jean jacques rousseau's the social contract

With Melissa Lane, Senior University Lecturer in History at Cambridge University Susan James, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London Karen O’Brien, Professor of English Literature at the University of Warwick.

A key idea in political philosophy, it states that political authority is held through a contract with those to be. His strongest reason for this position is the claim that wrongdoers, in violating the laws of the state, are essentially violating the social contract. We explore how an idea that burgeoned among the 17th century upheavals of the English civil war and then withered in the face of modern capitalist society still influences our attitude to government today. The Social Contract Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Social Contract. Rousseau supports the death penalty, arguing that the sovereign has the right to determine whether its subjects should live or die. But the idea of the social contract - that political authority is held through a contract with those to be ruled - began before Rousseau with the work of John Locke, Hugo Grotius and even Plato. 1 Thus begins Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s classic political treatise, The Social Contract, the aim of which is to offer a solution to the puzzle so memorably stated in its opening line. He said himself that he was a man of paradoxes, and several of his most important works begin, famously, with paradoxes.

In agreeing to the social contract, citizens agree rationally to join together for the betterment of all. Rousseau was trying to understand why a man would give up his natural freedoms and bind himself to the rule of a prince or a government. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was one of the strangest, and one of the most intelligent, men of the eighteenth centuryof any century. Rousseau is careful to make tolerance one of the precepts of his civil religion, but such an action does not prevent an unreasoned subservience to the state. So begins Jean Jacques Rousseau’s great work on the Social Contract. Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Social Contract and ask a foundational question of political philosophy – by what authority does a government govern? “Man was born free and he is everywhere in chains”.

Jean jacques rousseau's the social contract