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This introductory chapter discusses Rousseau's theory of amour-propre. It looks at why Rousseau's theory of amour-propre can be considered a theodicy and the centrality of amour-propre. The chapter also presents some preliminary remarks about his understanding of amour-propre.

This chapter discusses a movement of modern democratic type in Geneva in 1768, which made a positive impression on institutions of government. In the roles played by upper, middle, and lower classes, in the conflict between political and economic demands, and in the interplay between revolutionary and counterrevolutionary pressures, this “revolution” at Geneva prefigured or symbolized the greater revolution that was to come in France. It was, moreover, a revolution precipitated by the presence in the neighborhood of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It was here that the Social Contract produced its first explosion. Near at hand, at the same time, lived another worthy of more than local repute, namely Voltaire. The embroilment of Rousseau and Voltaire in the politics of Geneva meant the blowing of two antithetical views of the world into a teapot tempest; or, rather, the agitations at Geneva, which in themselves were significant enough, were brought to the level of world history by the involvement of these two difficult geniuses.

In Chapter 7 I turn to the Social Contract, which poses a challenge for my approach because there is only the barest indication of the intended reader of the work or any dialogue between author and reader. What I examine, then, are the two principal readings of the treatise Rousseau makes available to any reader. The first reading is a treatise on the principles of political right which are always and everywhere the same whereas the second reading is a work that also attends to the conditions for the creation and maintenance of a legitimate political association. In order to show how these two principal readings are made available by Rousseau in the Social Contract, I first examine the precis of his political treatise contained in Emile, arguing that he provides only the first of these readings there of a treatise on political right. I then briefly analyze the structure of the earlier version of the work, the so-called “Geneva Manuscript,” in comparison to the structure of the final version of the Social Contract, and then the structure of the Social Contract itself, with the same intention. I then briefly outline the two principal readings themselves.

This chapter outlines the foundations of an argument that would culminate in the displacement of the death penalty from the top rung of the ladder of punishments. It focuses solely on the longest chapter, Chapter 28, in Cesare Beccaria's On Crimes and Punishments to discuss the author's structure of punishments. As such, it represented all that was wrong with the existing criminal law. The chapter argues that the argument against the death penalty, which Beccaria regarded as decisive, is derived from his version of Social Contract theory. The abuses of the existing system of criminal justice, which are roundly attacked from the very beginning, are the creation of human convention, that is to say, legislation supplemented by jurisprudential opinion, which have strayed from the 'enactments' of the Social Contract. It then follows with a statement of the fundamental principle which the laws representing the contracts made among men should seek to uphold, namely, 'the greatest happiness shared among the greater number'. Ultimately, the chapter assesses the influence of Helvétius on Pietro Verri and Beccaria in elevating an early version of utilitarianism to the status of an established philosophical doctrine.

The social being of humans, which was conceptualized in the seventeenth century, was presented as the result of combining isolated individuals wherein a set of agreed upon laws or rules binds these separated individuals. This chapter analyzes the notion of contract and the pre-social conditions that could have initiated the idea of having a Social Contract when these separated individuals had no shared fields of experience, institutions, or obligations. One of the key concerns in this chapter is the notion of a universal “human nature” and how this could provide explanations, given the fact that there are ways of testing the presence or absence of certain attributes. This chapter also describes the notions of nature and society and how these could have aided in explaining human nature.

This chapter examines the issue of sociability and the theory of the state with regard to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. More specifically, it considers Rousseau's intervention in the debate over human sociability, mainly in The Discourse on Inequality, and how it ultimately led in the opposite direction to that pointed out by David Hume: back to Thomas Hobbes. The chapter begins with a discussion of Rousseau's idea of the state of nature as well as the views of Rousseau and Hume on pity, justice, property, and deception. It then analyzes Rousseau's The Social Contract, an exercise in full-blooded Hobbesian sovereignty theory, and his attempt to start from a different place in the theory of sociability, and then offer a purposefully counter-Hobbesian theory of sovereignty. The chapter argues that Rousseau ultimately could not get past Hobbes, and ended up returning to the latter's positions.

This chapter provides an overview of what should be understood as one of the most sophisticated analyses of the distinction between constituent and constituted authority, that of Rousseau. It engages in a close reading of Rousseau’s work and considers the ways in which it anticipated and served as the basis for Sieyès’ famous theory. Rousseau has not generally been seen as a theorist of constituent power. This is probably a result of his apparent support of direct democracy: in a direct democracy, there is no separation between the government and the governed and, therefore, no separation between the constituted powers and the constituent subject. But Rousseau, the chapter shows, clearly rejected direct democracy as a form of government: he only insisted in the direct intervention of the citizenry for the ratification of the ‘laws’. The problem with most contemporary interpretations of Rousseau is that they attribute to his use of the term ‘law’ the same meaning that that term has today: an ordinary statute adopted by a representative body. But Rousseau used the term ‘law’ to refer to the fundamental norms of the legal system, norms that only an assembly of the entire people or a multiplicity of primary assemblies, the constituent subject, could legitimately adopt. The chapter also considers the practical implications of Rousseau’s approach, such as primary assemblies with the authority to issue legally binding instructions.

In this introduction to his volume The Portable Rousseau (1973), Paul de Man focuses on Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Social Contract. He begins by discussing the notion of textual allegory, as it derives from the Social Contract, and how it provides the generalising principle which makes it possible to consider theotropical or ethical allegories as particularised versions of this generative model and thus to break down the significance of such thematic distinctions. He then suggests that the ‘inclusion’ of a deconstructed version of the Profession de foi within the context of the Social Contract is predictable, since both works can be considered as the same political allegory, the first on a figural, the second on a textual level. He also cites Rousseau's novel La nouvelle Héloïse as a textural allegory like the Social Contract and not like the Profession de foi.

This chapter asks directly a question which often lurks behind discussions of Hobbes, but which is rarely put clearly: how radical is the transformation of politics, and indeed human life in general, which Hobbes supposed would be the result of taking his theory seriously? This question is raised partly for its intrinsic interest, as it seems that answering it correctly gives us a great deal of insight into the overall character of Hobbes's politics, but also because it is relevant to the further question of who Hobbes's successors were, and what happened to Hobbesian politics in the 18th and early 19th centuries; in particular, one cannot address the issue of the relationship between Hobbes and Rousseau without first clarifying the extent to which both were utopians, of a kind. It is argued that Leviathan is as much of a utopian work as The Social Contract, and may indeed be the greatest piece of utopian writing to come out of the English Revolution.

The fourth chapter shows how the earlier established definition of modern sovereignty – as the justification of the end of power through the means of violence – influences the development of the idea of popular sovereignty. Spinoza's theory of resistance is shown to be the first time that the idea of the sovereign justification of violence is criticized by suggesting a theory of democracy. Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas further indicates that a direct opposition to sovereignty power can only increase the power of justification, and hence that different strategies need to be employed for a radical politics.

This chapter explores Rousseau’s account of the tension between community and individual by examining the Second Discourse and the Social Contract on the one hand, and Julie on the other. In his political theory Rousseau defines the state of nature as a mere fantasy which belongs to an optative imagined past. In leaving the state of nature, people trade basic needs for decadent desires. Rousseau introduces the general will as a practical device for managing the asociability of the private will, which is driven mainly by appetite. To safeguard the general will from its wayward members, individuals must form a social contract which transforms them into sociable beings. In Julie Rousseau explores the sacrifices that individuals make in joining the general will, as Julie is torn between personal desire on the one hand and social conformity on the other. Rousseau’s literature suggests that the two are incompatible and thus ‘judges’ his philosophy, exploring the deathly outcome of contract. Rousseau’s use of literature to critique the social contract constitutes his major legacy to British Romantic writers.

Despite the attempt of social contract theory and its critics to banish Aristotle’s concept of natural sociability, imagery of dismembered bodies resurfaces in political writings circa 1650-1810. Fractured body imagery is a metaphor for a cadaverous commonality that is inherent to modern political theory. From different perspectives, British empiricism, the Scottish Enlightenment, German Idealism, and Romanticism all express a crisis in theories of community through the imagery of a fragmented body politic. Hobbes and Locke unbind the state from metaphysical legitimizations but are unable to reconcile concepts of individuality, freedom, and sovereignty. Adam Smith’s invisible hand retains a visceral memory of the lost body politic, which finds an outlet in the workings of sympathy. German Idealism recasts the conflict between private individuals and commonality as a productive dynamic. British caricatures of the 1790s reproduce the fragmentation of individuals from the social body in visual terms. Together with anti-Jacobin fictionalizations of the social contract these caricatures break down boundaries between ‘radical’ and ‘conservative’ engagements with contract, demonstrating the ubiquity of Aristotle’s ghostly body politic.

This chapter argues that while the category of “modernity” is differential, it is so in several senses that intersect and vie with one another. It introduces certain theses on modernity which aim to “deconstruct” the institutions, presuppositions, and discourses of modernity, arguing that they are always present at the heart of the philosophical expressions of modernity. The chapter discusses these concepts with respect to a problem of reading and interpreting a particular Hegelian utterance: “Ich, das Wir, und Wir, das Ich ist” (hereafter, “IWWI”), taken from Chapter 4 of the Phenomenology of Spirit. In doing so the chapter also takes into account two models for Hegel's utterance: the theophanic utterances from the Gospel of John, and Rousseau's Social Contract.

This introduction argues that not only have Romantic works been shaped by social contract theory’s tensions, but also their reception. The historical-political turn in Romanticism studies has brought attention to politics but often regards Romantic literature as promoting social retreat. Yet Romanticism’s preoccupation with retreat responds to social contract theory and its alienation of individuals from the social body. British Romanticism was affected by a rift in theories of sociability as European culture shifted away from an Aristotelian model of natural sociability to a modern view of sociability as a secondary property of human nature. The introduction considers differences between genres of political theory and Romantic poetry and novels. Social contract theory developed a subversive approach to literature as a medium suited to political critique. Whereas Romantic poetry maintains a critical distance from philosophical discourse based on formal discreteness, narrative fiction had always been an integral part of philosophical argumentation and particularly of empiricism. Therefore, novelists focus their works on dissident individuals excluded from the general will and on a crumbling social body.

Chapter one examines John Locke’s treatment of disability, showing how he drew on disability to symbolize both shared human vulnerability and the outer skirts of personhood. I conceptualize Locke’s treatment of disability as two sides of a capacity contract, showing how uncertainty over human capacities invites both exclusion and solidarity.

This chapter considers the experience of the Labour Government during the crucial eighteen month period following the general election of February 1974, including the nature of the Social Contract and the Government‘s failure to effectively tackle Britain‘s economic problems. It does so by reference to Prentice‘s experience in the Labour Cabinet as Secretary of State for Education, focussing on his important Cabinet alliance with Roy Jenkins and his increasingly fractious relationship with the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson. The alliance with Jenkins enabled Prentice to resume his controversial and outspoken campaign in favour of moderate social democracy. By speaking out against the policy preferences of the Left, he represented, in its most overt form, the growing gap between Labour‘s parliamentary leadership and the extra-parliamentary party of left-wing activists and militant trade unionists. The EEC referendum campaign highlighted still further these growing divisions and threatened to split the Party. Prentice‘s controversial role in the campaign, with his call for national unity, brought his relations with Wilson to a head and provided the trigger for a successful challenge from within his local party.