*Du Contrat Social* is the slim book Jean-Jacques Rousseau published in Amsterdam in 1762. It was banned and publicly burned in both Geneva and Paris within months, and its author went into exile. Its opening line is among the most famous in the history of political thought: '*L'homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers*' — Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

Rousseau's question is not Hobbes' or Locke's. He asks not after the origin of authority but its legitimacy. Their 'state of nature' is a theoretical hypothesis; Rousseau's is a historical thesis — humans in nature were innocent, roughly equal, and not unhappy; the invention of property brought inequality and inauthenticity. Only a better social contract, not nostalgia for a vanished past, can cure the malady of contemporary society.

The formula for that better contract is this. Each individual surrenders all their rights to the whole community — *and*, at the same instant, receives them back as an equal member of that community. The citizen, obeying only the laws they have themselves made, remains free. The key concept is the *volonté générale*, the general will: not the 'will of all' (the sum of private wishes) but the output of a collective deliberation aimed at the common good. In a properly constituted republic, the laws are the expression of that will.

The theory's seductiveness is matched by its danger. The line that an individual 'may be forced to be free' — forced to obey the general will — opens the door to totalitarian readings; Rousseau has been blamed for Jacobin Terror and many later horrors. More sympathetic readers (Cassirer, Rawls) find in him instead the conceptual foundation of democratic self-government. Both sides confirm his enduring centrality: the French Revolution of 1789 spoke in his sentences, and modern democratic theory still moves along the fault line he opened.