Came across this while watching Crash Course Big History, and now I’m interested. But most stuff on google requires a great deal of prior understanding of the subject. Could someone explain this for me like I’m five? Thanks
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Well, there’s a lot of ways that they differed in their philosophy, but probably the most clear distinction is where they both came down on the relationship between what they conceived of as the “natural state of man” and society. At the time, one of the big questions in sociology was what people would be like if society didn’t exist. What was the state of the “natural man” outside of civilization? (Modern sociologists basically reject this idea entirely, arguing instead that society is itself innate to human nature, but anyway.) Hobbes takes a rather pessimistic view of human nature and argues that without the laws, expectations, and morals of society, humans would live in a state of natural war and brutality, because people are naturally selfish. There’s a lot more to say here, but this is the most important way that he differs from Rousseau, who, by contrast, argues for a “noble savage” idea. Rousseau answers the same question by arguing that all the wants and desires that people have which make them selfish and violent are actually unnatural, and are imparted by society. In a natural state, without society telling us what to want, humans would want for nothing and thus live in natural harmony.
So to summarize – Hobbes = people bad, society good, because it restrains people; Rousseau = people good, society bad, because it corrupts people.
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