2 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau's 1762 political treatise articulating the general will — the idea that legitimate political authority comes from the common interest of the community, not from monarchs or contracts between rulers and ruled — whose opening line 'Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains' is the most famous in political philosophy.
English philosopher — author of Leviathan (1651) — who argued that without a sovereign power, life is 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short' — and that legitimate government derives from a social contract in which individuals surrender natural freedom for security.