The Social Contract: Rousseau’s Explosive Cry for Liberty, in Penguin Great Ideas
Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed how we see ourselves and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and confronted. They have enriched lives, and destroyed them. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract (1762) is one of them.
Author: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778)
Title: The Social Contract (Du contrat social, 1762)
Format: English paperback (Penguin Great Ideas), 176 pages, translated by Maurice Cranston
Scope: Classic of political philosophy on sovereignty, the general will and legitimate government
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/0141018887 (ASIN 0141018887)
Born Free, Everywhere in Chains
The book opens with one of the most famous lines in political philosophy: man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. Rejecting the idea that anyone has a natural right to rule, Rousseau argues for a pact, a social contract, among all citizens, in which each person gives himself to the community and obeys the ’general will’ that he himself helps to form.
Blueprint or Warning?
Rousseau’s explosive cry for human liberty helped to spark the French Revolution and has haunted our discussions of how we should govern one another ever since. It has been seen both as a blueprint for political terror and as a fundamental statement of democracy, and reading it yourself is the only way to decide which.
The General Will
The central idea of the book is the general will. When citizens join the social contract, Rousseau argues, they create a collective body whose will aims at the common good, as distinct from the "will of all", which is merely the sum of private interests. Laws are legitimate only when they express that general will, and sovereignty belongs to the people as a whole and cannot be transferred. Rousseau goes so far as to say that anyone who refuses to obey the general will may be "forced to be free", the phrase that has troubled his readers ever since.
Rousseau Against Representation
Rousseau is a radical democrat in a very literal sense. He distinguishes the sovereign, the people making laws, from the government, which merely carries them out, and he distrusts representatives: the English, he famously remarks, think they are free, but they are free only during elections. That is one reason he thought true republics had to be small, like his native Geneva, where citizens could gather to make their laws.
A Dangerous Book
Rousseau was born in Geneva in 1712 and became famous with his prize-winning Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1750) and his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755). The Social Contract and his treatise on education, Émile, both appeared in 1762, and both were condemned by the authorities in Paris and Geneva; Rousseau had to flee. During the French Revolution, Robespierre and the Jacobins treated him as a prophet.
In Context
The book is best read alongside the earlier contract theorists it argues with, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) and John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1689). Hobbes wanted an absolute sovereign to end the war of all against all; Locke wanted government limited to protecting rights; Rousseau wanted the people themselves to rule. Maurice Cranston, the translator of this edition, was also Rousseau’s biographer, and his version is clear and reliable.
Tip
Book I takes an hour and contains the essentials.
Great Ideas
Penguin’s Great Ideas series collects the work of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilisation and helped make us who we are. These short, beautifully designed editions are an ideal way to read a classic in an evening, and this one, in Maurice Cranston’s translation, is among the best of them.
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