Jean - Jacques Rousseau

"Man is born free but everywhere is in chains."

This quote is the first line in Rousseau's most famous piece of work, The Social Contract. This contract led up to be the basis for the Declaration of Independence. The Social Contract made it clear to the public that Rousseau thought all citizens should be entitled to liberty. The idea of the Social Contract would outline the general theory that liberty and justice were entitled to all. Rousseau said that all forms of government should be under the Social Contract. He also wrote an essay, The Discourse of Inequality, to outline all ideas that influence the way things are today. Some of these things are the idea of the Social Contract, the idea that the happiest state of humankind is a middle state between completely wild and completely civilized, the nature of human distinctions, the criticism of property, and the nature of human freedom. Rousseau argued that civilization had actually corrupted human beings, and that technology has morally degraded humanity. He also brought up the idea that man lived only to please others, and have opinions that are based solely on their surroundings.
Rousseau proposed a formal government in which the leaders were not concerned with themselves, but rather with the whole of the governed. He said that rights, happiness, and property would be better distributed under this type of government than an anarchy. Rousseau declared that if any government was not giving these rights to their citizens, it was breaking the social contract. Rousseau mainly introduced to the public how important rights are, and he was the only one of the thinkers to do it in a way using Contracts. Rousseau also said that the best way to educate human beings was to make sure every human being was being educated. This led up to modern day public schooling.