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Rousseau was an influential 18th-century Swiss-French philosopher who developed a democratic theory of the social contract. Famous for imagining people in the state of nature as “noble savages” and criticizing the inequalities that arose within civilized society, Rousseau nevertheless argued that only non-white people could be noble savages. He justified this assumption by insisting that Europeans had superior metallurgy and agriculture, which Mills points out is historically inaccurate.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes in The Racial Contract
The The Racial Contract quotes below are all either spoken by Jean-Jacques Rousseau or refer to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 1, Part 2 Quotes
It would be a fundamental error, then—a point to which I will return—to see racism as anomalous, a mysterious deviation from European Enlightenment humanism. Rather, it needs to be realized that, in keeping with the Roman precedent, European humanism usually meant that only Europeans were human. European moral and political theory, like European thought in general, developed within the framework of the Racial Contract and, as a rule, took it for granted.
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau Character Timeline in The Racial Contract
The timeline below shows where the character Jean-Jacques Rousseau appears in The Racial Contract. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Introduction
...justice. However, Mills’s project is closer to that of early social contract theorists like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who imagined how non-ideal social contracts could explain the actual society we live in. Similarly,...
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Chapter 2, Part 3: The Racial Contract underwrites the modern social contract and is continually being rewritten
...will next examine the key writings of the four major classic social contract theorists—Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant—to show that they openly wanted to reserve personhood, and therefore membership in society,...
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously imagined the “noble savage” living freely in the state of nature. However, he only...
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Chapter 3, Part 1: The Racial Contract historically tracks the actual moral/political consciousness of (most) white moral agents
...all their important disagreements, influential male philosophers ranging from Plato and Aristotle to Hobbes and Rousseau all agreed that societies should subordinate women. Similarly, all the major philosophers of the social...
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