90 Chapter V
Contract. Others of Rousseau’s works probably had more direct and actual influ-
ence. His Emile presented the image, disconcerting for any professional clergy, of
the reverent man who had no need for any church. His Nouvelle Héloise estranged
readers from their over- refined mode of life. His Discourse on Inequality offered
passages on which social revolutionaries could seize to point out the evils of pri-
vate property. Rousseau’s influence on education, on literature, on pure philosophy,
was conveyed by these and other works.
The Social Contract remains the great book of the political revolution. It ap-
peared in no fewer than thirteen editions in the French language in 1762 and
- There were three editions in English and one in German in 1763 and 1764;
it appeared also in Russian in 1763. Thereafter, except for a solitary French edition,
it was not reissued until after the Revolution began in France. Perhaps the copies
in existence were enough; perhaps, as has been argued, people did not much read it
after its first publication. What is certain is that the greatest vogue of the book
came after the fact of revolution. The book did not so much make revolution as it
was made by it. Readers did not become revolutionary from reading it; but, if they
found themselves in a revolutionary situation, they might read it to gain a sense of
direction, or because propagandists put it before them. The Social Contract ap-
peared in thirty- two French editions between 1789 and 1799. (There were none
under Napoleon.) It was printed three times in English in 1791 and once in
1795—and thereafter not until 1905. There were two editions in Dutch in 1793–
1796, four in German between 1795 and 1800, eight in Italian during the triennio,
1796–1799. A Latin translation circulated in manuscript copies in Hungary in the
1790’s. Four editions appeared in Spanish between 1799 and 1801, and many more
in Latin America after 1810. It first appeared in Hungarian in 1819, in Greek in
1828, in Polish in 1839, in Czech in 1871. There were four editions in Russian in
1906–1907, and one in Turkish in 1910. It may be observed that in most of these
countries publication was preceded by revolution or attempted revolution.^6
It is well, therefore, to analyze again this much- analyzed work. Or, at least, in
the absence of strict theoretical analysis, it is useful to point out the main ideas in
the Social Contract which appealed to men in a mood of rebellion.
The best way to understand the book is not to compare its propositions to later
democratic practice, which owes little to it except on the most abstract and funda-
mental level; nor yet to view it as an anticipation of totalitarianism, as if free soci-
eties did not also have to issue commands; but to contrast its doctrine with the
attitudes prevailing at the time it was written, of which one of the most funda-
mental was that some men must in the nature of things take care of others, that
some had the right to govern and others the duty to obey. It was abhorrent to
Rousseau to obey anything or anyone outside of and foreign to himself. Yet he was
no anarchist; he accepted the need for authority and public order. “Public order in
its entirety emanates from me,” Louis XV declared in 1766. The constituted bodies
6 Senelier, Bibliographic des oeuvres de Jean- Jacques Rousseau (Paris, 1949). For the Latin manu-
script see Eckhardt as cited in Chapter IV note 22 above. Parts of the Social Contract may have been
included in selections of Rousseau’s writings or in other anthologies in some languages, but hardly
enough to change the tenor of the above paragraph, which refers only to publication of the work as a
separate item under its own title.