The Government of Poland

Description

Should be read both as a clarification and a criticism of the political teaching of The Social Contract and as a comprehensive attempt to deal with those central problems of democratic theory that have continued to exercise our minds to this day.

Jean Jacques Rousseau

The Government of Poland is the only finished work in which Rousseau himself dons the mantle of legislator, applying the principles of the Social Contract to the real world around him. Poland teaches us much about the mysterious art of the Social Contract's 'legislator,' how he transforms each individual into part of a larger whole. Only in . . . Poland do we find what this crucial transformation entails and what it presupposes. But probably the greatest lesson to be learned from . . . Poland concerns Rousseau's understanding of the proper relationship between theory and practice. . . . Time and again we see Rousseau advising the Poles to do things which are in gross violation of the strict principles of political right he had elaborated in the Social Contract. --Richard Myers in Canadian Journal of Political Science