politalX Politics Store - The Social Contract (Wordsworth Classics of World Literature)
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List Price: £3.99
Our Price: £3.99
Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
Manufacturer: Wordsworth Editions Ltd
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 973
EAN: 9781853267819
ISBN: 1853267813
Label: Wordsworth Editions Ltd
Manufacturer: Wordsworth Editions Ltd
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 160
Publication Date: 1998-10-01
Publisher: Wordsworth Editions Ltd
Studio: Wordsworth Editions Ltd
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Editorial Reviews:
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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.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: You'll never learn so much in such a small book
Comment: This book is a work of genius for the whole, exquisitely written it offers wisdom on most pages and nonsense on the others. It's been a very long time since I learnt such a large amount, the language has a poetic beauty to it and anybody interested in governance should read this. The thesis of the book is well known (as it indeed should be) but there are some startling facts about the author. Rousseau was serial child abandoner; he seems to have left five children in foundling hospitals and when attacked by his critic, a certain Voltaire, his defence was that the he would have been a poor father and his children would fair better in a foundling hospital. A slightly implausible fact given the high mortality rate at the founding hospital. Still, we judge him for his ideas, not his actions so this book receives a resounding five stars.
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Summary: socialist precurser
Comment: this book is not, as other readers claim, endorsing dictatorship, but rather is criticising bad democracy. surprisingly persuasive and well written, as a blueprint to later socialist theories eg Marx, it is fascinating.
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Summary: A Warning From History
Comment: This is an important book, perhaps one of the most influential ever written. Unfortunately its influence has been wholly pernicious in the extreme - the blueprint for totalitarian regimes the world over. Rousseau was a psychotic and self obsessed individual who elaborated a theory of human civilization at odds with the basic principles of common sense and reason. From the French Revolutionary terror to the Soviet Gulags - the hallmarks of Rousseau's absurd doctrines can be found. But a willfull disregard for reality seems to be the prerequisite for so called enlightened thinkers and those that provided the ideological bedrock for revolutionaries from the french revolution onwards. The most recent example of an attempt to throw off the 'shackles' of civilization occured in Cambodia - Pol Pot - a true disciple of Rousseau, nurtured in the intellectual salons of the Left Bank. Savage indeed, but noble? In the fevered dreams of Marxist intellectuals were the ovens and gulags first delineated - Rousseau was their precursor, an important document, handle with care.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Rousseau, we love ya!
Comment: It's coherent. It's valid. It's informed. One must make up one's own mind about the 'general will', however. Buy, read, then dismiss. Or buy, read, then love. If you can find it in your soul to love a piece of political theory, that is.
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