The Social Contract & The Prince

Rousseau, like John Locke, was a founder of modern liberal democratic political philosophy. Before their era, it had normally been assumed that kings, nobles, and the like ruled because they had the power to do so, and that was how it had to be. Rousseau proposed instead the concept of the ôsocial contractö should be the central concept of political theory, arguing that a society exists only because its members have agreed on a certain set of rules by which their society should be governed, and have surrendered some portion of their own individual, absolute sovereignty to the society in agreeing to be bound by whatever sanctions can enforce these rules. The translator points out that the concept of the social contract had been around since the time of the Greek sophists, and had been especially important in some medieval thought. Rousseau innovation was in making it the central concept of his political philosophy, explicitly rejecting all other supposed sources of authority.

Rousseau particularly argued that even in a society ruled by a hereditary nobility, the nobility could rule only because everyone else continually gave a tacit consent to the unwritten social contract that existed between the nobles and the common people. Rousseau, like

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Approximate Word count = 829
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page)

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