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Rousseau vs. Burke Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Edmund Burke were 2 great political philosophers of the late 18th Century with drastically different opinions on society, private property, individual rights, and government. Edmund Burke’s ideas in the “Reflections on the Revolution in France” and “An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs” combat those of Rousseau in his “Social Contract.” Burke held a more favorable view of the monarchy, along with strong focus on established religion. Rousseau on the other hand held ground on the argument that individual has certain inalienable rights. Rousseau speaks of the inequality of human nature, and the only way around this inequality is through a Social Contract. Rousseau also discusses the difference and importance of The General Will and The Private Will and also of the State of Nature and Civil Society. Burke speaks of a natural aristocracy that must exist, and a scientific based society using trial-and-error as opposed to society being mathematically based. Let us first discuss Rousseau’s idea of the state of nature. In the state of nature, the strongest is always right. Although “no man has natural authority over his fellow man (p.144),” men who have physi