Political Theory Pack: Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract, Lysander Spooner’s Natural Law, John Locke’s Two Treatises of Civil Government, & Niccolo Machiavelli’s Art of War - Softcover

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This collection contains the following works: Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract Lysander Spooner’s Natural Law John Locke’s Two Treatises of Civil Government Niccolo Machiavelli’s Art of War The Social Contract, or Of the Social Contract, or Principles of Political Law (1762) by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is a book in which Rousseau theorized about the best way to establish a political community in the face of the problems of commercial society, which he had already identified in his Discourse on Inequality (1754). The Social Contract helped inspire political reforms or revolutions in Europe, especially in France. The Social Contract argued against the idea that monarchs were divinely empowered to legislate. Rousseau asserts that only the people, who are sovereign, have that all-powerful right. The epigraph of the work is "foederis aequas / Dicamus leges" (Virgil, Aeneid XI.321–22). The stated aim of The Social Contract is to determine whether there can be a legitimate political authority, since people's interactions he saw at his time seemed to put them in a state far worse than the good one they were at in the state of nature, even though living in isolation. He concludes book one, chapter three with, "Let us then admit that force does not create right, and that we are obliged to obey only legitimate powers", which is to say, the ability to coerce is not a legitimate power, and there is no rightful duty to submit to it. A state has no right to enslave a conquered people. Lysander Spooner (January 19, 1808 – May 14, 1887) was an American political philosopher, essayist, pamphlet writer, Unitarian, abolitionist, legal theorist, and entrepreneur of the nineteenth century. He was a strong advocate of the labor movement and severely anti-authoritarian and individualist in political views. Natural law a philosophy asserting that certain rights are inherent by virtue of human nature endowed by nature; traditionally God or a transcendent source, and can be understood universally through human reason. As determined by nature, the law of nature is implied to be universal, existing independently of the positive law of a given political order, society or nation-state. The Two Treatises of Government is a work of political philosophy published anonymously in 1689 by John Locke. The First Treatise attacks patriarchalism in the form of sentence-by-sentence refutation of Robert Filmer's Patriarcha, while the Second Treatise outlines Locke's ideas for a more civilized society based on natural rights and contract theory. This publication contrasts former political works by Locke himself. In Two Tracts on Government, written in 1660, Locke defends a very conservative position; however Locke never published it. In 1669 Locke co-authored the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, which endorses aristocracy, slavery and serfdom. The Art of War (Italian: Dell'arte della guerra) is a treatise by the Italian Renaissance political philosopher and historian Niccolò Machiavelli. The format of The Art of War is a socratic dialogue. The purpose, declared by Lord Fabrizio Colonna (perhaps Machiavelli's persona) at the outset, "To honor and reward virtù, not to have contempt for poverty, to esteem the modes and orders of military discipline, to constrain citizens to love one another, to live without factions, to esteem less the private than the public good." To these ends, Machiavelli notes in his preface, the military is like the roof of a palazzo protecting the contents.

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