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.
Provides the philosophical foundation for popular sovereignty and democratic legitimacy — the general will as something distinct from the will of all (the sum of individual preferences) — while introducing a concept that can justify both participatory democracy and totalitarian coercion in the name of the people.
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