The state of nature versus Plato’s Protagoras

  Compare the accounts of human nature (the state of nature) and of the origin of civil society given by Protagoras (in Plato’s Protagoras) and by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality). In so doing you should address these questions: does Rousseau agree with Protagoras’s point that human beings are by nature deficient and weak? Do Protagoras and Rousseau agree on the reasons why human beings have come to live in society? According to Protagoras and Rousseau, how was civil society first established?