Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

This is the first sentence of the first chapter of The Social Contract, entitled “Subject of this first book”. Rousseau states the problem he wants to solve: people are born free, yet everywhere society holds them in subjection. He adds at once that someone may think himself the master of others and still be more of a slave than they are.

He does not try to explain how this change came about (“I do not know,” he writes), but what can make it legitimate. His answer is the social contract: a pact by which each person unites with all and obeys only the general will, that is, the law the people give themselves.

Published in 1762, the same year as Emile, the book was condemned and burned in Geneva, and Rousseau had to flee. A few decades later, the French revolutionaries drew some of their ideas from it, and the sentence became one of the mottoes of freedom.

The Social Contract (Du contrat social), Book I, chapter I, 1762

Original text checked word for word in the work; the translation is by quotesay.

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