Rousseau’s treatment of civil religion in Social Contract IV.8 is best understood as an effort to grapple with religion’s relationship to national unity and international unity. Put in terms of a question, Rousseau asks: What form of religion brings both national unity and international unity? Restated in Rousseau’s specialized terminology, the central question at the heart of this chapter is: what (if any) religion is capable of bringing unity to, and thereby reconciling, particular society and general society? The aim of this chapter then is to show that the civil religion of Social Contract IV.8 is developed with an eye towards political unity – and indeed not political unity in any ordinary sense, but political unity that is at once national and international, at once a unity of the particular society and a unity of the general society.

Property has a vexed status in Rousseau’s Social Contract. On one hand, Rousseau seems committed to the conventionalist view that property is a creation of law and state. Yet Rousseau also recognizes prepolitical dimensions of property, such as a right of first occupancy and a natural entitlement to land through “labor and cultivation.” This chapter contends that Rousseau’s seemingly divergent views on property become less paradoxical once one distinguishes between the rights of others and the more self-regarding aspects of morality. Focusing on the dense section of the Social Contract titled “Of Real Property,” it argues that while Rousseau acknowledges moral obligations governing the use of things, he ultimately holds that persons only have full-fledged property rights within the state. It suggests, moreover, that Rousseau’s attention to both the political and prepolitical dimensions of property continues to resonate in contemporary debate.

Rousseau’s Social Contract is often viewed as one of the early modern attempts to construct a theory of positive liberty. This interpretation makes sense. In Book I, Rousseau writes of freedom as a form of rational self-determination that enlarges and ennobles minds. Some theorists, most notably Isaiah Berlin, have argued that this notion of freedom opens the door to tyranny and blame Rousseau for the authoritarianism and fascism in the first half of the twentieth century. However, Rousseau is probably best considered a theorist of negative liberty. The Social Contract is in many respects a deeply practical work that primarily seeks to prevent both government and interpersonal domination and is animated by an underlying skepticism toward Rousseau’s very own solutions to these problems.

Rousseau’s Social Contract is known for its very distinctive doctrine of the separation of powers in which the legislative power (located in the community as a whole) is sovereign over the executive power (or government). According to Rousseau, the seeds of the downfall of every community, no matter how good it may be, is contained in the tendency of the government to usurp the powers of sovereignty. The sovereign can maintain its authority only if it is regularly assembled and passes judgment on the government, dissolving it and forming a new one if necessary. Critics from a variety of perspectives have argued that the practical and theoretical flaw in Rousseau’s account is that the sovereign can pronounce only when it is assembled and a usurping government can easily prevent it from assembling. I investigate this question by examining the Second Part of the Letters Written from the Mountain, where Rousseau describes the corruption of the Genevan government and discusses the resources available to citizens who wish to call it to account before an unassembled sovereign.

In book III chapter 4 of the Social Contract, Rousseau takes up the political principle established by Montesquieu in the Spirit of the Laws by correlating the form of a polity’s government to the extent of its territory: it is impossible, in his view, to answer once and for all the question of the best regime, without considering the suitability of regime types for particular situations. Yet democracy could still have a crucial advantage in Rousseau’s system: this kind of government confers most power to the people. A republican state seems to call for a democratic regime. This is why Rousseau’s response may come as a surprise: far from being the best form of government, democracy is the worst – or at least it is not suitable for a people of men, not gods. This essay reassesses Rousseau’s case against democracy. Why does Rousseau declare that democracy causes, so to speak, “a government without government,” and threatens popular sovereignty itself? This paradoxical claim needs to be explained.

Rousseau’s chapter “Of Civil Religion” has perplexed readers ever since the publication of the Social Contract. For the book’s earliest readers, the chapter was a sign of its author’s theological heresy even if contemporary readers are likely to take a more benign view of Rousseau’s intention. The question I pose is why the formula for the laws and institutions set out in the earlier parts of the Social Contract requires additional support in the form of the religious beliefs examined in the penultimate chapter. I want to suggest that this chapter represents a nod in the direction of Rousseau’s political realism in his acknowledgement that civil religion remains an indispensable part of the education of republican citizens.

Reasoned and impassioned controversy have accompanied The Social Contract since its publication in 1762. Once the book entered conversations about the foundations and ends of modern politics, it never left them.

Immanuel Kant’s debt to Rousseau, for example, was deep and multidimensional. He drew many of his own ethical and political arguments from contemplating Rousseau’s philosophy, including the general will and other ideas that extended well beyond the portrait of Rousseau that famously adorned his otherwise sparsely decorated study.

The structure of the Social Contract presents an intriguing puzzle. While the first three books argue for a republic of free and equal citizens, the fourth book seems to praise the Roman Republic, a state based on military expansion, slavery, class division, and an inegalitarian voting system. I argue that this puzzle can be solved if we understand the fourth book to be making an a fortiori argument in which Rousseau counterintuitively uses the flawed example of the Roman Republic to show the possibility of large republics in modern circumstances.

Most interpreters who have taken an interest in Rousseau’s nationalism have looked beyond his Social Contract. This seems fitting, for Rousseau’s Considerations on the Government of Poland, Constitutional Project for Corsica, and Discourse on Political Economy explicitly discuss the role of nationality and the distinctiveness of national identity. By way of contrast, the Social Contract is often cited as a work of ideal theory, less concerned with the empirical, sociological contingencies of actual nations and more focused on normative questions about the best political community. This chapter suggests that this standard interpretation of the Social Contract discounts the significant role played by extant, prepolitical peoples. Rather than a purely abstract contract among previously unaffiliated individuals, as per Thomas Hobbes, a closer reading reveals the ontological and historical primacy of peoples in Rousseau’s political theory.

When Rousseau published the Social Contract in 1762, there was no more illustrious authority on politics than Montesquieu. Rousseau draws on Montesquieu’s discussion of republics, but his departures from his predecessor are even more important. Notably, he criticizes Montesquieu for not seeing that the sovereign authority is the same in all states and that “Every legitimate government is republican.” The chapter begins with Montesquieu’s treatment of republics in the Spirit of the Laws to identify the features of classical republicanism that attracted Rousseau and also to reveal Montesquieu’s ambivalence about these ancient models. It then turns to Rousseau’s endeavor to revive republicanism by putting it on a new basis of the principles of political right.

Rousseau’s Social Contract begins with breathtakingly ambitious declarations about freedom and justice. Yet the project comes to an abrupt end, and the manuscript remains a fragment. Given that Rousseau sees daring arguments to their end elsewhere, why was this particular project – one so close to the core of his thought – abandoned? On the surface, the Social Contract appears beset by contradictions, but it pursues its conclusions toward an intricate and audacious coherence, giving an account of ancient political orders to overcome what Rousseau understands as misapprehensions associated with the Enlightenment. Yet it is not the Enlightenment, but Christianity that inaugurates the break with and confusions of ancient political distinctions. An attempt to confront this origin directly shatters Rousseau’s penultimately profound coherence. In remarkable congruence with patterns of figurative language developed in Descartes, Rousseau seeks to both ground and energize his account of political life by deploying diverse, often distinctly modern aspirations and metaphors in order to escape the Christian interruption of proper political ordering and concludes he cannot do so.