Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The French Enlightenment (French: les Lumières françaises, lit. '"the French Lights"') was the intellectual and cultural movement that flourished in 18th-century France, forming a central part of the Age of Enlightenment (historically known in French as les Lumières, lit. '"the Lights"').

The movement drew heavily on the ideas of English thinkers such as John Locke and Isaac Newton, while in turn profoundly shaping other national Enlightenments. It also played a major role in inspiring the French Revolution (1789–1799). According to Sharon A. Stanley, the French Enlightenment was distinctive for its "unrelenting assault on church leadership and theology." Many works critical of the monarchy or the Church were printed in the Dutch Republic, where more liberal press laws allowed them to be smuggled into the Kingdom of France.

In welfare economics and social choice theory, a social welfare function—also called a social ordering, ranking, utility, or choice function—is a function that ranks a set of social states by their desirability. Each person's preferences are combined in some way to determine which outcome is considered better by society as a whole. It can be viewed as mathematically formalizing Rousseau's idea of a general will.

Social welfare functions are studied by economists as a way to identify socially optimal decisions, giving a procedure to rigorously define which of two outcomes should be considered better for society as a whole (e.g., to compare two different possible income distributions). They are also used by democratic governments to choose between several options in elections, based on the preferences of voters; in this context, a social choice function is typically referred to as an electoral system.

John Locke (/lɒk/; 29 August 1632 (O.S.) – 28 October 1704 (O.S.)) was an English philosopher and physician, widely regarded as one of the most influential of the Enlightenment thinkers and commonly known as the "father of liberalism". Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Francis Bacon, Locke is equally important to social contract theory. His work greatly affected the development of epistemology and political philosophy.

His writings influenced Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and many Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, as well as the American Revolutionaries. His contributions to classical republicanism and liberal theory are reflected in the United States Declaration of Independence. Internationally, Locke's political-legal principles continue to have a profound influence on the theory and practice of limited representative government and the protection of basic rights and freedoms under the rule of law.

Nakae Chōmin (中江 兆民; December 8, 1847 – December 13, 1901) was the pen-name of a journalist, political theorist and statesman in Meiji-period Japan. His real name was Nakae Tokusuke (中江 篤助). His major contribution was the popularization of the egalitarian doctrines of the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Japan. As a result, Nakae is thought to have been a major force in the development of liberalism in early Japanese politics.

In philosophy, economics, and political science, the common good (also commonwealth, common weal, general welfare, or public benefit) is either what is shared and beneficial for all or most members of a given community, or alternatively, what is achieved by citizenship, collective action, and active participation in the realm of politics and public service. The concept of the common good differs significantly among philosophical doctrines. Early conceptions of the common good were set out by Ancient Greek philosophers, including Aristotle and Plato. One understanding of the common good rooted in Aristotle's philosophy remains in common usage today, referring to what one contemporary scholar calls the "good proper to, and attainable only by, the community, yet individually shared by its members."

The concept of common good developed through the work of political theorists, moral philosophers, and public economists, including Thomas Aquinas, Niccolò Machiavelli, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, James Madison, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, John Maynard Keynes, John Rawls, and many other thinkers. In contemporary economic theory, a common good is any good which is rivalrous yet non-excludable, while the common good, by contrast, arises in the subfield of welfare economics and refers to the outcome of a social welfare function. Such a social welfare function, in turn, would be rooted in a moral theory of the good (such as utilitarianism). Social choice theory aims to understand processes by which the common good may or may not be realized in societies through the study of collective decision rules. Public choice theory applies microeconomic methodology to the study of political science in order to explain how private interests affect political activities and outcomes.

A natural border is a border between states or their subdivisions which is concomitant with natural formations such as rivers or mountain ranges. The "doctrine of natural boundaries" developed in Western culture in the 18th century being based upon the "natural" ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and developing concepts of nationalism. The similar concept in China developed earlier from natural zones of control.

Natural borders have historically been strategically useful because they are easily defended. Natural borders remain meaningful in modern warfare even though military technology and engineering have somewhat reduced their strategic value.

Enlightenment philosophy was the philosophy produced during the Age of Enlightenment (late 17th and 18th centuries), originating in France, then western Europe and spreading throughout the rest of Europe. The Enlightenment philosophers included (among others) Baruch Spinoza, David Hume, John Locke, Edward Gibbon, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Denis Diderot, Pierre Bayle, and Isaac Newton. Enlightenment philosophy was influenced by the Scientific Revolution in southern Europe, arising directly from the Italian Renaissance with people like Galileo Galilei.

Enlightenment philosophers saw themselves as a progressive élite, and battled against religious persecution and political persecution, fighting against what they saw as the irrationality, arbitrariness, obscurantism and superstition of the previous centuries. They redefined the study of knowledge to fit the ethics and aesthetics of their time. Their works had great influence at the end of the 18th century, in the American Declaration of Independence and the French Revolution.

The French landscape garden (French: jardin anglais, jardin à l'anglaise, jardin paysager, jardin pittoresque, jardin anglo-chinois) is a style of garden inspired by idealized romantic landscapes and the paintings of Hubert Robert, Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin, European ideas about Chinese gardens, and the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The style originated in England as the English landscape garden in the early 18th century, and spread to France where, in the second half of the 18th century and early 19th century, it gradually replaced the rigidly clipped and geometrical French formal garden (jardin à la française).

In moral and political philosophy, the social contract is an idea, theory, or model that usually, although not always, concerns the legitimacy of the authority of the state over the individual. Conceptualized in the Age of Enlightenment, it is a core concept of constitutionalism, while not necessarily convened and written down in a constituent assembly and constitution.

Social contract arguments typically are that individuals have consented, either explicitly or tacitly, to surrender some of their freedoms and submit to the authority (of the ruler, or to the decision of a majority) in exchange for protection of their remaining rights or maintenance of the social order. The relation between natural and legal rights is often a topic of social contract theory. The term takes its name from The Social Contract (French: Du contrat social ou Principes du droit politique), a 1762 book by Jean-Jacques Rousseau that discussed this concept. Although the antecedents of social contract theory are found in antiquity, in Greek and Stoic philosophy and Roman and Canon Law, the heyday of the social contract was the mid-17th to early 19th centuries, when it emerged as the leading doctrine of political legitimacy.