Iván Szelényi's lecture from Yale's Foundations of Modern Social Theory (SOCY 151) covers Jean-Jacques Rousseau, tracing his unconventional biography, from an orphaned childhood to his relationship at sixteen with an older woman later fictionalized in Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir, and his shifting alliances with figures of the French Enlightenment. Szelényi walks through Rousseau's major works before turning to The Social Contract in detail, examining its account of legitimate rule, popular sovereignty, and the role of lawgivers. The core of the lecture is the general will, the idea that collective interest can override individual will, and Szelényi traces how this concept fed both liberal notions of consent and popularly elected legislatures and, later, justifications used by authoritarian and communist regimes. The lecture situates Rousseau's ideas as a direct intellectual current running into the French Revolution, despite his death before it occurred.