The Social Contract

The Social Contract

By Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Translated by G. D. H. Cole.

Table of Contents

1. Titlepage
2. Imprint
3. Introduction
4. Epigraph
5. Foreword
6. The Social Contract
   1. Book I
      1. I: Subject of the First Book
      2. II: The First Societies
      3. III: The Right of the Strongest
      4. IV: Slavery
      5. V: That We Must Always Go Back to a First Convention
      6. VI: The Social Compact
      7. VII: The Sovereign
      8. VIII: The Civil State
      9. IX: Real Property
   2. Book II
      1. I: That Sovereignty Is Inalienable
      2. II: That Sovereignty Is Indivisible
      3. III: Whether the General Will Is Fallible
      4. IV: The Limits of the Sovereign Power
      5. V: The Right of Life and Death
      6. VI: Law
      7. VII: The Legislator
      8. VIII: The People
      9. IX: The People (Continued)
      10. X: The People (Continued)
      11. XI: The Various Systems of Legislation
      12. XII: The Division of the Laws
   3. Book III
      1. I: Government in General
      2. II: The Constituent Principle in the Various Forms of Government
      3. III: The Division of Governments
      4. IV: Democracy
      5. V: Aristocracy
      6. VI: Monarchy
      7. VII: Mixed Governments
      8. VIII: That All Forms of Government Do Not Suit All Countries
      9. IX: The Marks of a Good Government
      10. X: The Abuse of Government and Its Tendency to Degenerate
      11. XI: The Death of the Body Politic
      12. XII: How the Sovereign Authority Maintains Itself
      13. XIII: The Same (Continued)
      14. XIV: The Same (Continued)
      15. XV: Deputies or Representatives
      16. XVI: That the Institution of Government Is Not a Contract
      17. XVII: The Institution of Government
      18. XVIII: How to Check the Usurpations of Government
   4. Book IV
      1. I: That the General Will Is Indestructible
      2. II: Voting
      3. III: Elections
      4. IV: The Roman Comitia
      5. V: The Tribunate
      6. VI: The Dictatorship
      7. VII: The Censorship
      8. VIII: Civil Religion
      9. IX: Conclusion
7. Endnotes
8. Colophon
9. Uncopyright

Imprint

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Introduction

For the study of the great writers and thinkers of the past, historical imagination is the first necessity. Without mentally referring to the environment in which they lived, we cannot hope to penetrate below the inessential and temporary to the absolute and permanent value of their thought. Theory, no less than action, is subject to these necessities; the form in which men cast their speculations, no less than the ways in which they behave, are the result of the habits of thought and action which they find around them. Great men make, indeed, individual contributions to the knowledge of their times; but they can never transcend the age in which they live. The questions they try to answer will always be those their contemporaries are asking; their statement of fundamental problems will always be relative to the traditional statements that have been handed down to them. When they are stating what is most startlingly new, they will be most likely to put it in an old-fashioned form, and to use the inadequate ideas and formulae of tradition to express the deeper truths towards which they are feeling their way. They will be most the children of their age, when they are rising most above it.

Rousseau has suffered as much as anyone from critics without a sense of history. He has been cried up and cried down by democrats and oppressors with an equal lack of understanding and imagination. His name, a hundred and fifty years after the publication of the Social Contract, is still a controversial watchword and a party cry. He is accepted as one of the greatest writers France has produced; but even now men are inclined, as political bias prompts them, to accept or reject his political doctrines as a whole, without sifting them or attempting to understand and discriminate. He is still revered or hated as the author who, above all others, inspired the French Revolution.

At the present day, his works possess a double significance. They are important historically, alike as giving us an insight into the mind of the eighteenth century, and for the actual influence they have had on the course of events in Europe. Certainly no other writer of the time has exercised such an influence as his. He may fairly be called the parent of the romantic movement in art, letters and life; he affected profoundly the German romantics and Goethe himself; he set the fashion of a new introspection which has permeated nineteenth century literature; he began modern educational theory; and, above all, in political thought he represents the passage from a traditional theory rooted in the Middle Ages to the modern philosophy of the State. His influence on Kant’s moral philosophy and on Hegel’s philosophy of Right are