While a brawny soldier with beady eyes suspiciously scanned through Rousseau’s Social Contract, Hovhannes Stamboulian couldn’t help but ponder the passages the man was staring at without really seeing: Man is born free but everywhere is in chains. In reality, the difference is that the savage lives within himself while social man lives outside himself and can only live in the opinion of others, so that he seems to receive the feeling of his own existence only from the judgment of others concerning him.
