“Man is born free, but he is always in chains.” Rousseau’s “Social Contract” tells the world this truth: You are free, but you will always wear the shackles customized by society.

1. This is the first sentence in "The Social Contract" besides the preface.

2. In a sense, this sentence needs to be understood within the framework of Rousseau's entire work. Rousseau's works can be divided into two parts, one is a diagnosis of the human condition, and the other is a solution proposed for this diagnosis. The masterpiece of the first part is "On the Origin of Human Inequality". If we talk about this part, the sentence "Man is born free but is always in chains" is a review and summary of "On Inequality" itself.

3. It contains at least two levels of meaning. First of all, man is naturally good, while is corrupted by society. This good includes natural freedom. Secondly, society as a shackles on human beings cannot be removed. That is to say, people cannot return to the state of nature outlined in the second treatise "On Inequality".

4. To expand, the second theory first describes the individual in the state of nature. This individual is free because it does not depend on others and exists almost self-sufficiently. For analysis of this, you can refer to the first two chapters of Melzer's book: The natural goodness of man. But since then, due to external accidental factors, human beings' natural perfectibility has responded to the environment, triggering a series of consequences, the culmination of which is that human beings have combined into a society and fallen into the rule of an autocratic government. The natural state of individuals living alone has been completely eliminated. Dissolved. Let’s talk about society, to be precise, it’s the state of society. Rousseau has a historical horizontal axis here, which means that once people enter the social state, they cannot return to the natural state. Therefore, if this sentence is translated according to the content of the second theory, it is: Man is originally free in the state of nature, but once he enters the state of society, it is almost impossible to preserve natural freedom, because society as a shackles has nothing to do with natural freedom. are not compatible. Moreover, the social state cannot be escaped. Therefore, everyone is actually shackles.

5. Let’s talk about the solution proposed by Rousseau, let’s just talk about “The Social Contract”. Since man is born free but is always in chains, then Rousseau's task in the social contract theory is to help people remove their chains? naive. The purpose of the social contract is not to remove the shackles, but to legitimize the shackles. The social contract theory itself indicates the impossibility of removing the shackles. The foregoing makes it clear: the yoke itself is society. Moreover, its subtitle is the principle of political rights. What Rousseau wants to answer is what kind of political body is legitimate. Rousseau replaced natural freedom by contracted freedom, and then legalized the shackles of this society through a complex government construction process.