SOCIAL CONTRACT, The. The Social Contract' was that one of Rousseau's important works which bore most directly on the con stitution and ordering of states. In 1743 Rousseau had gone to Venice as secretary to M. Montagu and had acquired some slight practical experience of diplomacy and state craft. Some time after he conceived a vague project of composing a treatise along these lines, and about a decade later, after the suc cess of his First Discourse, seems to have set himself to work in earnest on an ambitious volume, (Political Institutions,' which remained in his mind for years but which was never finished. The work was probably distasteful to its eloquent and imaginative author because of its abstract and theoretical character and was, therefore, laid aside. As an afterthought he later revised or rewrote a section of his manuscript and published it as (Le Contrat Social' in 1762. This work is, therefore, essep tially a fragment, and in his own mind and that of his contemporaries was set on a lower plane than his novel (La Nouvelle Heloise' or his treatise on education. It is in this light that it should be regarded to-day.
In writing it Rousseau intended it as ap plicable only to an ideal communal state of about 20,000 inhabitants whose interests and character were homogeneous. He himself warns against attempts to apply it outside this sphere. His theory involves an organic con ception of the state in which sovereignty is represented as the will of the organism. More
or less closely attached to this conception are several important assumptions. Government, according to Rousseau, exists by virtue of a tacit agreement with each individual governed. By virtue of this contract every individual agrees to abide by general will.5 The individual citizen thus stipulates that on all questions and at all times it is his will that his state shall be governed by the general will. Therefore, even in cases where the particular individual is overruled by the contrary-minded majority he has the satisfaction of knowing that his fundamental principle of government is being maintained. The greatest danger of Rousseau's system lay in the fact that on this basis he developed a mystical notion that the general will, which in practice is only the will of the greater number, cannot err. He failed, therefore, to put any check on the tyranny of majorities. Much of the radical democratic theorizing of our time, like that of the recall and referendum, find their beginning in the Contract? Intended, as we have seen, in the first instance to provide an ideal basis for a small city state, in spite of many interest ing suggestions, as a complete or final theory of liberal government on any large scale its doc trines are dangerous. Consult Vaughan, C. E., (The Political Writings of Rousseau.'