The Social Contract
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762)
“'Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.' Rousseau's 1762 treatise converts this opening provocation into the most radical and most dangerous contract theory of the Enlightenment — a blueprint for popular sovereignty that the French Revolution would carry in its pocket, and that twentieth-century critics would blame for the Terror.”
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The Social Contract
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762) · 150pages · Enlightenment · 5 AP appearances
Summary
The Social Contract (Du contrat social ou Principes du droit politique, 1762) is Jean-Jacques Rousseau's systematic political treatise, divided into four books. Book I rejects the 'right of the strongest' and grounds legitimate authority in voluntary association; Book II develops the doctrine of the inalienable and indivisible general will; Book III analyzes forms of government (democracy only for gods; monarchy efficient but risky); Book IV addresses voting, tribunates, censorship, and civil religion. Rousseau's core claim — that legitimate authority is an expression of the sovereign people's general will directed at the common good — transforms the contract tradition inherited from Hobbes and Locke into a theory of popular sovereignty that would shape the French Revolution, the European Romantic movement, and modern democratic theory.
Why It Matters
The Social Contract is one of the most influential political philosophy texts in modern history. It transformed the contract tradition inherited from Hobbes and Locke into a theory of popular sovereignty grounded in the general will, and in doing so provided the conceptual vocabulary for modern d...
Themes & Motifs
Diction & Style
Register: High formal with rhetorical interruption. Rousseau addresses the reader directly, uses first-person frequently, and allows himself rhetorical questions and imperatives that Montesquieu or Voltaire would have suppressed. The style is learned but not academic.
Narrator: First-person, engaged, rhetorically energetic. Rousseau presents himself as a thinker addressing a literate public, o...
Figurative Language: Moderate. Rousseau's metaphors are mostly political-institutional (body politic, foundation, construction) with occasional classical allusions (Sparta, Rome, Lycurgus, Cato). Agricultural metaphors (sowing, harvesting) appear in the chapter on the Legislator. Natural-law metaphors (chains, freedom, nature) pervade Book I.
Historical Context
Late Enlightenment — pre-Revolutionary France and Europe (1740s-1770s): The Social Contract emerges from the intellectual ferment of the late French Enlightenment, a period in which the philosophes were simultaneously expanding knowledge (the Encyclopédie), attacking t...
Key Characters
Talking Points
- Define the general will and distinguish it from the will of all. What is gained, analytically, by making this distinction?
- What does Rousseau mean by 'forced to be free' (Book I.7)? Is the phrase coherent, or does it contain an internal contradiction?
- Compare Rousseau's social contract with Hobbes's and Locke's. How do the three theories differ in who covenants with whom, what rights are alienated, and what powers the resulting sovereign holds?
- How did the French Revolution — particularly the Jacobin period of 1793-1794 — realize or betray Rousseau? Draw on specific examples.
- Assess Berlin's 'positive liberty' critique of Rousseau. Is the 'forced to be free' formulation adequate grounds for Berlin's worry that Rousseau's theory authorizes illiberal coercion?
Notable Quotes
“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they. How did thi...”
“To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties. For him who renounces everything no indemn...”
“Find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, whi...”
Why Read This
The Social Contract is one of the three or four most important political philosophy texts in the Western canon. Students who have not read it cannot be said to have studied political philosophy seriously. The book is also remarkably short (150 pag...