Rousseau's Social Contract and the General Will

Rousseau's Of the Social Contract (1762) opens with a famous line: 'Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. ' His goal was not to return to nature but to find a form of association in which each person, while uniting with all, 'obeys only himself and remains as free as before'. His answer was that each citizen gives themselves wholly to the community, which then acts through the general will, the will directed toward the common good of all.

Rousseau distinguished the general will from the 'will of all', which is merely the sum of private interests. Sovereignty, he held, belongs to the people as a whole and cannot be transferred or represented, so laws are legitimate only when citizens make them together. This was a powerful theory of popular sovereignty, influential in the French Revolution. Unlike Locke, Rousseau gave less weight to rights held against the community, which became a central point of later criticism.