Assignment:
INSTRUCTIONS: You must identify the author, and explain the meaning and significance.
IDENTIFICATION OF PASSAGES:
1. For I ask whether in the wild woods and uncultivated waste of America left to Nature, without any improvement, tillage or husbandry, a thousand acres will yield the needy and wretched inhabitants as many conveniences of life as ten acres of equally fertile land do in Devonshire where they are well cultivated?
2. I am far from pretending that wives are in general no better treated than slaves; but no slave is a slave to the same lengths, and in full sense of the word, as a wife is.
3. Nevertheless we are not to understand, that by [the liberty of subjects], the sovereign's power of life and death is either abolished or limited. For it has already been shown, that nothing the Sovereign Representative can do to a subject... can properly be called Injustice, or Injury; because every Subject is Author of every act [of] the Sovereign....
4. The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and reason, the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form of property ... this misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded you What you see clearly in the case of ancient property, what you admit in the case of feudal property, you are of course forbidden to admit in the case of your own bourgeois form of property.
5. For all men are by nature provided of notable multiplying glasses (that is their passions and self-love) through which every little payment [appears as a] great grievance; but are destitute of those prospective glasses (namely moral and civil science), to see a far off the miseries that hang over them, and cannot without such payment be avoided.
6. "But because rational creatures share in the eternal law by using their intellect and reason, we call their participation in the eternal law ‘law' in the strict sense, since law belongs to reason, as I have said before."
7. "Therefore, as we are made well by hope, so we are made happy by hope; and as we do not presently possess well-being, but look forward to it in the future ‘with patience,' so it is with happiness. This is because we are now among evils, which we must endure patiently."
8. "And it is certainly a happier condition to be enslaved to a man than to a lust, since the very lust for dominating - not to mention others - ravishes the hearts of mortals by a most savage mastery."
9. Nature, then, tends to make the bodies of slaves and free people different too, the former strong enough to be used for necessities, the latter useless for that sort of work, but upright in posture and possessing all the other qualities needed for political life."
10. I conclude all these forms of government are pestilential: the three good ones do not last long, and the three bad ones are evil. Those who know how to construct constitutions wisely have identified this problem and have avoided each on of these types of constitution in pure form, constructing a constitution with elements of each ... Such a constitution would be more solid and stable, would be preserved by checks and balances, there being present in the one city a monarch, an aristocracy, and a democracy.
11. "... if I say that it is the greatest good for a man to discuss virtue every day and those other things about which you hear me conversing and testing myself and others, for the unexamined life is not worth living for men, you will believe me even less."
12. No longer can anything but danger to the entire society trouble the tranquil slumber of the philosopher and yank him from his bed. His fellow man may be killed with impunity underneath his window. He has merely to place his hands over his ears and argue with himself a little in order to prevent nature, which rebels within him, from identifying with the man being assassinated.
13. Let us summarize the entire balance sheet so that the credits and debits are easily compared. What man loses through the social contract is his natural liberty and an unlimited right to everything that tempts him and that he can acquire. What he gains is civil liberty and the propriety ownership of all he possesses.
14. For this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good left in common for others.
15. The desires, and other passions of man, are in themselves no sin. No more are the actions, that proceed from those passions, till they know a law that forbids them: which till laws be made they cannot know: nor can any law be made, till they have agreed upon the person that shall make it..
16. But, indeed, the dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes.
17. This makes it lawful for a man to kill a thief, who has not in the least hurt him, nor declared any design upon his life, any farther than by the use of force, so to get him into his power
18. ... because certain products of the general and vital force sprout luxuriously and reach a great development in this heated atmosphere and under this active nurture and watering, while other shoots from the same root, which are left outside in the wintry air, with ice purposely heaped all round them, have a stunted growth, and some are burnt off with fire and disappear; men, with that inability to recognize their own work which distinguishes the unanalytic mind, indolently believe that the tree grows of itself in the way they have made it grow, and that it would die if one half of it were not kept in a vapour bath and the other half in the snow.
19. It is true that labour produces for the rich wondrous things - but for the worker it produces privation. It produces palaces - but for the worker, hovels. It produces beauty - but for the worker, deformity. It replaces labour by machines - but some of the workers it throws back to a barbarous type of labour, and the other workers it turns into machines. It produces intelligence - but for the worker idiocy, cretinism.
20. Society ... practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.
21. Now it is easy to see that the moral aspect of love is an artificial sentiment born of social custom, and extolled by women with so much skill and care in order to establish their hegemony and make dominant the sex that ought to obey.
22. Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.
23. But when the words Free, and Liberty, are applied to anything but bodies, they are abused; for that which is not subject to motion, is not subject to impediment.
24. ...I think it may not be amiss, to set down what I take to be Political Power. That the power of a Magistrate over a Subject, may be distinguished from that of a Father over his Children, a Master over his Servant, a Husband over his Wife, and a Lord over his Slave.