- All's Well That Ends Well
- Antony and Cleopatra
- As You Like It
- The Comedy of Errors
- Coriolanus
- Cymbeline
- Hamlet
- Henry IV, Part 1
- Henry IV, Part 2
- Henry V
- Henry VI, Part 1
- Henry VI, Part 2
- Henry VI, Part 3
- Henry VIII
- Julius Caesar
- King John
- King Lear
- Love's Labor's Lost
- A Lover's Complaint
- Macbeth
- Measure for Measure
- The Merchant of Venice
- The Merry Wives of Windsor
- A Midsummer Night's Dream
- Much Ado About Nothing
- Othello
- Pericles
- The Rape of Lucrece
- Richard II
- Richard III
- Romeo and Juliet
- Shakespeare's Sonnets
- The Taming of the Shrew
- The Tempest
- Timon of Athens
- Titus Andronicus
- Troilus and Cressida
- Twelfth Night
- The Two Gentlemen of Verona
- Venus and Adonis
- The Winter's Tale
After he initially poses the question of how society must relate to people’s freedom in order to be legitimate, Rousseau begins investigating whether there can be any legitimate social relationships based on coercion (which is the opposite of freedom). He concludes that there cannot be, which marks a break from philosophical tradition. Earlier philosophers, like Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes, argued that the state’s purpose is to institutionalize and defend the power of the wealthy, and even the celebrated ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle thought that some people were simply “born for slavery” by nature. Rousseau disagrees: he thinks that everyone…