A new interpretation of the social contract was put forward by French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He turned Hobbes’s ideas (see A state of nature) on their head, arguing that humans are fundamentally good when given the freedom of a ‘state of nature’, but this goodness is corrupted by modern culture: civil societies are formed to protect private property, not rights and freedoms, and their restrictive and unjust laws foster inequality. Rousseau’s alternative was direct rule by the people, with legislation decided by the volonté générale, the general will: laws created by the people would encapsulate, rather than restrict, individual freedoms. He did, however, introduce a note of caution, saying that the people would need to be educated in order to know what their will really was.
Rousseau’s rather idyllic ideas were later taken up by the Romantic movement (see Idealism and nature), but before then his famous declaration that ‘Man was born free yet everywhere he is in chains’ was adopted as a rallying cry of the French Revolution.
