Product Description

Rousseau argues for the preservation of individual freedom in political society. An individual can only be free under the law, he says, by voluntarily embracing that law as his own. Hence, being free in society requires each of us to subjugate all our desires to the collective good, the general will. This text is not only a defence of civil society, but also a study of the darker side of political systems.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1932 in Books
• Published on: 1998-10-01
• Original language: French
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 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
Christopher is Senior Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Warwick.

Customer Reviews

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.

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.

A Warning From History
This is an important book, perhaps one of the most influential ever written. Unfortunately its influence has been wholly pernicious in the extreme - the blueprint for totalitarian regimes the world over. Rousseau was a psychotic and self obsessed individual who elaborated a theory of human civilization at odds with the basic principles of common sense and reason. From the French Revolutionary terror to the Soviet Gulags - the hallmarks of Rousseau's absurd doctrines can be found. But a willfull disregard for reality seems to be the prerequisite for so called enlightened thinkers and those that provided the ideological bedrock for revolutionaries from the french revolution onwards. The most recent example of an attempt to throw off the 'shackles' of civilization occured in Cambodia - Pol Pot - a true disciple of Rousseau, nurtured in the intellectual salons of the Left Bank. Savage indeed, but noble? In the fevered dreams of Marxist intellectuals were the ovens and gulags first delineated - Rousseau was their precursor, an important document, handle with care.