What problem did Jean-Jacques Rousseau try to solve in The Social Contract?

In The Social Contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau sought to solve the problem of how individuals could recover the liberty they had lost through the development of corrupt civil societies.1

Having argued in his earlier work that humans are naturally good but corrupted by society, Rousseau addressed the contradiction between humanity's purported natural freedom and the reality of being "everywhere in chains". He aimed to reconcile the individual with the community by proposing a social contract that would allow people to exchange their natural independence for a higher form of freedom: true political or republican liberty.12

Rousseau identified that while individuals are free when they obey only rules they prescribe for themselves, a society consists of many conflicting individual wills. To resolve this, he introduced the concept of the general will—a collective will aimed at the common good. By participating in this general will, citizens obey laws they have collectively authored, meaning that in obeying the law, the individual is ultimately obeying themselves.132