s in government that were to occur in America in 1776 and France in 1789 and that were to inform political and social praxis thereafter.
The strongest Enlightenment case for the creation of a society radically different from the one prevailing in Europe in the 18th century is made by Rousseau. Some commentators assert that Rousseau's work is in opposition to the Enlightenment, but that can 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 ca...