Social Contract

What It Is

A short treatise, published in Amsterdam in 1762, condemned in Paris and burned in Geneva within weeks. Rousseau spent much of the rest of his life moving between countries. He had planned a vast work on political institutions; he abandoned it and salvaged this.

Four books, under 150 pages. It is not a description of any state that exists. It is an attempt to answer one question: what could ever make political authority legitimate, given that no man is born owing obedience to another? Everything in it follows from that.

The style is compressed to the point of aphorism. Rousseau writes in declarations. Sentences that took him months arrive in a line, and they are quoted by people who have read four of them.

Why It Matters

Before Rousseau, the question was who should rule. He replaced it with a harder one: what could make any rule anything more than force with a flag on it. His answer is the one everything else in the book is built on, and it is far less accommodating than the people who quote him tend to admit. That put him against Locke, against Montesquieu, and against the English constitution the rest of Europe was busy admiring.

The idea he built from it, the general will, is the most consequential and most contested concept in modern politics. It is what a people wills when it wills the common good rather than its private interests, and it is not the same thing as what a majority happens to want. From it descend popular sovereignty, the modern idea of citizenship, the nation as a moral entity, and the conviction that a constitution can be an act of collective self-creation.

It also produced the most notorious sentence in political thought, and you should meet it where Rousseau puts it rather than where his enemies quote it. Robespierre carried Rousseau. So did the framers of a dozen democratic constitutions. Both readings are available in the text, and the ambiguity is Rousseau's, not his critics'. That is exactly why you should read him rather than the summaries.

Before You Read

Three or four hours, and it is among the hardest books here per page. Nothing is difficult in the sentence. Everything is difficult in the paragraph.

Go slowly and read Books I and II twice. That is where the argument lives. Books III and IV turn to institutions, to Roman assemblies and censors and civil religion, and are more tied to their century.

Read the Discourse on Inequality first if you can spare an evening. It is the diagnosis; this is the prescription, and the prescription makes little sense without it.

Which Translation to Read

• Maurice Cranston (Penguin Classics, 1968) — recommended. Cranston wrote the standard three-volume life of Rousseau, and it shows: he knows which word is doing the work. The English is clean and keeps the epigrammatic snap that makes Rousseau quotable, and his introduction is the best short account of what the book is trying to do. The cost: light annotation, and the volume gives you the Social Contract alone. View on Amazon →
• Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, 1997). The most exact version, with numbered paragraphs, excellent notes, and the later political writings alongside. The scholar's Rousseau. The cost: you are buying an apparatus, and precision costs some of the fire.
• Christopher Betts (Oxford World's Classics, 1994). A well-annotated middle path, now printed with the Discourse on Political Economy. The cost: the phrasing is less memorable than Cranston's, and Rousseau lives or dies on phrasing.

Take Cranston to read, Gourevitch to argue, Betts for notes at a lower price. The free G. D. H. Cole version of 1913 is everywhere and reads like 1913.

Getting the Most From This Book

Watch his definitions. Rousseau redefines liberty, law, sovereign and government, and if you carry the everyday meanings in with you, you will misread every page. The single commonest error is to confuse the sovereign with the government; he does not, and the whole book turns on the distinction.

Cranston's introduction is historical, so it is safe to read first.

Do not arrive wanting him to be a liberal. He is not one, and the effort to make him respectable removes the reason to read him. He believed a free people must be capable of wanting the common good more than its own comfort, and that a people incapable of it cannot be governed freely on any terms. Decide whether he is right. Two and a half centuries of politics have been an argument about it.