Does "Social Justice" lead to the Rousseau "Forced to be Free" State? - Scholar Fr. Fortin: "[S]ocial justice... does not refer to any special disposition of the soul, and hence cannot properly be regarded as a virtue. Its subject is not the individual being, but a mysterious society named 'X'"
Google AI: Father Ernest Fortin , a prominent Catholic political philosopher and Straussian scholar, critiqued Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s famous paradox "forced to be free" by framing it as a sharp, modern departure from classical and Christian political thought. [ 1 , 2 ] Rousseau famously argued in The Social Contract that if an individual citizen refuses to obey the general will , they must be compelled to do so by the entire body politic. In Rousseau's view, this coercion is not tyrannical; rather, it is a mechanism that "forces them to be free" by liberating them from personal dependence and aligning them with self-imposed, rational civil laws. [ 1 , 2 , 3 ] Fortin's critique of this paradox focuses on several core vulnerabilities: 1. The Artificiality of the "Political Machine" Fortin points out that Rousseau treats the state as an artificial machine rather than a natural, organic community. In classical thought (like Aristotle's), huma...