Which would you argue is Rousseau's main concern: freedom or equality?
             'Find a form of association which will defend and protect, with the whole its joint strength, the person and property of each associate, and under which each of them, uniting himself to all, will obey himself alone, and remain as free as before.' This is the fundamental problem to which the social contract gives the answer."(S.C. p.54). Thus Rousseau defines his objective in the Social Contract, using the expression to designate the primary act of association necessary to the creation of a legitimate political order. Contrary to Hobbes and Locke, Rousseau contended that it was civil society, not nature, that gives rise to a state of affairs always in danger of degenerating into war. Civil society begat governments and laws, inequality, resentment and other woes. Governments and laws "bound new fetters on the poor, and gave new powers to the rich; which irretrievably destroyed natural liberty, eternally fixed the law of property and inequality, converted clever usurpation into inalterable right, and, for the advantage of a few ambitious individuals, subjected all mankind to perpetual labour, slavery and wretchedness. It would be absurd Rousseau went on, to suppose that mankind had somehow consented to this state of affairs where "the privileged few.... gorge themselves with superfluities, while the starving multitude are in want of the bare necessities of life". So we could ask ourselves which is Rousseau's main concern: Freedom or Equality? Generations of scholars have attempted to resolve the seeming contradiction in Rousseau's political writings, notably between his passionate attachment to natural freedom and his complacency about the state that forces nonconformists to be free .In the Second Discourse, Rousseau contends that the most serious forms of injustice had their origins in civil society rather than in natu...