The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau is a 1762 book about the best way to establish a political community in the face of the problems of commercial society, which he had already identified in his Discourse on Inequality.

The Social Contract argued against the idea that monarchs were divinely empowered to legislate. Rousseau asserts that only the people, who are sovereign, have that all-powerful right. Social contract theory is the view that persons' moral and/or political obligations are dependent upon a contract or agreement among them to form the society in which they live.

After Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau are the best known proponents of this enormously influential theory, which has been one of the most dominant theories within moral and political theory throughout the history of the modern West.