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Question

These are five document can you read them and give me the meaning and description of each?

Document 1:

Source: Emilie du Chatelete, French author, essay, published between 1743 and 1739

Let us reflect briefly on why for so many centuries, not one good tragedy, one good poem, one esteemed history,, one beautiful painting, one good book of physics, has come from the hands of women. Let someone give me an explanation, if there is one. I leave it to naturalists to find a physical explanation, but until that happens, women will be entitled to protest against their lack of education. As for me, I confess that if I were kind I would wish to make this scientific experiment. I would reform an abuse that cuts out, so to speak, half of humanity. I would allow women to share the rights of humanity, and most of all to those of the mind.

Document 2:

Source: Jean- Jacques Rousseau, French philosopher, The Social Contract, 1763

Government is wrongly confused with the sovereign, whose agent it is. What then is government? It is an intermediary body established between the subjects and the sovereign to keep them in touch with each other. It is charged with executing the laws and maintaining both civil and political liberty.... The only will dominating government should be the general will or the law. The government's power is only the public power vested in it. As soon as [government] attempts to let any act come from itself completely independently, it starts to lose its intermediary role. If the time should ever come when the [government] has a particular will of its own stronger than that of the sovereign and makes use of the public power which is in its hands to carry out its own particular will-when there are thus two sovereigns, one in law and one in fact-at that moment the social union will disappear and the body politic will be dissolved.

Document 3:

Source: Queen Catherine II (the Great) of Russia, Instruction to the legislative Commission of 1767

13. What is the true end of monarchy? Not to deprive people of their natural liberty; but to correct

their actions in order to attain the supreme good.  

14. The form of government, therefore, which best attains this end, and at the same time sets less bounds than others to natural liberty, is that which coincides with the views and purposes of rational creatures, and answers the end, upon which we ought to fix a steadfast eye in the regulations of civil polity.

15. A sense of liberty arises in a people governed by a monarch;which may produce in these states as much energy in transacting the most important affairs, and may contribute as much to the happiness of subjects, as even liberty itself.

Answer 1