Please can yuh help me? I read the my book but I didnt really find out! Thanks =]

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Rousseau's Social Contract can probably be summed up in the phrase "power to the people." He said that force could only act through law, and that law could only work through popular consent. Note, though, that popular consent wasn't representative consent--Rousseau said the Roman Senate (representatives) didn't work because in effect the Senators were just mini-presidents of whom they represented, and spoke instead of the people and made decisions for the people. To quote him: "If then we discard from the social compact what is not of its essence, we shall find that it reduces itself to the following terms: 'Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and, in our corporate capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole.' This was entirely new in Europe. Previously, with the exception of rarities like the English Civil War (over 100 years before Rousseau), you had monarchies--whose rulers derived their authority through natural law (divine right, aka "God said I was king") or heredity ("my dad was king, so I'm king"), et cetera. Now, people saw that they could kick out the king--and in the most obvious example, the French Revolution, they did kick out the king and the aristocracy. Note that the Revolution wasn't a singleminded entity though--Robespierre and Danton and Marat were all very different people. But, if you boil down the Revolution to its essence, it all comes down to people wanting the 'general will,' not kings, to dictate. Many other revolutions in many other countries followed the French Revolution and took after Rousseau's thought process throughout the 18th and 19th centuries--the concept of 'general will' was twisted into certain elements of Nazism (aka "only the _real_ public ('undesirables' don't count) can decide") in the 20th century but _also_ helped various countries under colonial control by European countries gain independence ("why are these guys in Britain or Holland or France or Spain or Germany deciding what we do? They're not part of our population.") That's a very basic summary, but should be helpful.