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the program. Hello man is born free and everywhere he is in chains one thinks himself a master of others and

still remains a greater slave than they. Thus dramatically begins Jean-Jacques

Rousseau's influential work of political philosophy, the social contract.

Russo was trying to understand why a man would give up his natural freedoms and bind himself

to the rule of a prince or a government.

It's among the oldest questions in political philosophy, but the argument

flourished particularly in the 17th and 18th century as France and Britain were racked by

civil strife and revolution. What another great social contract thinker Thomas Hobbs might call the War of All

Against All.

We'd me to discuss the social contract as Susan James, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College

University of London, Karen O'Brien, Professor of English Literature at

the University of Warwick, and Melissa Lane, senior lecturer in history at Cambridge University.

Melissa Lane, at the heart at heart heart who is the social contract between?

What's distinctive in the social contract of the 17th century beginning with Grocious

...