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Of the Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right is a compact treatise in four books, the only finished part of a larger work on political institutions that Rousseau abandoned. It opens with its most famous sentence, that man is born free and everywhere in chains, and with a promise not to explain how this happened but to say what could make it legitimate.
Author
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Frequently Cited
“Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they”
“whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body. This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free”
“Were there a people of gods, their government would be democratic. So perfect a government is not for men”
Rousseau's Confessions is the founding text of modern autobiography. It promises to show 'a man in all the integrity of nature', the author himself, concealing nothing.