Social Contract and the Crisis of Legitimacy in Africa by Odum, Edoh Sunday;

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This book has advanced a discourse on Jean-Jacques Rousseau's social contract theory and its implications for democratic legitimacy in Africa. Rousseau's social contract stipulates that the state emerged from a contract entered into by people who have, before the emergence of the state, lived in the state of nature. In Rousseau's thought, sovereignty belongs to the people and it is both indivisible and inalienable and in relation to the general will, sovereignty is the general will in action. Sovereignty in Rousseau's thoughts belongs exclusively to the people who reserves the right to confer the power of governance to any trustee that they deem fit as well as withdraw same at whatsoever point they conceives of the trustee as having violated the terms of the social pact. It is with this postulation that it has been argued that Jean-Jacques Rousseau, with the publication of the Social Contract, seems to have laid down the prototype of all legitimate government. it is in the above context that this book advances both the contemporary relevance as well as the implication of Rousseau's Social Contract Theory (RSCT) in the face of the apparent crisis of legitimacy in Africa.