The Social Contract

Introduction

The Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right appeared in Amsterdam in April 1762, published by Marc-Michel Rey under the name "J.-J. Rousseau, Citizen of Geneva". Rousseau, then fifty, presented it as the most considerable surviving piece of a larger work on political institutions that he had abandoned. Within weeks it was banned in France and burned in Geneva together with Émile, and its author had to flee. Few short books have had so long and so powerful an afterlife.

Its question is stated in the first chapter: "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." Rousseau does not ask how this came about, but what could make it legitimate. Force cannot found right, and no one can rightfully give himself up to slavery. The answer is the social pact: each gives himself wholly to the community, and so, giving himself to all, gives himself to no one; obeying the laws that all have made, he obeys only himself. From this act a moral and collective body is born — the people as sovereign — and with it the general will, which aims always at the common good and is distinct from the mere sum of private wills.

The four books unfold the consequences. The first establishes the pact and the civil state, in which natural liberty gives way to civil and moral liberty. The second shows that sovereignty is inalienable and indivisible, defines law as an act of the whole people concerning the whole people, and describes the extraordinary figure of the lawgiver. The third distinguishes the sovereign from the government, its mere agent, and examines democracy, aristocracy and monarchy, the degeneration of governments and the dangers of representation. The fourth turns to voting, to the institutions of Rome — the comitia, the tribunate, dictatorship and the censorship — and ends with the much-debated chapter on civil religion.

The book's influence has been immense. Its ideas of popular sovereignty, of the equality of citizens before the law and of the people as the only legitimate source of law entered the vocabulary of the French Revolution and of modern democratic constitutions. Kant found in it the principle of autonomy; Hegel, Marx and the theorists of democracy and of its dangers have argued with it ever since. It remains the classic statement of the idea that political authority is legitimate only when those who obey it are also its authors.

This edition gives the French text in its original form, as printed in the first edition of 1762 (Amsterdam: Marc-Michel Rey), with the spelling of the time and all of Rousseau's own notes. The translations follow the same text, paragraph by paragraph; the notes are Rousseau's, and Latin quotations are followed by a translation. The "M. d'A." quoted in several notes is the Marquis d'Argenson, whose treatise on the government of France then circulated in manuscript.