On Rousseau's Thought Of The Social Contract Theory Of Law

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, born on June 28, 1712 in Geneva, Switzerland and died in 1778, was one of most remarkable representatives in the 18th-century Enlightenment movement, and also the ideological precursor of the French Revolution. He established his own status of significance in the modern world intellectual history by presenting novel ideas on the issues of equality, social contract, the people's sovereignty. He proposed that the people could establish a country of individual freedom, equality, democracy and love through the application of the new contract. As the establishment and operation of this contract is manifested and maintained in the form of the law, the legal thought has a pivotal function in Rousseau's entire ideology. Rousseau's Social Contract theory has been important to the development of modern democratic states: the idea of the government as the creation of the people's general will, which they can and should judge, and they have the right to overthrow if they find it wanting, contributed to the development of democratic forms of policy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. "The Social Contract, Or Principles of Political Right", the representative work of Rousseau, is one of most famous classical works in the Western legal thinking history, which reflects Rousseau's mature legal ideas. It summarizes the basic principles of the Rousseau's legal ideas, proposes the principles for democratic, equal social political system, and advocates the establishment of a democratic republican country system based on the social contract. Therefore, "The Social Contract, Or Principles of Political Right" has been regarded as the Gospels of the Western bourgeois revolution. Rousseau's ideas of democracy, equality, the rule of law should contribute to the development of political culture of present-day China. In the thesis, the time background and the intellectual background of "The Social Contract, Or Principles of Political Right" are analyzed; especially the legal ideas of the paper are expounded carefully, which include the legal essence and classification of law, the theory of people's sovereignty, regime pattern, property rights and so on. And the historical influence of Rousseau's paper on the American Revolution, the French Revolution and the Chinese Democratic Revolution in the modern times are also appraised one after another.