The summer after his absentee father is killed in a random shooting, Paul volunteers at a Harlem soup kitchen where he listens to lessons about "the social contract" from an elderly African American man, and mentors a seventeen-year-old unwed mother who wants to make it to college on a basketball scholarship.

"Whether we realize it or not, all of us participate in the social contract every day through mutual obligations among our family, community, place of work, and fellow citizens. Caring for others, paying taxes, and benefiting from public services define the social contract that supports and binds us together as a society. Today, however, our social contract has been broken by changing gender roles, technology, new models of work, aging, and the perils...

This [book] includes the three most important of Rousseau's political writings: Discourse on inequality, Discourse on political economy, and On social contract ... As background to these works, [it] provides a sketch of Rousseau's life, selections from his Confessions, and comments on Rousseau's work and character from such ... contemporaries and early critics as Voltaire, Hume, Boswell and Johnson, Paine, Kant, and Proudhon. A section of "Commentaries"...