an be attributed as much to the personal animus between Rousseau and exact contemporary Voltaire as to the fact that, in The Social Contract especially, he makes a critique of the political theories of Hobbes, Locke, and others in order to explain his own theory. Rousseau makes a virtual religion out of his opposition to the tyrannies created by absolute monarchy and absolutist religion, with a radical assertion of the moral superiority of natural law over the artificiality of prevailing social law.
This is the subtext of the famous first line of The Social Contract: "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." All prevailing "models" of society, whether political, familial, or religious, are inadequate to the moral weight that attaches to what ought to be the prevailing model, which is the coming together of free individuals for the purpose of engaging in self-created civilization. In defining what he terms the social compact, Rousseau posits the ideal framework of a society organized according to a Social Contract wherein: "Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and, in our corporate capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole."
Rousseau's tendency toward reconciliation and systematization of ideas can be discerned in his call for what Runes says is "restitution of the natural order in which reason and sentiment become harmonized." The society predicated of the social contract will, it may be inferred, reclaim the human heart as well as the capacity for reasoning, individually and collectively. The particular individual is to be subsumed in the universal order of the general will, but this will have been a creation of the association of individuals in their natural state. Equally important is the fact that this association will not be organized subject to the rule of organized religion or extant organized states. Rousseau is abou...