Product Description

'Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains' These are the famous opening words of a treatise that has not ceased to stir vigorous debate since its first publication in 1762. Rejecting the view that anyone has a natural right to wield authority over others, Rousseau argues instead for a pact, or 'social contract', that should exist between all the citizens of a state and that should be the source of sovereign power. From this fundamental premise, he goes on to consider issues of liberty and law, freedom and justice, arriving at a view of society that has seemed to some a blueprint for totalitarianism, to others a declaration of democratic principles.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #104660 in Books
• Published on: 1968-09-19
• Original language: French
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

From the Author
The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The social contract came to me when I was fairly young, living in Geneva. It is unlike a convential book, which may take a few years to write, in that that it was in the making throughout my entire life.
If you find some of the ideas are not to your liking, then I make no excuse for them. They are my own so I cannot disown them. We can do only that which we think to be right.
The Social Contract lays out my view of soceity, and how I feel it should be

Jean Jacques Rousseau,

17th April 2004

About the Author
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78) the French political philosopher and educationalist, is the author of A Discourse on Inequality, and Emile. Maurice Cranston was Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics and wrote and published widely on Rousseau, including two volumes of biography.

Customer Reviews

You'll never learn so much in such a small book
This book is a work of genius for the whole, exquisitely written it offers wisdom on most pages and nonsense on the others. It's been a very long time since I learnt such a large amount, the language has a poetic beauty to it and anybody interested in governance should read this. The thesis of the book is well known (as it indeed should be) but there are some startling facts about the author. Rousseau was serial child abandoner; he seems to have left five children in foundling hospitals and when attacked by his critic, a certain Voltaire, his defence was that the he would have been a poor father and his children would fair better in a foundling hospital. A slightly implausible fact given the high mortality rate at the founding hospital. Still, we judge him for his ideas, not his actions so this book receives a resounding five stars.

socialist precurser
this book is not, as other readers claim, endorsing dictatorship, but rather is criticising bad democracy. surprisingly persuasive and well written, as a blueprint to later socialist theories eg Marx, it is fascinating.

A nasty book by a nasty man
I have a theory that while it's possible to be a bad man but a good engineer or scientist (von Braun, probably Einstein, in his dealings with women, maybe even Newton), you cannot be a bad man and a good philosopher, certainly not of ethics or political philosophy.

Rousseau, on this account, was a worthless man who wrote the ur-text of modern authoritarianism.

Whether it's the specious twaddle of 'the general will' (you know, the one that tells you to kill the kulaks or the Jews or people who need to wear glasses, and it's OK because the General Will said so), or the weird drivel of the 'noble savage' (who presumably was immune to polio, malaria, leprosy, smallpox as well as to the competitive attentions lions, bears, locusts and so on) whose life was more convincingly described by Hobbes, Rousseau managed to give a completely unconvincing and historically refuted account of the social and political evolution of man.

But it's his murderous treatment of his children, his disgusting treatment of the unfortunate women whom he attracted and his foul disloyalty to David Hume, who took him in after he had been ejected from everywhere else that should settle the fate of this man's philosophy.