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 The Social Contract also keeps people from being totally alienated and affords them better protection. If a large group of people enter a Social Contract, they can more easily defend themselves against their enemies, and criminals who live in societies with no Social Contract. Thus in spite of giving up some individual rights for the Social Contract, they have not lost any more freedom, because all within the society have surrendered their rights freely and equally, and suffer the same inequality. In other words, all things being equal, man is still free, and maintains autonomy. Everyone must surrender his or her rights for the social contract to work. If one person gives up their rights and another does not, the person who does not has power over the other person and there is no contract. However, it is to a person benefit to agree to the social contract, because by giving up the freedom of Natural Liberty an individual gains Civil Liberty. Natural Liberty is the freedom man maintains in the State of Nature. Civil Liberty is freedom you have in society, freedom gained from the social contract. Rousseau argues in chapter eight of the Social Contract, What man loses by the social contract is his natural liberty and an unlimited right to everything he tries to get and succeeds in getting; what he gains is civil liberty and the proprietorship of all he possesses. If we are to avoid mistake in weighing one against the other, we must clearly distinguish natural liberty, from civil liberty. . . (Rousseau, P.196)
They are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if they are wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. . . . Those who desire to suppress it, of course deny its truth; but they are not infallible. They have no authority to decide the question of all mankind, and exclude every other person from the means of judging. (18)
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