“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”Jean-Jacques Rousseau · Contractul social · 1762 · Cartea I, capitolul 1
Social chains are legitimate only when those who bear them chose them.
The sentence opens The Social Contract and sets up the book's central tension: man's natural state is freedom, and society as it is organized corrupts it. Rousseau does not say every social order is bad, but that chains are legitimate only if they rest on the agreement of those who wear them. A citizen living under laws he never consented to lives exactly the situation described.
Why it matters It remains the basic grid for judging whether a law or rule serves people or merely keeps them in place.