Rousseau's critique of representative institutions holds that constitutional checks merely formalize factional elite interests rather than expressing the general will, making them instruments of particular advantage rather than common welfare.
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau was an 18th-century Swiss-French thinker who argued that people are naturally good but corrupted by society and civilization. He believed in the "general will" of the people and that legitimate governments should reflect what ordinary citizens want, making him hugely influential on democratic and revolutionary ideas. His writings on education, freedom, and social contracts shaped modern thinking about human rights and how societies should be organized.
general will(Rousseau's Social Contract)
The collective will that emerges from an assembly of citizens, either through procedural constraints on self-interested deliberation or through the exercise of citizen virtue