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The questions are: What are these ambiguities and what are the different statements that we can draw from their books? To answer to these questions, we will first talk about the origins of these ambiguities (I), and second we will see how the two authors express two completely different statements for each main thought, according to what they wrote (II). Plus, an we really take stock of what happened these last months in the Arab countries, this vast popular movement which name occurred to be 'Arab spring' although it doesn't fit it anymore nowadays? .
The Origins of Rousseau and Hobbes Ambiguities.
It is useful before starting to ask ourselves several questions: Why do we speak about these two ambiguities and who are the authors that highlighted these ambiguities? First, when one looks at the writings of these two authors, one can easily realize contradictions that lead us to think that some questions must be raised. Indeed, these contradictions appear when the authors talk about specific topics. A couple of examples of contradictions with regards to Hobbes are when he talked about Natural Law and liberties, when he gave a legal basis to the State, and when he said that to designate our "spiritual father" (basically the sovereign or the monarch) people must agree.
With Rousseau, these ambiguities and questions appear when he deified the people as good and as enacting laws that submit to his own welfare (a kind of self-sanctification), when he talked about death penalty, and also when we talked about building a new society where laws are an offshoot of the general will.
Mentioning some authors that talked about these contradictions will give more weight to our previous statements. In fact, several great philosophers and authors rose to say that Hobbes and Rousseau are not the philosophers that they pretended to be. John W. Chapman, an American philosopher states in his study that Rousseau was a totalitarian (Rousseau, Totalitarian or Liberal Columbia University Press, 1956).