Few people can claim to have had minds as fertile and creative as the
French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. One of the most influential
political theorists of the modern age, he was also a composer and writer
of opera, a novelist, and a memoirist whose Confessions ranks as one of
the most striking works of autobiography ever written. Like many
creative thinkers, Rousseau was someone whose restless mind could not
help questioning accepted orthodoxies and looking at matters from novel
and innovative angles. His 1762 treatise The Social Contract does
exactly that. Examining the nature and sources of legitimate political
power, it crafted a closely reasoned and passionately persuasive
argument for democracy at a time when the most widely accepted form of
government was absolute monarchy, legitimised by religious beliefs about
the divine right of kings and queens to rule. In France, the book was
banned by worried Catholic censors; in Rousseau's native Geneva, it was
both banned and burned. But history soon pushed Rousseau's ideas into
the mainstream of political theory, with the French and American
revolutions paving the way for democratic government to gain ground
across the Western world.
Though it was precisely what got Rousseau's book banned at the time, the
novel idea that all legitimate government rests on the will of the
people is now recognised as the core principle of democratic freedom and
represents, for many people, the highest of ideals.
