Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract, first published in French in 1762, asks a demanding question: how can people live together under political authority without surrendering the freedom that belongs to them as human beings? Rousseau rejects the idea that legitimate rule can rest upon force, conquest, slavery or a supposed natural right of kings. Authority becomes rightful only through a form of association in which each person joins with all while obeying laws that citizens collectively prescribe to themselves.
The famous declaration that human beings are born free yet are everywhere in chains does not simply oppose every social restraint. Rousseau distinguishes illegitimate dependence upon another person's will from civic obligation created through a lawful political community. His task is to explain how the constraints of law might express rather than destroy freedom.
The social pact creates a moral and collective body. Each associate gives himself and his powers to the whole community under the same conditions as everyone else. Because the terms are reciprocal, no member has an interest in making them burdensome to others. The resulting public person may be called a republic, body politic, state, sovereign or power according to the aspect under consideration.
Sovereignty belongs to the people as a collective law-making body. It cannot be alienated or represented because the general will cannot be transferred to another person. Government is therefore not sovereign. It is an intermediate executive body commissioned to apply laws and maintain civil and political liberty.
The general will is not simply whatever most people happen to desire. Rousseau distinguishes the will of all, which adds together private preferences, from a will directed towards the common interest. Citizens may disagree or be mistaken, but legitimate law must consider them as members of the whole rather than reward particular factions.
Rousseau's account of freedom has several dimensions. Natural liberty is limited only by individual power. Civil liberty is bounded by the general will but protected through reciprocal law. Moral liberty is self-government: freedom from enslavement to appetite through obedience to a law one prescribes as a citizen.
Property becomes a civil right within the political community. Rousseau does not deny possession, but he subjects it to public recognition and conditions of legitimacy. Occupation must concern land not already inhabited, take only what is needed for subsistence and be established through labour rather than empty ceremony.
Book II examines sovereignty, law and legislation. Laws are general in both their source and object. The legislator may frame institutions suited to a people, territory and historical situation, but possesses no independent right to command. A successful constitution must connect political equality, civic character and practical circumstances.
Book III turns to government. Rousseau analyses democracy, aristocracy and monarchy as forms of executive administration rather than forms of sovereignty. Each has strengths and dangers, and no single form suits every society. The tendency of government to pursue its corporate interest against the sovereign people creates a permanent risk of political decay.
Book IV considers assemblies, voting, Roman institutions, emergency dictatorship, censorship and civil religion. Rousseau argues that sovereignty remains active only when citizens meet and exercise judgement. His civil religion seeks a minimal public profession supporting social duties while rejecting theological intolerance.
The work is both influential and difficult. Its defence of popular sovereignty and equality helped shape republican and democratic thought, yet phrases about compelling someone to be free and the unity of the general will have also generated fears of coercion. A careful reading must keep Rousseau's distinction between general law and private domination in view while testing whether his institutions adequately protect disagreement and minorities.
This edition uses Henry J. Tozer's public-domain translation, first published in 1895, as preserved in the revised 1898 Library of Congress scan. Tozer's historical introduction and endnotes are not reproduced: the reading text contains Rousseau's prefatory and introductory notes and all forty-eight chapters, cleaned of page furniture and footnotes.