Rousseau publishes The Social Contract
Rousseau opened The Social Contract in 1762 with the line 'Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.' He argued that legitimate political authority comes not from a contract with a sovereign (Hobbes) or a contract among property-holders (Locke) but from the general will of the people themselves, expressed through direct democratic participation. Representative government was already a concession, in his view — the moment citizens delegated, they had already lost sovereignty. The French Revolution quoted him constantly, often badly.
Rousseau was suspicious of parliamentary representation — he wrote that the English were free only on the day they elected MPs, after which they became slaves again. Most subsequent democracies ignored that part of the argument and picked the representation anyway.
05 · Social Contract
In roughly two centuries, European philosophers worked out a new account of where authority came from. Hobbes said the sovereign's power was granted by a tacit contract individuals signed to escape the war of all against all. Locke said the contract was conditional and revocable, and that the governed retained the right to dissolve any government that broke its terms. Rousseau said legitimate authority was the general will of the people themselves, not any individual monarch. Each argument sharpened the previous one. By 1789 the conclusions had been put on parchment and fired out of muskets on two continents.
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