The Social Contract And Discourses
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The Social Contract And Discourses
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Author : Jean Rousseau
language : en
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Release Date : 2018-07-19
The Social Contract And Discourses written by Jean Rousseau and has been published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2018-07-19 with categories.
The Social Contract & Discourses by Jean Jacques Rousseau - Translated with Introduction by G. D. H. Cole. The Social Contract finally appeared, along with Emile, in 1762. This year, therefore, represents in every respect the culmination of Rousseau's career. Henceforth, he was to write only controversial and confessional works; his theories were now developed, and, simultaneously, he gave to the world his views on the fundamental problems of politics and education. It is now time to ask what Rousseau's system, in its maturity, finally amounted to. The Social Contract contains practically the whole of his constructive political theory; it requires to be read, for full understanding, in connection with his other works, especially Emile and the Letters on the Mount (1764), but in the main it is self-contained and complete. The title sufficiently defines its scope. It is called The Social Contract or Principles of Political Right, and the second title explains the first. Rousseau's object is not to deal, in a general way, like Montesquieu, with the actual institutions of existing States, but to lay down the essential principles which must form the basis of every legitimate society.
The Social Contract
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Author : Jean-Jacques Rousseau
language : en
Publisher: Good Press
Release Date : 2023-11-30
The Social Contract written by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and has been published by Good Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2023-11-30 with Political Science categories.
This eBook edition of "The Social Contract" has been formatted to the highest digital standards and adjusted for readability on all devices. The Social Contract, originally published as On the Social Contract; or, Principles of Political Rights by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is a 1762 book in which Rousseau theorized about the best way to establish a political community in the face of the problems of commercial society, which he had already identified in his Discourse on Inequality (1754). The Social Contract helped inspire political reforms or revolutions in Europe, especially in France. The Social Contract argued against the idea that monarchs were divinely empowered to legislate. Rousseau asserts that only the people, who are sovereign, have that all-powerful right.
The Social Contract
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Author : Jean-Jacques Rousseau
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 1973
The Social Contract written by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 1973 with Economics categories.
In The Social Contract Rousseau (1712-1778) argues for the preservation of individual freedom in political society. An individual can only be free under the law, he says, by voluntarily embracing that law as his own. Hence, being free in society requires each of us to subjugate our desires to the interests of all, the general will.
The Social Contract Discourses
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Author : JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU
language : en
Publisher: BEYOND BOOKS HUB
Release Date : 2016-06-15
The Social Contract Discourses written by JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU and has been published by BEYOND BOOKS HUB this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2016-06-15 with Fiction categories.
For the study of the great writers and thinkers of the past, historical imagination is the first necessity. Without mentally referring to the environment in which they lived, we cannot hope to penetrate below the inessential and temporary to the absolute and permanent value of their thought. Theory, no less than action, is subject to these necessities; the form in which men cast their speculations, no less than the ways in which they behave, are the result of the habits of thought and action which they find around them. Great men make, indeed, individual contributions to the knowledge of their times; but they can never transcend the age in which they live. The questions they try to answer will always be those their contemporaries are asking; their statement of fundamental problems will always be relative to the traditional statements that have been handed down to them. When they are stating what is most startlingly new, they will be most likely to put it in an old-fashioned form, and to use the inadequate ideas and formulae of tradition to express the deeper truths towards which they are feeling their way. They will be most the children of their age, when they are rising most above it. Rousseau has suffered as much as any one from critics without a sense of history. He has been cried up and cried down by democrats and oppressors with an equal lack of understanding and imagination. His name, a hundred and fifty years after the publication of the Social Contract, is still a controversial watchword and a party cry. He is accepted as one of the greatest writers France has produced; but even now men are inclined, as political bias prompts them, to accept or reject his political doctrines as a whole, without sifting them or attempting to understand and discriminate. He is still revered or hated as the author who, above all others, inspired the French Revolution. At the present day, his works possess a double significance. They are important historically, alike as giving us an insight into the mind of the eighteenth century, and for the actual influence they have had on the course of events in Europe. Certainly no other writer of the time has exercised such an influence as his. He may fairly be called the parent of the romantic movement in art, letters and life; he affected profoundly the German romantics and Goethe himself; he set the fashion of a new introspection which has permeated nineteenth century literature; he began modern educational theory; and, above all, in political thought he represents the passage from a traditional theory rooted in the Middle Ages to the modern philosophy of the State. His influence on Kant's moral philosophy and on Hegel's philosophy of Right are two sides of the same fundamental contribution to modern thought. He is, in fact, the great forerunner of German and English Idealism. It would not be possible, in the course of a short introduction, to deal both with the positive content of Rousseau's thought and with the actual influence he has had on practical affairs. The statesmen of the French Revolution, from Robespierre downwards, were throughout profoundly affected by the study of his works. Though they seem often to have misunderstood him, they had on the whole studied him with the attention he demands. In the nineteenth century, men continued to appeal to Rousseau, without, as a rule, knowing him well or penetrating deeply into his meaning. "The Social Contract," says M. Dreyfus-Brisac, "is the book of all books that is most talked of and least read." But with the great revival of interest in political philosophy there has come a desire for the better understanding of Rousseau's work. He is again being studied more as a thinker and less as an ally or an opponent; there is more eagerness to sift the true from the false, and to seek in the Social Contract the "principles of political right," rather than the great revolutionary's ipse dixit in favour of some view about circumstances which he could never have contemplated. The Social Contract, then, may be regarded either as a document of the French Revolution, or as one of the greatest books dealing with political philosophy. It is in the second capacity, as a work of permanent value containing truth, that it finds a place among the world's great books. It is in that capacity also that it will be treated in this introduction. Taking it in this aspect, we have no less need of historical insight than if we came to it as historians pure and simple. To understand its value we must grasp its limitations; when the questions it answers seem unnaturally put, we must not conclude that they are meaningless; we must see if the answer still holds when the question is put in a more up-to-date form. First, then, we must always remember that Rousseau is writing in the eighteenth century, and for the most part in France. Neither the French monarchy nor the Genevese aristocracy loved outspoken criticism, and Rousseau had always to be very careful what he said. This may seem a curious statement to make about a man who suffered continual persecution on account of his subversive doctrines; but, although Rousseau was one of the most daring writers of his time, he was forced continually to moderate his language and, as a rule, to confine himself to generalisation instead of attacking particular abuses. Rousseau's theory has often been decried as too abstract and metaphysical. This is in many ways its great strength; but where it is excessively so, the accident of time is to blame. In the eighteenth century it was, broadly speaking, safe to generalise and unsafe to particularise. Scepticism and discontent were the prevailing temper of the intellectual classes, and a short-sighted despotism held that, as long as they were confined to these, they would do little harm. Subversive doctrines were only regarded as dangerous when they were so put as to appeal to the masses; philosophy was regarded as impotent. The intellectuals of the eighteenth century therefore generalised to their hearts' content, and as a rule suffered little for their lèse-majesté: Voltaire is the typical example of such generalisation. The spirit of the age favoured such methods, and it was therefore natural for Rousseau to pursue them. But his general remarks had such a way of bearing very obvious particular applications, and were so obviously inspired by a particular attitude towards the government of his day, that even philosophy became in his hands unsafe, and he was attacked for what men read between the lines of his works. It is owing to this faculty of giving his generalisations content and actuality that Rousseau has become the father of modern political philosophy. He uses the method of his time only to transcend it; out of the abstract and general he creates the concrete and universal. Secondly, we must not forget that Rousseau's theories are to be studied in a wider historical environment. If he is the first of modern political theorists, he is also the last of a long line of Renaissance theorists, who in turn inherit and transform the concepts of mediæval thought. So many critics have spent so much wasted time in proving that Rousseau was not original only because they began by identifying originality with isolation: they studied first the Social Contract by itself, out of relation to earlier works, and then, having discovered that these earlier works resembled it, decided that everything it had to say was borrowed. Had they begun their study in a truly historical spirit, they would have seen that Rousseau's importance lies just in the new use he makes of old ideas, in the transition he makes from old to new in the general conception of politics. No mere innovator could have exercised such an influence or hit on so much truth. Theory makes no great leaps; it proceeds to new concepts by the adjustment and renovation of old ones. Just as theological writers on politics, from Hooker to Bossuet, make use of Biblical terminology and ideas; just as more modern writers, from Hegel to Herbert Spencer, make use of the concept of evolution, Rousseau uses the ideas and terms of the Social Contract theory. We should feel, throughout his work, his struggle to free himself from what is lifeless and outworn in that theory, while he develops out of it fruitful conceptions that go beyond its scope. A too rigid literalism in the interpretation of Rousseau's thought may easily reduce it to the possession of a merely "historical interest": if we approach it in a truly historical spirit, we shall be able to appreciate at once its temporary and its lasting value, to see how it served his contemporaries, and at the same time to disentangle from it what may be serviceable to us and for all time. Rousseau's Emile, the greatest of all works on education, has already been issued in this series. In this volume are contained the most important of his political works. Of these the Social Contract, by far the most significant, is the latest in date. It represents the maturity of his thought, while the other works only illustrate his development. Born in 1712, he issued no work of importance till 1750; but he tells us, in the Confessions, that in 1743, when he was attached to the Embassy at Venice, he had already conceived the idea of a great work on Political Institutions, "which was to put the seal on his reputation." He seems, however, to have made little progress with this work, until in 1749 he happened to light on the announcement of a prize offered by the Academy of Dijon for an answer to the question, "Has the progress of the arts and sciences tended to the purification or to the corruption of morality?" His old ideas came thronging back, and sick at heart of the life he had been leading among the Paris lumières, he composed a violent and rhetorical diatribe against civilisation generally. In the following year, this work, having been awarded the prize by the Academy, was published by its author. His success was instantaneous; he became at once a famous man, the "lion" of Parisian literary circles. Refutations of his work were issued by professors, scribblers, outraged theologians and even by the King of Poland. Rousseau endeavoured to answer them all, and in the course of argument his thought developed. From 1750 to the publication of the Social Contract and Emile in 1762 he gradually evolved his views: in those twelve years he made his unique contribution to political thought. The Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, the earliest of the works reproduced in this volume, is not in itself of very great importance. Rousseau has given his opinion of it in the Confessions. "Full of warmth and force, it is wholly without logic or order; of all my works it is the weakest in argument and the least harmonious. But whatever gifts a man may be born with, he cannot learn the art of writing in a moment." This criticism is just. The first Discourse neither is, nor attempts to be, a reasoned or a balanced production. It is the speech of an advocate, wholly one-sided and arbitrary, but so obviously and naively one-sided, that it is difficult for us to believe in its entire seriousness. At the most, it is only a rather brilliant but flimsy rhetorical effort, a sophistical improvisation, but not a serious contribution to thought. Yet it is certain that this declamation made Rousseau's name, and established his position as a great writer in Parisian circles. D'Alembert even devoted the preface of the Encyclopædia to a refutation. The plan of the first Discourse is essentially simple: it sets out from the badness, immorality and misery of modern nations, traces all these ills to the departure from a "natural" state, and then credits the progress of the arts and sciences with being the cause of that departure. In it, Rousseau is already in possession of his idea of "nature" as an ideal; but he has at present made no attempt to discriminate, in what is unnatural, between good and bad. He is merely using a single idea, putting it as strongly as he can, and neglecting all its limitations. The first Discourse is important not for any positive doctrine it contains, but as a key to the development of Rousseau's mind. Here we see him at the beginning of the long journey which was to lead on at last to the theory of the Social Contract...
The Social Contract
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Author : Jean-Jacques Rousseau
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 1938
The Social Contract written by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 1938 with Economics categories.
The Social Contract And Discourses
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Author : Jean-Jacques Rousseau
language : en
Publisher: Bnpublishing.Com
Release Date : 2007-06-04
The Social Contract And Discourses written by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and has been published by Bnpublishing.Com this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2007-06-04 with Philosophy categories.
The Everyman Paperback Classics series offers the latest scholarship on the works of the world's greatest poets, writers and philosophers. Each edition includes a comprehensive introduction, chronology, notes, appendix, critical responses, and a text summary. Presented in an affordable edition with wide format pages for generous margins for notes. Contact your sales rep or call Tuttle for a complete list of available titles.
On The Social Contract
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Author : Jean-Jacques Rousseau
language : en
Publisher: Hackett Publishing
Release Date : 1988-11-15
On The Social Contract written by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and has been published by Hackett Publishing this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 1988-11-15 with Philosophy categories.
Contents include a note on the translation, introduction by Peter Gay, and a bibliography.
The Social Contract Discourses
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Author : Jean Jacques Rousseau
language : en
Publisher: Lulu.com
Release Date : 2016-11-26
The Social Contract Discourses written by Jean Jacques Rousseau and has been published by Lulu.com this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2016-11-26 with Political Science categories.
The role of government and whether it is required was a great topic of discussion around the revolt against the French nobility at the time this book was written. The argument focuses around whether the idea of law and good conscious is written within each of us and that we all know how government should act and be carried out. The work then goes over the various forms of government and of them all which would fit the proposed "Social Contract" the best. Each as its own merits.
Discourse On Political Economy And The Social Contract
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Author : Jean-Jacques Rousseau
language : en
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Release Date : 2008-08-14
Discourse On Political Economy And The Social Contract written by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and has been published by Oxford University Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2008-08-14 with Literary Collections categories.
Censored in its own time, the Social Contract (1762) remains a key source of democratic belief and is one of the classics of political theory. This new translation is fully annotated and indexed. The volume also contains the opening chapter of the manuscript version of the Contract, together with the long article on Political Economy, a work traditionally between the Contract and Rousseau's earlier masterpiece, the Discourse on Inequality.
The Social Contract
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Author :
language : en
Publisher: Cosimo, Inc.
Release Date : 2008-01-01
The Social Contract written by and has been published by Cosimo, Inc. this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2008-01-01 with Philosophy categories.
Wise men, if they try to speak their language to the common herd instead of its own, cannot possibly make themselves understood. There are a thousand kinds of ideas which it is impossible to translate into popular language. Conceptions that are too general and objects that are too remote are equally out of its range: each individual, having no taste for any other plan of government than that which suits his particular interest, finds it difficult to realize the advantages he might hope to draw from the continual privations good laws impose. -from VII: "The Legislator" How does human nature impact politics and government? What is the "social contract," and what are our obligations to it? Is the "general will" infallible? What are the limits of sovereign power? What are the marks of "good government"? What constitutes the death of the body politic? How can we check the usurpations of government? Swiss philosopher JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU (1712-1778) was a dramatic influence on the French revolution, 19th-century communism, the American Founding Fathers, and much modern political thought, primarily through this 1762 work, his most influential. Here, he explores concepts of civil society, human sovereignty, and effective government that continue to be debated-and not yet settled-in the 21st century. A classic of modern thought, this is required reading for anyone wishing to be considered well educated.