Every man has a right to risk his own life in order to preserve it.
 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762). copy citation

edit
Author Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Source The Social Contract
Topic life risk self-defence
Date 1762
Language English
Reference Of the Social Contract, or Principles of Political Law, Book II
Note Translated by George Douglas Howard Cole
Weblink https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Social_Contract/Book_II

Context

“THE question is often asked how individuals, having no right to dispose of their own lives, can transfer to the Sovereign a right which they do not possess. The difficulty of answering this question seems to me to lie in its being wrongly stated. Every man has a right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. Has it ever been said that a man who throws himself out of the window to escape from a fire is guilty of suicide? Has such a crime ever been laid to the charge of him who perishes in a storm because, when he went on board, he knew of the danger?” source
Original quote

Meaning and analysis

write a note
report