You can't just issue degrees without having the use of force lurking in the background to make sure those degrees have some "teeth" so to speak. But Rousseau rejected that idea.

Rousseau also rejected the notion that ties between family members were an appropriate model for relationships between the state and its citizens. In using precepts from what Aristotle had written two thousand years earlier (in Aristotle's Politics), Rousseau - who admitted that he owed a profound debt to Aristotle - "was adamant that the authority of man over man in civil society - whether for good or evil - had been and ought to be established by choice and not necessity," Wokler explained.

Justice, in other words, cannot thrive if the government is in a paternal partnership with citizens (the belief that father knows what's best isn't applicable to government in a true democracy); a just society is a...
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