JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. University of Pennsylvania Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to " There is no secular work in all the history of mankind which has stirred society to its depths so vehemently as did the Contrat Social."These words of a famous jurist' would certainly be widely accepted by modern historians.It must also be admitted that there is hardly another book which has aroused so much controversy.It has been accused of inconsistency and considered incompatible with the other works of its author.2 It has been held to justify political issues as antagonistic as fire and water. During the French revolution-as Charles E. Vaughan pointed outthe Contrat Social was claimed by the men of the "spontaneous anarchy" of the National Assembly of 1789 and also by the spokesmen for the ideas of 1793 who stood for a unified powerful state. Even in our times to some of his interpreters Rousseau seems the champion of individual liberty and to others the father of state absolutism or even of despotism.3 What could be better proof of I Georg Jellinek, Ausgewdhlte Schriften und Reden (Berlin, 1911), II, 13. 2 The inconsistencies have been particularly stressed by Albert Schinz, La pense'e de Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Paris, 1929); he tries to reduce them to a certain "oscillation of Rousseau between the two incompatible tendencies of Romanticism, rooted in his personality, and of discipline, rooted in philosophic reflection" (247). Some authors such as Smile Faguet stress the incompatibility between the Contrat Social and Rousseau's other works. (See Faguet, La Politique comparee de Montesquieu, Rousseau et Voltaire [Paris, 1902] and Rousseau Penseur [Paris, 1912].) Some of this polemic literature is listed by Louis Ducros, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Paris, 1908-18), II, 142, and by George Beaulavon in his edition of the Contrat Social, 9 seq. and more recently by Schinz, E~tat pre'sent des Travaux sur Jean-Jacques Rousseau (New York, 1941). 3 Cf. the following statements: Leon Duguit, Rousseau, Kant et Hegel (Paris, 1918), 6: "Rousseau est le pere du despotisme jacobin, de la dietature cesarienne et a y regarder de pres l'inspirateur des doctrines absolutistes de Kant et de Hegel"; and Alfred Cobban, Rousseau and the Modern State (London, 1934), 6: "Rousseau . . . is primarily a moralist, and being such . . . his end is always the individual and his liberty." John Morley, Rousseau (1886), II, 132, calls the Contrat Social the gospel of the Jacobins and Pmile Faguet, Rousseau Penseur (283): "le manuel de toutes les democracies modernes." 259 260 WALTER ECKSTEINthe vacillating and self-contradictory character of a book and its author ? Some authors find a certain development in Rou...
