ABSTRACT
Scholars who see Jean-Jacques Rousseau through the eyes of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel mistakenly remove him from social contract theorizing; those who see him through the eyes of Immanuel Kant immerse him in a version of social contract theory that was quite other than his own. Completely overlooked by George Sabine and other scholars who transformed Rousseau into a pre-Hegelian was the persistence of social contract theory as a formidable, perhaps the most formidable, feature of Rousseau’s thought. Even as scholars lost sight of Hegel’s recognition that Rousseau belonged to the social contract tradition, they remembered his legacy of tying Rousseau not only to nineteenth-century notions of the state but also to modern nationalism. Du Contract Social, moreover, features the full panoply of concepts common to thinkers in the social contract tradition, such as notions of natural rights and government by the consent of the governed.
