Well, I said about a hundred billion years ago that I would read it, and now I'm finally doing just that: Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract. My first impressions are that I'm not particularly impressed. He would have probably fared better in politics: he speaks with passion which makes for impressionable speeches, but philosophically his arguments seem very unconvincing. He comes across as sounding embittered by the society in his life experience and yet having the utmost confidence in human nature, and in the end he can't make them meet in a harmonious and convincing conclusion. Hobbes, on the other hand, had such brilliant and concise arguments that even with his advocacy for monarchism, I was left astonished just by how much sense his rationalizations made. I'll reserve my final judgment for when I'm finished, but for now I must say I was a lot more impressed with Hobbes.