Freedom for Rousseau and Individual Liberties

Freedom for Rousseau and Individual Liberties

The purpose which Rousseau ostensibly gives his social contract is to free man from the illegitimate chains to which existing governments have shackled him. If this is his aim, then it follows that he should be most concerned with the preservation of freedom in political society, initially so that savage man might be lured out of nature and into society in the first place, and afterwards so that Rousseau’s framework for this society will prevent the present tyranny from reasserting itself. Indeed, in his definition of purpose for man’s initial union into society, he claims that, despite his membership in an association to which he must necessarily have some sort of obligation if the contract is to be valid, he will “obey only himself and remain as free as before” (I.vi. 4). However, hardly a paragraph later, he appears to contradict this idea entirely, saying instead that men’s union into society constitutes “the total alienation of each associate with all of his rights to the whole community” (I.vi.6). This apparent contradiction begs the question, what is the freedom that Rousseau envisions for man, and how does this kind of freedom relate to individual rights and protect the individual within a society governed by the general will?

Rousseau’s conception of freedom begins to take shape in the transition from nature to society, in which a fundamental shift occurs in human nature that translates into a change in the nature of freedom between the two states. Entrance into civil society, Rousseau argues, “produces the most remarkable change in man by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct” (I.viii.1). That is, entering civil society allows man to exist peacefully in ...

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...s him without any recourse except to accept the constant error of his ways and obey. Rousseau opens The Social Contract with the claim that he is “taking men as they are,” but he is in fact taking man as he wishes he might someday become, as his theory of human perfectionism betrays (I.i.1). And while Hobbes understands that man will never bow voluntarily to coercion and will fight for his life inside and outside of society, Rousseau thinks man can be conditioned to accept coercion as a blessing so that no force will need to be exerted to keep him in order. And in the process of shaping men in the image of his mind’s eye, he is willing himself to tolerate what he calls “the most enormous abuses,” from the subjection of men’s very thoughts to the jurisdiction of the law, down to the right of the sovereign to execute citizens it deems a danger to its amorphous good.