Rousseau 1712–1778 Switzerland, France

In Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755), Rousseau maintains that every variety of injustice found in human society is an artificial result of the control exercised by defective political and intellectual influences over the healthy natural impulses of otherwise noble savages.  The alternative he proposed in Du contrat social (On the Social Contract) (1762) is a civil society voluntarily formed by its citizens and wholly governed by reference to the general will [Fr. volonté générale] expressed in their unanimous consent to authority.

Encyclopedia Entries

Jean-Jacques Rousseau	Oxford Companion to Philosophy
Jean-Jacques Rousseau	Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Jean-Jacques Rousseau	Encyclopedia Britannica
Jean-Jacques Rousseau	Wikipedia
The Social Contract	Catholic Encyclopedia (1913)

Philosopher of the Month

Questions of 

The Social Contract, liberty, equality, fraternity

Reading

Rousseau's Social Contract

Emile, or On Education

Emile, or On Education (frameless)

English translation by Barbara Foxley (1911); revised by Grace Roosevelt, 1998.

Writing available on the net

Commentaries

Rousseau Snapshot

Philosopher of the Month

Quotations

''Everything is good when it leaves the hands of the Creator; everything degenerates in the hands of man.'' [Emile]

Jean Jacques Rousseau
''In the strict sense of the term, a true democracy has never existed, and will never exist. It is against natural order that the great number should govern and that the few should be governed.'' [The Social Contract]

CLASSICAL SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY SSR Prelim Summary Archive

Rousseau, Jean. 'On the Social Contract.' TS, pp. 119-25