A gloomy pessimism about the prospects for the human race is united with a sunny optimism about what might be possible in a virtuous republic. The experience of the actual societies in which Rousseau lived, particularly Geneva and Venice, combines with his nostalgia for ancient republics and his hopes for new ones. To name but a few, there is ancient philosophy (particularly Plato's), together with Hobbesian modernism, social contract theory with virtue ethics, Machiavellian republicanism and Malebranche's theology. It is also a work through which many different intellectual currents flow, some of them subterranean. Thanks to its author's literary skills, it is a work that contains many of the great slogans but thanks also to those skills it contains much that is deliberately paradoxical and provocative, such as the claim that citizens who are made to obey the general will are thereby 'forced to be free'. Rousseau's Social Contract remains, after a quarter of a millennium, one of the most controversial texts in the history of political philosophy, variously seen as a model for participatory democracy, a blueprint for totalitarianism, and several points in between. Williams's treatment is accurate and reliable, but on two interlinked questions, namely, Rousseau's relationship to his native Geneva and his attitude to democracy, I wish he had said more than he does. He concludes with two appendices: the first giving a more synoptic account of the general will than emerges from the commentary itself the second discussing Rousseau's attitude to women. After a useful placing of Rousseau in his intellectual and historical context, Williams provides the reader with a chapter-by-chapter commentary, clarifying issues that will be obscure to a modern reader and signposting problems and disagreements with interpretation.

It offers the novice a secure companion to the original text, and it gives those already familiar with Rousseau an insightful interpretation that can sit alongside others. David Lay Williams's book is the latest addition to the enormous and varied literature on the Social Contract, and it is a very fine contribution.

The social contract rousseau