Very important for the history of philosophy and of political thought, but also much more fun to think and talk about than to read, in large part because Rousseau, one of the great prose-writers of his age, decided to make this 'objective', so it reads like, well, someone from the nineteenth century. I felt guilty about this judgment until I spoke with a friend who wrote his dissertation on Rousseau. I told him I was reading this. He looked at me, puzzled, and demanded to know why? Not because he thought it useless to me, that 'why' implied, but because it was so painful.

For the record, I'm assigning part of it in a class, and it's going to work very nicely as a bridge between the early contract theorists and Hegel. ( )