It is not likely that students will have read any books directly related to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and The Social Contract, but many of the arguments and ideas presented within the work will likely seem familiar to students by virtue of their having grown up in a democratic society shaped just as equally by philosophical notions of popular sovereignty as it is by constitutional law.
Rousseau's political thought can be further studied in his "First and Second Discourses". Additionally, the idea of a social contract prefigures prominently in the writings of several other philosophers from this time period, including Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan) and John Locke (Two Treatises on Government)....
