Rousseau Jean-Jacques - Discourse on political economy ; and, the social contract

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

THE SOCIAL CONTRACT

JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU (171278) was born a Citizen of Geneva, an inhabitant with full political rights, to Isaac Rousseau, a skilled craftsman (he made clocks) who passed on his keen political awareness to his son. Rousseaus mother died soon after his birth. Virtually self-taught, and having voluntarily exiled himself from his native city at the age of 16, he led an unsettled life in France until his mid-thirties, when he began to make a name for himself in Paris, first as a musician. A friend of some of the leading younger thinkers of the time, notably Denis Diderot, later the chief editor of the huge and epoch-making Encyclopdie, Rousseau first achieved fame as a writer by his denunciation of the state of modern, as compared with ancient, society (the First Discourse). His Second Discourse, on social inequality, broadened the scope of the attack, but also presented man as a being with potential for goodness. From this point Rousseaus thought diversified into several areas, connected by his intense preoccupation with the moral aspect of social life; his wide-ranging novel in letter form, Julie (1761), scrutinizes private and domestic relations, while in mile he wrote unforgettably on the upbringing of a future citizen. The Social Contract, published in 1762, the same year as mile, deepens and extends political ideas put forward in embryonic form in the Second Discourse and, more fully, in the Discourse on Political Economy, originally an article published in 1755 in the Enclyclopdie. Rousseaus profundity, originality, and intellectual daring, as well as his policy of declaring his own anonymity, brought him serious trouble: legal measures were taken against both the Social Contract and mile, which included a long and very audacious section on religion. For some years Rousseau again became a wanderer, in Switzerland and England, then, under an assumed name, in France. The personal works he wrote in later years, notably the extraordinary Confessions, remarkably candid but also picturesque and informative, have been just as significant as his ideas for readers of later generations. The precise extent of his undoubted influence on the French Revolution remains a matter of debate, but one revealing sign is that in 1794 his ashes were transferred to the Panthon in Paris.

CHRISTOPHER BETTS is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Warwick, where he has been in the Department of French Studies since its inception in 1965. He has published books and articles on eighteenth-century French literature and thought and has translated Montesquieus Lettres persanes.

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OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU

Translated with an Introduction and Notes by
CHRISTOPHER BETTS

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Christopher Betts 1994

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First published as a Worlds Classics paperback 1994
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Data available

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 17121778.
[Discours sur loeconomie politique. English]
Discourse on political economy and The social contract/Jean
Jacques Rousseau; translated with introduction and notes by
Christopher Betts.
p. cm.(Oxford worlds classics)
Translation of: Discours sur loeconomie politique: Du contrat social.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Political science. 2. Social contract. I. Rousseau, Jean
Jacques, 17121778. Du contrat social. English. 1994.
II. Title. III. Title: Social contract. IV. Title: Discourse on
political economy. V. Series.
JC179.R86 1994 320.01dc20 9348985
ISBN 0192835971

3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4

Printed in Great Britain by
Cox & Wyman Ltd.
Reading, Berkshire

I should like to thank Professor Donald Charlton for the first suggestion, and for making me think hard about some problems in Rousseau; the advisers and staff of Oxford University Press, for their scrupulous and expert assistance, without which this translation would have been considerably more imperfect than it is; and my wife Ann for advice, information, and unfailing support.

C.J.B.

October 1993

IN 1755, the publication of Rousseaus Discourse on Inequality brought him considerable success, but also created obligations. The Discourse, in tracing the moral decay of man in society, drew a large-scale contrast between the state of nature, in which man had at least the potential for good, and the social state, which as Rousseau described it had led to misery and tyranny. The contrast between nature and society made it possible to denounce many political and social evils, but left fundamental questions unanswered; the author owed it to himself and to his public to develop his ideas further. One question was how the individuals potential for good could be preserved in the social milieu of the mid-eighteenth century, and to this the answer came with