Does Majority Consent Make You Free? Voltaire, Rousseau & the General Will

Podcast: Consequential Actions Podcast · Jeff Kellick

Opublikowano: 2026-10-04

Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Ep. 15 Voltaire vs. Rousseau: Toleration, Consent & the General Will In 1762 a Protestant cloth merchant was broken on the wheel in Toulouse for a murder that never happened. Voltaire spent three years getting the verdict overturned, and the case became the occasion for his Treatise on Tolerance. That same summer, Rousseau’s Social Contract was burned in Geneva, his own city. It answered a different question, where legitimate authority comes from, and its answer gave the world the general will and the line about being “forced to be free.” They w...