An Analysis of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract

Few people can claim to have had minds as fertile and creative as the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.One of the most influential political theorists of the modern age, he was also a composer and writer of opera, a novelist, and a memoirist whose Confessions ranks as one of the most striking works of autobiography ever written.Like many creative thinkers, Rousseau was someone whose restless mind could not help questioning accepted orthodoxies and looking at matters from novel and innovative angles.His 1762 treatise The Social Contract does exactly that.Examining the nature and sources of legitimate political power, it crafted a closely reasoned and passionately persuasive argument for democracy at a time when the most widely accepted form of government was absolute monarchy, legitimised by religious beliefs about the divine right of kings and queens to rule.In France, the book was banned by worried Catholic censors; in Rousseau’s native Geneva, it was both banned and burned.Bu