”And most of all he [Rousseau] provided a way in which the torments of the ego - an increasingly popular pastime in the late eighteenth century - could be assuaged by membership in a society of friends. In place of an irreconcilable opposition between the individual, with his freedom intact, and a government eager to abridge it, Rousseau substituted a sovereignty in which liberty was not alienated but, as it were, placed in trust.
The surrender of individual rights to the General Will was itself conditional on that entity preserving them, so that the citizen could truly claim that for the first time he governed himself.”
Simon Schama
Citizens - A Chronicle of the French Revolution
