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Jean Jacques Rousseau opens with a famous shock: man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. Then he asks how people can form a fair society and still stay free, by agreeing together to follow the general will. This edition also brings his lively discourses on the arts and sciences and on inequality. Rousseau argues passionately and sometimes contradicts himself, which makes him fun to argue with while you read.
Jean Jacques Rousseau opened this book in 1762 with one of the most famous sentences in political thought: man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. The Genevan writer, famous and controversial across Europe, wanted to know what could make authority legitimate. This volume, in G. D. H. Cole's translation, gives the Social Contract together with his earlier discourses, so you can watch the whole argument develop.
The Contract itself runs in four short books: the founding pact by which a people becomes a people, the sovereign and the general will, laws and the forms government takes, and finally voting, dictatorship in emergencies and civil religion. Around it stand the discourses on the arts and sciences, on the origin of inequality, which traces property and dependence from an imagined state of nature, and on political economy. Rousseau is lucid, paradoxical and deliberately provocative throughout.
Revolutionaries quoted him, tyrants have abused him, and democrats still argue with him. That argument is the point. Readers who want to understand popular sovereignty, civic virtue, or the tensions inside democracy itself should start with Rousseau's own unsettling words.
Jean Jacques Rousseau, the Genevan writer whose ideas helped unsettle the old order in France, published The Social Contract in 1762, opening with the famous claim that man is born free and is everywhere in chains. This volume, in G. D. H. Cole's translation, adds his discourses on the arts and sciences, on inequality, and on political economy. It offers Rousseau's political thought whole: provocative, brilliant, and contested ever since.
This volume is more than its title suggests. In G. D. H. Cole's Everyman edition it bundles four works: The Social Contract itself, the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, and the Discourse on Political Economy, preceded by Cole's introduction and Rousseau's foreword. All of them are carried here.
The Social Contract occupies the center, in four books and 48 chapters: the first convention and the social compact, sovereignty inalienable and indivisible, the general will, the legislator, the division of governments into democracy, aristocracy and monarchy, the death of the body politic, and closing chapters on the tribunate, dictatorship, censorship and civil religion. Around it stand the two early discourses that made Rousseau famous, the first arguing that the arts and sciences have corrupted morals, the second tracing inequality from the state of nature to the first man who enclosed a plot of ground.
Read the Discourse on Inequality before the Contract if you want Rousseau's story whole: the diagnosis first, then the remedy. Cole's introduction gives the historical setting plainly and is worth its place at the front.
Edition: Translated by G. D. H. Cole. Text: Project Gutenberg ebook 46333.
The first chapter
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 this change come about? I do not know. What can make it legitimate? That question I think I can answer.
If I took into account only force, and the effects derived from it, I should say: "As long as a people is compelled to obey, and obeys, it does well; as soon as it can shake off the yoke, and shakes it off, it does still better; for, regaining its liberty by the same right as took it away, either it is justified in resuming it, or there was no justification for those who took it away." But the social order is a sacred right which is the basis of all other rights. Nevertheless, this right does not come from nature, and must therefore be founded on conventions. Before coming to that, I have to prove what I have just asserted.
Source: Project Gutenberg. Published 1762. Author died 1778. G. D. H. Cole translation. Public domain worldwide. Share this book: WhatsApp
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