The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau's Social Contract

by David Lay Williams (editor), Matthew W. Maguire (Editor)

What is freedom? What is equality? And what is sovereignty? A foundational text of modern political philosophy, Rousseau's Social Contract has generated much debate and exerted extraordinary influence not only on political thought, but also modern political history, by way of the French Revolution and other political events, ideals, and practices. The Social Contract is regularly studied in undergraduate courses of philosophy, political thought, and modern intellectual history, as well as being the subject of graduate seminars in numerous disciplines. The book inspires an ongoing flow of scholarly articles and monographs. Few texts have offered more influential and important answers to research questions than Rousseau's Social Contract, and in this new Cambridge Companion, a multidisciplinary team of contributors provides new ways to navigate this masterpiece of political philosophy- and its animating questions.

384 pages, Hardcover

Published February 22, 2024

About the author

Professor Williams teaches and conducts research in political theory, especially the history of political thought. He received his PhD in Government from the University of Texas at Austin. Prior coming to DePaul in 2011, he was Professor of Philosophy and Political Science at the University of Wisconsin—Stevens Point.​

Williams is the author of Rousseau's Platonic Enlightenment (2007),​ Rousseau's 'Social Contract': An Introduction (2014) and The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought from Plato to Marx (2024). as well as numerous articles on thinkers ranging from Plato to Jürgen Habermas and topics such as democratic theory, economic inequality, political ontology, and deception. He has also co-edited several books, including most recently, The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau’s “Social Contract” (2024).

In 2003-2004 and 2008-2009, he held research fellowships at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, and in 2012-13, he held a faculty fellowship at the DePaul Humanities Center. In 2016-2017 he was the Wicklander Fellow at DePaul's Institute for Business and Professional Ethics. From 2017-2022 he was the political theory editor for the journal, Political Research Quarterly. In 2023-2024, he collaborated with Professor Matthew W. Maguire and the Alliance Française​ in Chicago as part of the HumanitiesX​ program, funded by the Mellon Foundation​, in which he co-taught a course on Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America​ and co-organized a public roundtable on Tocqueville’s relevance today. Professor Williams also writes short pieces connecting the history of political thought to contemporary political concerns for outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Time Magazine, The Hill, Public Seminar, Bloomberg News, and the Chicago Sun-Times.