Michael Sonenscher is a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. He is the author of Before the Deluge and Sans-Culottes: An Eighteenth-Century Emblem in the French Revolution, as well as the editor of Sieyès: Political Writings.

This is a book about why Jean-Jacques Rousseau can be seen as one of the first theorists of the concept of civil society and a key source of the idea of a federal system.