The Social Contract — who's who

Born 1712 in the Republic of Geneva to a watchmaker father. Runs away from an apprenticeship at sixteen, spends the next decade in Savoy and Turin, arrives in Paris in 1742. Befriends Diderot, contributes to the Encyclopedia, wins sudden fame in 1750 with the Discourse on the Sciences and Arts — an argument that the arts and sciences had corrupted morals. The Social Contract is his attempt to describe the conditions under which political life could be legitimate. Published April 1762, burned in Paris and Geneva by June. He spends the remaining sixteen years of his life in flight. Dies 1778; buried in the Panthéon in 1794.

The small Calvinist republic of about twenty thousand citizens in which Rousseau was born and which he invokes throughout the Social Contract as his approximate model. Geneva in 1762 was governed by elected councils, with a citizen body small enough to assemble — everything Rousseau's theory requires. The city returned the compliment by burning the book and Émile simultaneously. Rousseau formally renounced his Genevan citizenship the following year.

The English political philosopher whose Leviathan (1651) is the immediate target of Book 1. Hobbes had argued that men in the state of nature were locked in a war of all against all and could escape only by transferring their natural rights to an absolute sovereign. Rousseau accepts the social-contract framework and rejects almost everything Hobbes did with it: the state of nature is peaceful isolation, not war; the contract constitutes the people as sovereign rather than delegating sovereignty to a separate power; sovereignty cannot be alienated.

The English theorist whose Second Treatise (1689) Rousseau simultaneously inherits and breaks with. Both derive legitimate government from consent in a state of nature where men are free and equal. But Locke's contract protects pre-existing natural rights, especially property; Locke's sovereign is fiduciary; his legislature is representative. Rousseau's contract constitutes a new collective person; his sovereign is inalienable; representation is a betrayal of sovereignty. The two men together define the two main streams of modern democratic theory.

The semi-legendary figure who, according to ancient sources, gave Sparta its constitution — the rigorous military code that trained citizens for war and made Sparta the most stable republic of the ancient world. Rousseau cites him in Book 2 as the paradigm of the Lawgiver: a man who drafted the laws, held no authority himself, and withdrew once the people had ratified them. Whether Lycurgus was a historical person or a collective myth does not matter to Rousseau's argument; the function he represents is real.

The second king of Rome, said to have given the early republic its religious institutions and laws. In Rousseau's account, a second instance of the Lawgiver: he had to invoke the gods to get his laws accepted, since philosophy alone could not move the Romans of his day. Rousseau treats this not as deception but as a necessary feature of all early lawgiving — the gap between what a people needs and what it can recognise without the authority of the sacred.

Jean Calvin, the reformer who gave Geneva its distinctive Protestant civic order in the mid-sixteenth century. Rousseau's third example of the Lawgiver and his most personal: Calvin's Geneva is the republic whose principles the Social Contract is partly an attempt to articulate. The inclusion of Calvin in the same sentence as Lycurgus and Numa is characteristic Rousseau — secular, cross-cultural, interested in function rather than theology.

Not a contemporary of Rousseau, but the figure who proves how directly the Social Contract translated into political action. Robespierre read it closely, kept Rousseau's portrait on his wall, and grounded his political programme explicitly in the doctrine of the general will. The Festival of the Supreme Being (June 1794) is the closest any modern state has come to enacting the chapter on civil religion. Whether Robespierre's reading was faithful to Rousseau or a perversion of him remains one of the foundational disputes of modern political thought.