Rousseau Publishes Du Contrat Social
Published in Amsterdam by Marc-Michel Rey in April 1762, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Du Contrat Social, ou Principes du droit politique (The Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right) is the most politically explosive text of the Enlightenment and the foundational document of modern democratic theory. Rousseau's central argument overturns the existing basis of political authority: legitimate government derives not from divine right or hereditary succession but from a social contract through which individuals collectively surrender their natural freedom to a 'general will' that expresses the common good — and any government that violates this contract forfeits its claim to obedience. The implications were revolutionary: if sovereignty resides in the people rather than the monarch, then the Ancien Régime was not merely inefficient or corrupt but fundamentally illegitimate. The book was immediately condemned by the Paris Parlement and burned in Geneva, and Rousseau was forced to flee France, spending years in exile; yet within two decades his vocabulary of 'popular sovereignty,' 'general will,' and 'social contract' had become the constitutive language of the American and French Revolutions, mobilised by men who had absorbed Rousseau in adolescence and would cite him on the floor of the National Assembly.
- Year: 1762 CE
- Category: Intellectual
