From The Geek with a .45 (who really needs to blog more often, ’cause he’s friggin’ brilliant):
A generation before the American Revolution, the English philosopher John Locke dug a deep well from which the waters of liberty are drawn, laying out the manner in which explicit, finite, enumerated Powers can be delegated by the People to government, while reserving all other prerogatives to themselves.
A generation later, the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau poisoned, pissed and shat into that well, restating the social compact with key bits sabotaged to support collectivism and the oppression of the individual by the allegedly infallible democratic will of the people.
The refutation of this point is a simple question: “Is there any process of democracy that will justly allow you to rape another against their will?”
If the answer is no, then there are limits to what the democratic will of the people can justly enable, and the remainder of the argument is about where those limits are, and by what process/axiom/principle they are discovered or established.
If the answer is yes, I don’t want to know you, it’d be best for you never to encounter me.