Talk:The Social Contract

Please

Sign yeer posts. Sioraf (talk) 05:22, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

Rousseau and Revolution

The paragraph on the influence of The Social Contract could be improved by expanding on both its positive and negative effects on the course of the French Revolution. The Terror as well as the Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen have been traced back to Rousseau. Dactylion (talk) 17:20, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

Requested move

The following discussion is an archived discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

Moved to The Social Contract. The is the name of the book as used in the notes within the article. Vegaswikian (talk) 03:42, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

Social Contract (Rousseau) → The Social Contract, Or Principles of Political Right — MoS conformation to article about a book. Alternatively, it should be moved to just The Social Contract. I note that all of the diasmbig pages/hatnotes to point to The Social Contract, Or Principles of Political Right rather than to Social Contract (Rousseau). Robert K S (talk) 14:06, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

• Move to The Social Contract, which already redirects here anyway, is the common English name, and meets guidelines at WP:THE and WP:NC-BK. Subtitles are generally not used for books unless needed for disambiguation, which is not the case here. Station1 (talk) 19:23, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

In Our Time

• The BBC programme In Our Time presented by Melvyn Bragg has an episode which may be about this subject (if not moving this note to the appropriate talk page earns cookies). You can add it to "External links" by pasting * {{In Our Time|The Social Contract|b008w3xm}}.

Rich Farmbrough, 03:22, 16 September 2010 (UTC).

 Done —Tom Morris (talk) 14:16, 28 September 2015 (UTC)

Overview

City states and nations.

"In light of all this, Rousseau argues that, like his native Geneva, small city-states are the form of nation in which freedom can best flourish"

There is a very large difference between a state and a nation. I'm not being pedantic about this either. The two concepts are completely different. Nations didnt truely exist till end of the 19th centuary, around 1870 etc. Please read Ernest Gellners Nations and Nationalism, Age of empire (Hobsbawn) et al. A better wording would be: "In light of all this, Rousseau argues that, like his native Geneva, small city-states would be easier to govern than states which cover larger geographical areas such as russia."

86.178.54.77 (talk) 17:06, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

This section has bad writing.

I would like to see a link to Thomas Hobbes' included in here, as Jean Jacques Rousseau's argument of The Social Contract was directly against Thomas Hobbes' version. Yoccarachel95 (talk) 22:24, 28 January 2018 (UTC)

Adding clarification regarding Rousseau's definition of "Democracy"

Currently, the article describes Rousseau's views thusly:

"In his view, a monarchical government is able to wield the most power over the people since it has to devote less power to itself, while a democracy the least. In general, the larger the bureaucracy, the more power required for government discipline. Normally, this relationship requires the state to be an aristocracy or monarchy. When Rousseau uses the word democracy, he refers to an executive composed of all or most of the people (Bk. 3, Ch. 3, Para. 2) rather than to a representative democracy. Rousseau argues that it is the people themselves, not their representatives, who have supreme power, and that everyone taking part in legislation is a check against abuse of power. In light of the relation between population size and governmental structure, Rousseau argues that like his native Geneva, small city-states are the form of the nation in which freedom can best flourish. For states of this size, an elected aristocracy is preferable, and in very large states a benevolent monarch; but even monarchical rule, to be legitimate, must be subordinate to the sovereign rule of law."

This is accurate with regards to Rousseau's own terminology, but (due to his tendency to use his own less-than-intuitive definitions) has the propensity to mislead. Rousseau's "monarchy," "aristocracy," and "democracy" would all be considered democracies (and direct democracies) in modern terms, given that legitimacy is dependent on legislative (as opposed to executive, which is what Rousseau is talking about in this section) power being held exclusively by the people as a whole in a system of what we would today call direct democracy.

Obviously, this isn't really what we today would think of as "monarchy." Rousseau would deem all of what we would call monarchies, representative democracies, aristocracies, etc, to be fundamentally illegitimate governments and a form of slavery. Someone not used to how Rousseau writes, though, might be inclined to think via this paragraph that he would support a conventional "monarchy" given that the rule of law remains, when in actuality he is talking exclusively about executive authority. It might be wise to clarify that a bit in this paragraph so as to make it clear that Rousseau was absolutely a supporter (to a still-radical extent) of what we would deem "democracy" in all cases. PaulRevered (talk) 20:19, 23 October 2025 (UTC)