ABSTRACT
To say that ‘Man was born free and everywhere he is in chains’ is to conceive him as originally without any obligations towards others but presently enmeshed in a web of dependence inimical to human happiness. The social contract represents a second transformation, a redemption of the social state that restores to human beings the independence they forfeited in leaving the natural condition. The transformed or legitimate society must be a society of right that establishes a ‘moral and collective’ existence alongside our ‘natural and independent’ existence, creating a ‘real union’ among individuals who are otherwise abandoned to unstable and oppressive alliances of interest. Rousseau’s unflinching account of the requirements of social contract and the apparently insuperable obstacles facing its success culminates in what might be described as a conservative politics of freedom.
