Rousseau's claim that legitimate authority rests on the 'general will' of a free people. Its opening line—'Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains'—became a rallying cry of revolution.
Sources for Jean-Jacques Rousseau — The Social Contract
Jean-Jacques Rousseau — The Social Contract in Governance & Society
Held in the Governance & Society chamber of the Babel Nexus Index.
- Aristotle — Politics (−350)
- Cicero — De Re Publica (On the Commonwealth) (−54)
- Cicero — De Legibus (On the Laws) (−52)
- Kautilya — Arthashastra (−300)
- Machiavelli — The Prince (1532)
- Plato — The Republic (−380)
- Thomas Hobbes — Leviathan (1651)
- John Locke — Two Treatises of Government (1689)
- Thomas Paine — Common Sense (1776)
- Thomas Paine — Rights of Man (1791)
- Alexis de Tocqueville — Democracy in America (1835)
- John Stuart Mill — On Liberty (1859)