Rousseau's Social Contract was burned in Geneva and banned in Paris
In 1762 Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that no king rules by divine right and that only the people, acting together, may make laws. France banned the book, Geneva burned it, the Church put it on its index, and Rousseau fled to avoid prison, though the chapter that caused most offence concerned religion.
Rousseau, a Genevan, had already diagnosed the ills of commercial society in his Discourse on Inequality of 1755. The later book asks whether any political authority can be legitimate, given that people seemed to have ended up worse off than they were in a solitary state of nature. His answer starts with a blunt point: coercion does not create right. Nobody owes obedience to mere strength, and a conqueror has no right to enslave the conquered.
Legitimate power, he reasoned, must leave people free, and that requires consent. Unlike Hobbes, Grotius or Pufendorf, Rousseau held that freedom cannot be signed away to a ruler. The only valid contract makes the people their own sovereign, expressing what he called the general will. That will must pass only general laws aimed at the common good; applying them to particular cases belongs to a separate executive, which the people may abolish if it oversteps.
His vocabulary is easy to misread. By democracy he meant an executive made up of all or most citizens, not a representative system. He tied the right form of executive to the size of a state: small city-states like Geneva suit freedom best and do well with an elected aristocracy, while very large states may need a benevolent monarch who still answers to the sovereign law. The meaning of the general will itself remains hotly disputed.
The reaction was loud. Voltaire, who mocked Rousseau, still said that burning an argument amounts to admitting you cannot answer it. Kant credited Rousseau with teaching him to honour ordinary people. Robespierre addressed him in his diary as a divine man, Noah Webster drew on the book for his 1785 case for a strong American central government, and a Jesuit, Alfonso Muzzarelli, published a refutation in 1794.
Source: The Social Contract
