The Social Contract in Rousseau: An Analysis Based on Girardian Mimetic Theory

Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, successive reformulations of the social contract developed from the Hobbesian proposal, categorized today under the label of classical contractualism. Within such proposals, it is argued that it was with Rousseau that the social contract reached i...

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Autor principal: Valenzuela Corales, Maria de Los Andes
Formato: Artículo revista
Lenguaje:Español
Publicado: ARFIL y UNL 2023
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Acceso en línea:https://bibliotecavirtual.unl.edu.ar/publicaciones/index.php/index/article/view/10657
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Sumario:Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, successive reformulations of the social contract developed from the Hobbesian proposal, categorized today under the label of classical contractualism. Within such proposals, it is argued that it was with Rousseau that the social contract reached its moment of full maturity, rationalizing and deepening its democratic consequences. Thus, the social contract is -within political philosophy- the most significant element to support the theory of the modern state. However, an important consequence of this theorization is the fact that the nascent modern State holds for itself the monopoly of violence. Thus, it is possible that an obscure undercurrent of violence is hidden behind the contractualist formulation. The following article aims to develop an analysis of the social contract theory, particularly in Rousseau's formulation, based on René Girard's mimetic theory, with the objective of finding in his most representative work, The Social Contract, traces of the mimetic violence and the scapegoat mechanism proposed in Girard's theory.