom.
- John Locke --- Second Treatise on Government --- everyone has natural rights of life, liberty, and property.
Born in Wrington, England on August 29, 1632, John Locke is considered the father of English political liberalism and empiricism. He is not exactly Enlightenment, but he had a fundamental influence on eighteenth-century thought. He postulates that experience, the source of knowledge, can have both external origin in sensations and internal origin in reflection.
In his 2nd Treaty on Civil Government, Locke contradicts Hobbes by arguing that the state of nature could not be a war of all against all, but a state of perfect liberty, without any form of subordination or subjection, all men being equal power. In this state, men would enjoy the so-called natural rights: life, liberty, equality and private property - the latter would be derived from labor and therefore natural. In the state of nature, since there are no police or laws to prevent individuals from bothering each other, it is in the hands of all men the power to preserve their property against the damages of other men. Of course, in a situation in which everyone has the right to punish an offender, inconveniences arise: since men are judges of their own affairs, self-love, passion and revenge would take them too far in punishing others, hence confusion and disorder. Moreover, if a man does not have the strength to punish his offender, or to defend himself from him, there is no call to do but to heaven.
Because of these inconveniences, men, by "necessity and expediency," decided to meet by making a pact for the mutual preservation of life, liberty, and goods. Thus, political society is born when individuals renounce their natural power of justice, passing it into the hands of the government, with the sole purpose of preserving themselves, their freedom and their property - the so-called "Social Contract."
