Holding men in wretched subservience, feudalism --- alongside religion --- was a powerful force in the eighteenth
century. Self-serving monarchic social systems, which collectively reduced common people to servitude, were now
attacked by Enlightenment philosophers, of whom Rousseau was a leading light. His masterpiece, The Social Contract,
profoundly influenced the subsequent development of society and remains provocative in a modern age of continuing
widespread vested interest.