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THE SOCIAL CONTRACT & DISCOURSES
BY
JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU
LONDON & TORONTO
PUBLISHED BY J. M. DENT & SONS
IN NEW YORK BY E. P. DUTTON & CO
1920
EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY
EDITED BY ERNEST RHYS
PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY
ROUSSEAU'S
SOCIAL CONTRACT, ETC.
TRANSLATED WITH INTRODUCTION
BY G. D. H. COLE,
FELLOW OF MAGDALEN COLLEGE,
OXFORD
INTRODUCTION
For the study of the great writers and thinkers of the past, historicalimagination is the first necessity. Without mentally referring to theenvironment in which they lived, we cannot hope to penetrate below theinessential and temporary to the absolute and permanent value of theirthought. Theory, no less than action, is subject to these necessities;the form in which men cast their speculations, no less than the waysin which they behave, are the result of the habits of thought andaction which they find around them. Great men make, indeed, individualcontributions to the knowledge of their times; but they can nevertranscend the age in which they live. The questions they try to answerwill always be those their contemporaries are asking; their statementof fundamental problems will always be relative to the traditionalstatements that have been handed down to them. When they are statingwhat is most startlingly new, they will be most likely to put it in anold-fashioned form, and to use the inadequate ideas and formulae oftradition to express the deeper truths towards which they are feelingtheir way. They will be most the children of their age, when they arerising most above it.
Rousseau has suffered as much as any one from critics without a senseof history. He has been cried up and cried down by democrats andoppressors with an equal lack of understanding and imagination. Hisname, a hundred and fifty years after the publication of the SocialContract, is still a controversial watchword and a party cry. He isaccepted as one of the greatest writers France has produced; but evennow men are inclined, as political bias prompts them, to accept orreject his political doctrines as a whole, without sifting them orattempting to understand and discriminate. He is still revered or hatedas the author who, above all others, inspired the French Revolution.
At the present day, his works possess a double significance. They areimportant historically, alike as giving us an insight into the mindof the eighteenth century, and for the actual influence they have hadon the course of events in Europe. Certainly no other writer of thetime has exercised such an influence as hi