ABSTRACT
The Social Contract is but one of Rousseau’s essays in political philosophy, albeit the most important one. Its connection to Rousseau’s wider body of thought is sometimes clear on the surface, but at other times the links are more subterranean. In this chapter I say something about the psychology and philosophical anthropology that lies behind the political philosophy. But before I do, it may be helpful for the reader to have a very brief initial summary of the ‘plot’ of the Social Contract. The Social Contract is organised into four books, though what we have is a fragment of a larger project on political institutions. In the first of these books, Rousseau’s intention is initially negative: he is concerned to rebut what he takes to be false theories of the legitimate authority of the state. This makes way, at the end of the first book, for a statement of his own contractarian theory of political association and his statement of the problem to which a theory of political right must provide an answer: namely, how to combine individual freedom with political authority. In the second book, Rousseau concentrates on the nature of the sovereign people, outlines his conception of the general will and of the law 18that flows from it and addresses some problems of the initial formation of the state via the figure of the ‘lawgiver’. The third book concentrates on the mechanism for the application and enforcement of the general will in particular cases: the government. Rousseau outlines what he takes to be the correct relationship between sovereign and government and the ways in which this relationship will almost inevitably go wrong and lead to the end of the body politic. This theme is continued into the beginning of the fourth book, most of which is devoted to a survey of Roman political institutions but which concludes with an important chapter on civil religion.
