ROUSSEAU, Jean Jacques.

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Principes du droit politique. First edition of the definitive version of Rousseau's greatest work, a potent influence on liberal, republican, and French revolutionary thinking. Where Rousseau's Second Discourse (1755) explained how people had lost their liberty in the past, the Principes considered how they might recover it in the future. The work develops the model of a government made legitimate by following the general will of its subjects. In so doing, it tackles the problem of securing political co-operation among people with separate wills. The concept of the general will followed as an artificially constructed pledge to dissolve individual natural rights.Shortly after the printing had begun, Rousseau requested that the title page vignette of Justice be replaced by one of Liberty, and that the 24-line note on civil marriage on page 324 be excised completely, for fear of French censors. He also judged the title page too crowded, hence the transposition of the first part of the title ("Du Contract Social") to a separate half-title.Bound after Rousseau's work is the Profession de foi du vicaire Chrétien (Berlin: Chez Jean Neaulme, 1764) by Johann Heinrich Samuel Formey (1711-1797), a key figure in the German Enlightenment and a committed opponent of Rousseau

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