- Length
- 192 pagesGourevitch, The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, Cambridge, 2nd ed. 2019
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
The Social Contract
A short book asking how anyone can be both governed and free, which answered its own question in a way that has been read as the charter of democracy and as the blueprint for something much worse. It was banned everywhere and quoted by everyone.
- Date
- 1762
- Author
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- Region
- France and Switzerland
- Language
- French
- 1764 English, anonymous First English version Consensus
- 1913 English, G. D. H. Cole Public domain Attested
- 2019 English, Victor Gourevitch Cambridge, 2nd edition; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Exchange — Both: answers an earlier work and drew a later one
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Demonstration — Proof from premises the opponent already grants
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years to the reply
- 28 years
- Years back to what it answers
- 111 years
Burned in Geneva and banned in France within weeks of publication, and by 1789 the most quoted book in the French Revolution.
What the book says
Four short books asking how people can join a political body and remain as free as they were before. The problem is stated in the first pages: man is born free and is everywhere in chains, and the question is not how this happened but what could make it legitimate. Force cannot, since obedience to force is prudence rather than duty and lasts only as long as the force does. Nor can conquest or paternal authority. What remains is agreement - but an agreement in which each person hands themselves over to a master would simply reproduce slavery. Rousseau's solution is that each gives themselves to everyone and therefore to nobody in particular: the whole community becomes the sovereign, and each member, obeying laws they helped make, obeys only themselves. The sovereign's will is the general will, which is not the sum of what people happen to want but what they will as citizens with the common good in view. Government is not a party to this contract but an employee of it, and may be dismissed. The famous and disturbing consequence is that someone who refuses to follow the general will may be forced to be free.
What it argues
That legitimate authority can only come from an agreement in which nobody ends up subject to anybody in particular. The device is precise: each person alienates everything to the whole community, so the terms are identical for all, nobody has an interest in making them burdensome, and each receives back as a citizen what they gave up as an individual. Sovereignty then belongs to the people and cannot be transferred, represented or divided - which makes Rousseau an opponent of representative government, not a founder of it. The general will is what the community wills for its own good, and it is not established by counting preferences; a majority can be wrong about it. Law must be general in form, applying to everyone equally, which is the structural protection against its being used against anyone.
What it answered
Leviathan 1651Thomas Hobbes
Hobbes on the terms of the contract, Grotius on whether a people may give itself away, and Locke on whether government may be trusted with rights it did not create. He also answers his own century's confidence: the Discourse on Inequality had argued that civilisation corrupted rather than improved, and the Social Contract is the constructive half - not a return to nature, which he says explicitly is impossible, but an arrangement in which the losses of society are compensated by a freedom that natural man never had.
What answered it
Reflections on the Revolution in France 1790Edmund Burke
Burke, in 1790, against the method as much as the conclusions. Constant argued after the Terror that Rousseau's idea of sovereignty, by refusing to limit the sovereign at all, transferred absolute power from a king to an assembly and made it harder to resist. Talmon in the twentieth century made him the origin of totalitarian democracy, a reading now generally judged overdrawn but not baseless. Against these stand the readings that take the generality of law as a genuine constraint and Rousseau as the first serious democratic theorist.
How it argues
By construction from a stated problem, in very short chapters and a plain, rapid French that is unlike the elaborate prose of his contemporaries. Rousseau states difficulties in their sharpest form and then answers them, and his best effects come from refusing an easy escape - he will not say that the general will is the majority, or that representatives can carry it, because those would dissolve the problem rather than solve it. The later books on government types, on Rome and on civil religion are more conventional and are where most readers slow down.
The moment
Rousseau was a citizen of Geneva who had left, made his name in Paris, quarrelled with the philosophes who had promoted him, and was writing against the current of a movement he had helped begin. In 1762 both this book and Emile were condemned; Geneva burned them, Paris ordered his arrest, and he fled, spending the rest of his life moving between refuges and writing autobiography. He died in 1778, eleven years before the revolution that made him its patron.
How it travelled
Banned into ubiquity. Condemned in 1762 and read anyway; by 1789 its vocabulary - sovereignty of the people, the general will, the citizen - was the vocabulary of the National Assembly, and Rousseau's remains were moved to the Panthéon in 1794. Its later career divides sharply by country and by century: a founding text of democratic theory in some hands, the accused in every argument about where the Terror came from in others.
The strongest objection
That the general will has no procedure, and that this is not an oversight but a hole. Rousseau insists it is not the will of all, so counting votes does not find it; he insists a majority can mistake it; and he offers no test by which anyone could show that a particular claim about it is wrong. That leaves whoever is in a position to declare the general will effectively unchallengeable, and the phrase about forcing someone to be free is what that looks like applied to a person. Rousseau's defence is the generality of law - the sovereign cannot single anyone out, because it legislates only in universal terms - which is a real constraint and stops well short of an answer.
Why read it
Because it is short, fast and genuinely unsettling, and because the opening two books contain the whole argument. Read the Discourse on Inequality first or alongside; the Social Contract assumes an account of how we got here that it does not restate. And read the chapter on the legislator, which is the strangest thing in it.
- First printed
- 1762
- First in English
- 1764
- Digitised
- Yes
Published with Emile in the same year; the Discourse on Inequality of 1755 supplies the account of the state of nature the Social Contract assumes and is essential to reading it.
Cole's 1913 English is public domain. Gourevitch's and Cranston's are in copyright.
Where it stands
Live and contested in exactly the same terms as when it was written. Popular sovereignty, the distinction between what people want and what is good for them, and the question whether a democratic majority can be wrong about the common good are all live, and this is the book they are argued from.
On quoting this book
The French is public domain and Cole's English is too, but the opening sentence and the forced-to-be-free passage circulate in modern in-copyright renderings that differ at the points that matter. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Whether Rousseau is the founder of democratic theory or of something more dangerous has been argued since the Terror, and both readings are supported by the text. What the general will actually is - an aggregate, an ideal, or a procedure - divides interpreters. How the Social Contract fits with the Discourse on Inequality and with Emile is a standing question, since the three make different assumptions about what people are like. And whether the chapter on civil religion, which prescribes belief on pain of exile, is consistent with the rest is a difficulty nobody has resolved.