Rousseau point of view

Rousseau was a writer of great intellectual excellence. He lived a vagrant life. Many of the basic ideas in modern democracy such as universal, justice distribution of wealth, the definition of government as fundamentally a matter of contract providing for the exercise of power in accordance with the ‘general will’ for   the common goods by the consent of the citizens as a whole in whom sovereignty ultimately resides etc. are from him. He preached the recognition of mans true nature and expressed his strong protest against the indifference to human misery shown by the feudal aristocracies of his age and his hatred of his dependence upon them for patronage. His expression of them led to the initiation of a theory of the rights of all men, “No citizen should be rich enough to buy another and none so poor that he is obliged to sell himself is one of the declarations of the ‘Social Contract. ‘Its opening sentences is “Man is born free, and every where he is in chains. In Votaries”, said Goethe, “we see the end of a world, in Rousseau the beginning of a new one”.