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Hobbes talks about this, and it's one of the basic foundations of Enlightenment republican thought, that no man knows the business of another so well that he can reliably claim the right of rule over him just by superior knowledge. It was only in the 20th Century that intellectuals became so detached and naïve that they thought, for instance, that they knew farming better than farmers, and, to be fair, only a few million had to die before experts settled on "let's give them better technology, educate them on techniques, and let them make the decisions on how to implement it." But the generations rotate, the lessons of common sense are forgotten, and now the experts are sure that they know best again.
I accept the point against democracy in general, but, if we are to have a democracy, better the ordinary people than the official class that democracy creates.
Where does Rousseau, and his distinction between the "general will" and the "popular will" fit into "Enlightenment republican thought"? Because I generally see people class him as a major figure of the "Enlightenment" alongside Hobbes, Locke, and Montesquieu; and because I've read an argument about how that concept means that real democracy is when a self-selected vanguard party of intellectual elites take uncontested charge of the state, and that giving the voters what they vote for is instead "populism," which is the greatest threat to Our Democracy.
So, I never liked the Social Contract, I think it's largely motivated by Rousseau coping about getting kicked out of Geneva, but the "General Will" was wildly misinterpreted by his revolutionary followers. The General Will can only legislate general laws, based on the idea that the population as a whole will come to the best solutions if it isn't tempted by faction, but is forced to consider full collective self-interest. In that respect, the General Will is entirely compatible with the American idea that the Constitution and Constitutional procedure is the essence of legitimate governance, in that, even with full popular sovereignty, whatever is done under the Constitution must be done according to general laws (e.g. the Amendments clause). The General Will is not a blank check for elites, but something closer to Kant's Categorical Imperative, that one should "act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law".
More generally, scholars of both the left and right radically overstate how much Rousseau broke with previous traditions. The Emile is an extraordinarily Classicizing, even reactionary text; he says that man in the state of nature is little different from an ape; amour-propre is a prototype of the Anglo concept of enlightened self-interest. Both leftist and conservative modern readings of Rousseau are understandable, given the abuse of Rousseau in the Revolution, but about as accurate as talking about Nietzsche endorsing the Aryan Race.
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