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Does Majority Consent Make You Free? Voltaire, Rousseau & the General Will
What is covered: the Calas affair and the four arguments of the Treatise on Tolerance; the general will versus the will of all; the real limits Rousseau set on his sovereign, and the question he did not clearly answer, which is who applies them; the "noble savage" phrase that is not his, and the famous Voltaire line that Voltaire never wrote; what Americans actually read of each man; how Robespierre invoked Rousseau, and why invocation is not derivation; how Edmund Burke and
6 days ago3 min read


The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre and the Birth of Resistance Theory
Theodore Beza vested the right of resistance not in the private individual but in the lesser magistrates — the constituted officers who stand between the sovereign and the subject — making revolt lawful without making it universal. François Hotman built his case from history, arguing in Francogallia that absolute monarchy was a corruption of France's older, better constitution. And the Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos, published under a pseudonym in 1579, grounded the whole structur
Jul 183 min read
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