SOURCE: An introduction to The Social Contract, by Jean Jacques Rousseau, translated by Maurice Cranston Penguin Books, 1968, pp. 9-43.

In the following excerpt, Cranston discusses Rousseau's Social Contract in the context of Rousseau's other works and in the works of his contemporaries.

The political views of the philosophes were as dis-tasteful to Rousseau as were most of their opinions. Like their master, Francis Bacon, they believed in strong government; the doctrine of planning called for a ruler with enough power to put plans into effect; and just as Bacon himself once dreamed of converting James I to his way of thinking and then using magnified royal prerogative to enact his proposals, so the philosophes of the eighteenth century based their hopes for success on influencing powerful monarchs to do what they suggested. The current name for this was le despotisme éclairé; to Rousseau, the champion of freedom, any...