Rousseau begins by arguing that freedom and self-preservation are the “basis for all other rights,” so nobody can coherently act in a way that deprives them of their freedom or works against their own well-being.

However, whereas the Discourse was a historical analysis of how property rights and political systems actually formed, The Social Contract takes a theoretical look at how a state should form in order for its rule to be legitimate. In Book I of The Social Contract, Rousseau briefly explains the purpose of his book and then declares: “man is born free, and he is everywhere in chains.” He means to say that the powerful systematically oppress the powerless, which he concluded in his previous book, the Discourse on Inequality. And in Book IV, he explains how the people can figure out what is in their best interests, analyzes examples from the history of the Roman Republic to show why all citizens should directly participate in lawmaking, and argues that effective states must systematically teach civic virtues in order to preserve popular sovereignty and strengthen their institutions from generation to generation. In Book III, Rousseau explores the various forms government can take, explains how those different structures of government work best in different types of states, and concludes that the sovereign (the people) must keep a careful watch over the government in order to ensure that it does not try to seize power.

The people’s job is to make laws and delegate the power to implement those laws to a set of institutions called a government, or executive power. In Book II, Rousseau argues that a state is only legitimate when the people rule, or have sovereignty, over themselves. Therefore, while forming a nation requires citizens to give up certain freedoms that they still had in the state of nature, it replaces these freedoms with the far more valuable “civil freedom” of living in society, which allows citizens to more fully develop themselves morally and rationally. In The Social Contract, the influential 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau addresses two interrelated questions that play a core role in social philosophy: how can people remain free while living under the authority of a state, and what makes such a state’s power valid (or legitimate)? In Book I of The Social Contract, Rousseau answers both of these questions by concluding that citizens form their own nations “by uniting their separate powers” through a kind of covenant, or social contract, in which they agree to govern themselves as a collective and protect one another’s rights.

The social contract theory of rousseau