«I mean to inquire if, in the civil order, there can be any sure and legitimate rule of administration, men being taken as they are and laws as they might be...» The Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right by Jean-Jacques Rousseau is a book in which Rousseau theorized about the best way to establish a political community in the face of the problems of commercial society, which he had already identified in his Discourse on Inequality (1754).
The Social Contract helped inspire political reforms or revolutions in Europe, especially in France. The Social Contract argued against the idea that monarchs were divinely empowered to legislate; as Rousseau asserts, only the people, who are sovereign, have that all-powerful right.
The stated aim of The Social Contract is to determine whether there can be a legitimate political authority, since people's interactions he saw at his time seemed to put them in a state far worse than the good one they were at the state of nature, even though living in isolation.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau nació en Ginebra, Suiza, en 1712.
El contrato social, la obra cumbre de Rousseau, fue publicada en 1762. En ella promulga que el hombre solo puede vivir en libertad en una sociedad verdaderamente igualitaria. Y para que así sea propone un contrato social que estipule la entrega total de cada asociado a la comunidad, a través de la enajenación de todas las voluntades, de forma que cada uno recupere finalmente todo lo que ha cedido a la comunidad. Así, este contrato será, pues, expresión de la voluntad general, y de esa voluntad general emana la única y legítima autoridad del Estado.
Las teorías contenidas en esta obra influyeron sobre numerosos pensadores (como Kant y Fichte) y sobre la propia Revolución francesa de 1789, que adoptó el lema de inspiración rousseauniana: «Igualdad, Libertad, Fraternidad».
