Hence Rousseau's novelistic works, Emile, La Nouvelle Héloïse, and Confessions―each of which is much longer than his primary political treatise, the two Discourses and the Social Contract, put together―constitute an attempt to establish what was missing in earlier democratic thinkers, a democratic art. He does for democracy what Socrates did for aristocracy in the Republic.
Jean-Jacques RousseauRelated topics
aristocracy art attempt constitute contract democracy democratic early longer missing political primary republic social treatise works emile heloise socratesRelated quotes
Our opinion at the time was that National Socialism and the Communism of the Soviet Republic were sort of 'siblings.' And it may also be that this attitude was peculiar especially to an Austrian SS member. For his enemies at that time were not Social Democracy and Communism; these were combated by the Austrian aristocracy as much as he himself was;...
Adolf Eichmann
Some commentators have drawn such a stark and gloomy picture of the Weimar Republic's early difficulties that the Republic seems foredoomed to failure from the outset... The conditions in which Weimar democracy were born were certainly not such as to help it flourish; and as it unfolded, it was clearly saddled with a burden of problems, in a range of areas.
Mary Fulbrook
The danger is not only that these austerity measures are killing the European economies but also that they threaten the very legitimacy of European democracies - not just directly by threatening the livelihoods of so many people and pushing the economy into a downward spiral, but also indirectly by undermining the legitimacy of the political system through this backdoor rewriting of the social contract.
Ha-Joon Chang
Every philosophy is complete in itself and, like a genuine work of art, contains the totality. Just as the works of Apelles and Sophocles, if Raphael and Shakespeare had known them, should not have appeared to them as mere preliminary exercises for their own work, but rather as a kindred force of the spirit, so, too reason cannot find in its own earlier forms mere useful preliminary exercises for itself.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
If you have reservations about the system and want to change it, the democratic argument goes, do so within the system: put yourself forward as a candidate for political office, subject yourself to the scrutiny and the vote of fellow citizens. Democracy does not allow for politics outside the democratic system. In this sense, democracy is totalitarian.
J. M. Coetzee
