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| The “Natural State”: An Unhisotorical Precondition in Rousseaus Construction of Modern Regime and Its Constructive Prospect |
| Bao Dawei |
| School of Humarities, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China |
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Abstract The concept of “natural state” possesses a fundamental political ethical meaning in the political philosophy of JeanJacques Rousseau. Through narrating the “natural history” that human transformed from the primitive being to the social being, Rousseau finds the possibility of premising the natural right within the frame that he constructs for the modern regime. He also identifies man’s natural “alienation” as the origin of the distinction between good and evil in the “social state”, by defining the ethical denotation of “natural state”. But his “natural state” is rather a structuralist idea, the good long existing in human political life, than the linear historical “alienationgeneration” state. As the outcome of civilization alienation, the inner structure and human basis of the civil society, in contrast with the “natural state”, is enough for man to construct a new “natural state”. But this can only be realized through the modern politics based on social contract.
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2017, Vol. 19 
