Jean-Jacques Rousseau published The Social Contract in 1762, the same year as Emile. It opens with the line "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains", a sentence that correctly identifies the text's central problem without providing what most readers want from it, which is an account of who put the chains on and how to remove them. Rousseau's argument is that legitimate political authority derives not from divine right, conquest, or tradition, but from a contract among free individuals who agree to subject themselves to what he calls the General Will, a concept he introduces and never entirely clarifies, which has been the source of most of the text's subsequent controversy and influence.
The General Will is not the will of the majority; it is the common good, the shared interest of all citizens in the conditions of their collective life. Rousseau distinguishes this from the "will of all," which is simply the aggregate of private interests. The distinction is crucial to his argument but creates a structural problem he never solves: who determines what the General Will is, and what happens to citizens whose private interests diverge from it? His answer that those who resist the General Will must be "forced to be free" is the passage most cited by readers who regard Rousseau as proto-totalitarian, and it genuinely is difficult to reconcile with the liberal freedoms he elsewhere seems to endorse.
The Social Contract is a short text that raises large problems it does not resolve, which is part of why it has been continuously influential since 1762. Every democratic political theory depends on some version of the argument that political authority requires popular legitimation; Rousseau is the clearest statement of that position and the most honest about the difficulties it creates when the "people" cannot agree on what they collectively want. Reading the text carefully as a philosophical argument with internal tensions rather than as a political program illuminates why the tensions it identifies have remained at the center of democratic theory for two and a half centuries.
Machiavelli wrote The Prince while under house arrest, hoping the Medici would give him a government job. They never did.
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