Jean-Jacques Rousseau intended the political ideas expressed in The Social Contract (1762) to form part of a much larger and more elaborate work, but ironically it was the pamphlet’s brevity that, along with its banning in Paris, made it popular as it was. Heavily influenced by the Republican vocabulary of Rousseau’s birthplace, Geneva, The Social Contract contains one of the most famous lines in eighteenth-century political writing: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains”—a phrase that encapsulates the essence of his thesis while demonstrating his penchant for paradoxical phrasing. Rousseau’s portrayal of man in the “state of nature” as peaceful but morally ignorant countered both Thomas Hobbes’s notion of pre-civil man as being in a “state of war” and John Locke’s assertion that, at his birth, man has inalienable natural rights. The Social Contract famously developed the concept of the “general will,” the combined will of all, which acts as sovereign and is distinct from government.