to bring about the triumph of reason and truth over prejudice and lies,
and to make men wiser by showing them their true interests. He learned
at this time, he says, to meditate profoundly, and for a moment
astonished Europe by productions in which vulgar souls saw only
eloquence and wit, but in which those persons who inhabit ethereal
regions joyfully recognized one of their own kind.[Footnote: Rousseau,
_Oeuvres_, xx. 275 (II. Dialogue).]

The best known and probably the most important of Rousseau's political
writings is the "Contrat Social," or "Social Compact," which followed
the Second Discourse after an interval of eight years, thus coming out
near the end of the period of its author's greatest literary activity.
In this essay, which is intended to be but a fragment of a larger work
on government, Rousseau lays down the conditions which should, as he
thinks, govern the lives of men united to form a true state. Indeed, he
believes that any government not founded on these principles is
illegitimate, resting merely on force and not on right. A nation thus
wrongly governed is but an aggregation, not an association. It is
without public weal or body politic.

There was nothing original with Rousseau in the idea of a social
compact. That idea may be traced in the writings of Plato, who speaks of
it as one already familiar. But it did not become a leading doctrine
with writers on politics until the publication of Hooker's
"Ecclesiastical Polity" in 1594. In that book it was contended that
there is no escape from the anarchy which exists before the
establishment of law, but by men "growing into composition and agreement
amongst themselves, by ordaining some kind of government public, and
yielding themselves subject thereunto." Through the seventeenth century
the theory grew and flourished. It was treated as the foundation of