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View allThe Social Contract
Rousseau
1762
The 1762 treatise that gave the French Revolution its vocabulary — and political philosophy an argument it still hasn't settled.
The Social Contract
Jean-Jacques Rousseau · 1762
Rousseau opens by declaring that man is born free and is everywhere in chains, then spends four short Books building a case for what legitimate authority would actually require: not force, not tradition, but the general will of a free people. The argument is compressed, technical, and famously slippery — revered and blamed, in the same breath, for the Revolution it helped inspire. It remains the place democratic theory keeps returning to argue about what a people's will actually is, and who gets to speak for it.
48 chapters · 41,183 words · ~3.1 hr read
Contents
Book I
Why man passes from the state of nature to civil society, and the terms of the social compact itself.
Book II
Sovereignty, the general will, and the Legislator — the theory of legitimate lawmaking.
Book III
Forms of government — democracy, aristocracy, monarchy — and how the body politic maintains or loses itself over time.
- 22Chapter 1~9 min
- 23Chapter 2~4 min
- 24Chapter 3~2 min
- 25Chapter 4~3 min
- 26Chapter 5~3 min
- 27Chapter 6~9 min
- 28Chapter 7~2 min
- 29Chapter 8~8 min
- 30Chapter 9~1 min
- 31Chapter 10~4 min
- 32Chapter 11~2 min
- 33Chapter 12~2 min
- 34Chapter 13~2 min
- 35Chapter 14~1 min
- 36Chapter 15~6 min
- 37Chapter 16~2 min
- 38Chapter 17~2 min
- 39Chapter 18~3 min
Book IV
Voting, elections, the Roman Comitia, and civil religion — how a state sustains the general will in practice.