What does Rousseau mean by the ʹGeneral Willʹ? Is it necessary that there is consensus among citizens if the ‘General Will’ is to prevail?
- Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, The Social Contract, 1762, especially Book 1, chapters 6-8, Book 2, Book 3, chapters 10-18, Book 4.
- Any edition is fine, but if you have to buy one, I recommend the Oxford Classics edition, edited by C. Betts.
- Dent, N. Rousseau, London: Routledge, 2005, ch. 5.
- Bertram, Christopher, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Rousseau and the Social Contract, London: Routledge, 2004, ch. 6.
- Bertram, Christopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter, 2012).
- Cassirer, Ernst, The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 2nd ed., New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.
- Cobban, Alfred, Rousseau and the Modern State, 2nd ed., 1964, London: Archon Books, 1970, esp. chs. 1-3.
- Gardiner, Patrick, Rousseau on Liberty, in John Gray and Zbigniew Pelczynski (eds.), Conceptions of Liberty in Political Philosophy, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1984, ch. 5.
- Hall, John, Rousseau: An Introduction to his Political Philosophy, London: Macmillan, 1973.
- Held, David, Models of Democracy, 3rd ed., Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996, ch. 2.
- Levine, Andrew, Engaging Political Philosophy: From Hobbes to Rawls, Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2002, ch. 2.
- Masters, Roger, The Political Philosophy of Rousseau, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1968.
- Plamenatz, John, Man and Society: Political and Social Theory, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966, vol. 1, ch. 10.
- Waldron, Jeremy, Rights and majorities: Rousseau revisited, in Liberal Rights: Collected Papers, 1981-1991, 1993, ch. 16.
- Wokler, Robert (ed.), Rousseau and Liberty, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995.
- Wokler, Robert, Rousseau: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
- Wolff, Jonathan, An Introduction to Political Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, ch. 3.
- What problem is Rousseau seeking to solve in The Social Contract?
- In what senses are individual citizens in Rousseau’s state ‘free’?
- Is it fair to say that while Rousseau aims for freedom in The Social Contract, the state he envisages would be highly oppressive?
- "The society described by Rousseau in The Social Contract is an unrealizable utopia.‟ Discuss.
- Man is born free, can be forced to free, and is free when he lives under a law he prescribes for himself. Can Rousseau reconcile these claims?
- Can the citizens of Rousseau’s Social Contract meaningfully be described as free?