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The “Discourse on the sciences and the arts” was an attack on the arts and sciences who

opposed the republican virtue. The sciences for Rousseau brought the corruption were

responsible for the disappearance of culture. Civilization (or society) was seen as responsible

for the degeneration of deep moral demands of human nature and its replacement by

intellectual culture. The life of primitive man, on the contrary, would be happy because he

knew how to live according to their innate needs.

The abuse centered on the loss of consciousness that man was driven by the cult of 

refinements, of conventional lies, of ostentation of intelligence and culture, in which the

sought most admiration of the closer ones than the satisfaction of his own conscience.

Somehow Rousseau repeats the Platonic assertion that corruption in the best form of 

government (monarchy or aristocracy - based on honor) resulting in excess of the honors

would take relations frivolous and vain.

Already freedom was a term fundamental in Rousseau, understood by him as a right and duty

at the same time, "all men are born free”. Freedom belonged to him and he would renounce

on his own quality of man. The principle of freedom it´s constituted by norms and not as fact

or as imperative form. It was not only a denial of impediments, but an assertion of a duty of 

realization of the spiritual skills.

In Rousseau had two expressions for freedom, one is a natural liberty, it was the absence of 

laws, exempt from state laws. While civil liberty was freedom in the sense of submission only

those laws that each gave himself. The natural man was free because they had no laws, with

the man being free because civil man obeyed only the laws he gave himself.

Equality also was a fundamental issue to the author. The man could only be free if it wereequal, because if an inequality between men arose freedom ended. He was referring both to

equality before the law as legal equality, but also came to understand that there was a

problem of economic and social equality, and thus has a pessimistic view of the problem.

Already in Kant freedom is the freedom to act according to laws. The laws describe

relationships of cause and effect. So when men are free when they “caused” to act. In rational

beings the cause of action is his own will (as opposed to mere desire or inclination that is not

objects of choice). A first sense, therefore, freedom is the absence of external determinations

behavior. This is the negative concept of freedom. It follows a definition "richer and more

fertile”. If actions are caused, obey laws. Freedom of will is not determined by laws of nature,but by no means escapes the empire of a certain kind of laws. If not so, human actions would

be uncaused, and the concept of "free will" would be inconsistent with him. Freedom has laws

and if those laws are not externally imposed can only be self-imposed. This is the positive

concept of freedom. He means the freedom as autonomy, or the property of rational beings to

legislate for them. The legislation is rational by its very nature a universal law: Freedom and

morality and politics are therefore inextricably linked.

Kant, like Rousseau, rejects the Hobbesian dilemma: freedom without peace or peace through

submission to the State. Both shares theoretically the two terms (Freedom and State) through

the concept of autonomy: the sovereign laws are the laws that we've given ourselves. Butthere between the two authors is a fundamental difference. Rousseau formulates a certain

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vision of a democratic state; Kant is a theorist of liberalism. Kant conceives of the State as an

instrument of freedom of individual subjects. Rousseau describes the emergence of a

“common sovereign self”; identifies freedom with autonomy, which from the point of view of 

the individual is exercised only to the extent that integrates the collective subject. In Kant,

autonomy deduces negative freedom, and preserves it and guarantees it. Freedom as no

impediment in the state of nature is precarious, and requires the exercise of autonomy.