Acta Universitatis Danubius. Juridica, Vol 4, No 1 (2008)

Abstract

Although it may seem as a paradox, but in 1767, in a letter addressed to the Marquis de Mirabeau, JJ Rousseau declared his intention to find a government form to put the people above the law. Admitting the impossibility of such unnecessary step, JJ Rousseau recognized that his famous Social Contract is condemned to remain a spirit construction. The author of this article wonders, along with Otto von Gierke, if JJ Rousseau somehow imagined the Social Contract, taking as a framework the democratic ideas of his forefathers about freedom and equality, filling the frame with the contents of the Hobbes’s absolutist Contract. Such a perspective implies a lot of nuances that the author underlines in this article.