The social contract & discourses

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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




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, 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.