It was Rousseau who - declaring in the opening statement of The Social Contract that 'man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains', and wanting to free men from all 'artificial' restraints - made what had been called the savage the virtual hero of progressive intellectuals, urged people to shake off the very restraints to which they owed their productivity and numbers, and produced a conception of liberty that became the greatest obstacle to its attainment. After asserting that animal instinct was a better guide to orderly cooperation among men than either tradition or reason, Rousseau invented the fictitious will of the people, or 'general will', through which the people 'becomes one single being, one individual'. This is perhaps the chief source of the fatal conceit of modern intellectual rationalism that promises to lead us back to a paradise wherein our natural instincts rather than learnt restraints upon them will enable us 'to subdue the world', as we are instructed in the book of Genesis.

F.A. Hayek