The concept of freedom is the core of Rousseau's thought and its fundamental enigma. Rousseau suggests paradoxically that men have a natural inclination toward freedom, and that it might be necessary to force them to be free. Furthermore, while freedom is the essence of humanity, its locus classicus is the prehuman natural condition; "humanity" is an historical acquisition. It appears that society simultaneously dehumanizes man by destroying his freedom, and humanizes him by compelling the acquisition of those characteristics which separate him from the animals. I try to dissolve these paradoxes by recovering the essential meaning of freedom as independence. Rousseau's problem was to preserve this fact of nature in the unnatural condition of society. His unusual and perplexing political project is subordinate to that end.
I challenge the prevailing view that Rousseau vindicates the autonomy of the political against the bourgeoisification of life accomplished by liberal theory and practice. Rousseauian democracy is curiously antipolitical. Withdrawn from genuine deliberation into an attitude of moral asceticism, the citizen is almost solipsistic as he contemplates the general will. Democratic citizenship is passive and defensive.
Rousseau desired to structure political relations so as to import the independence of the solitary and natural condition into the social and civil condition. Human conventions might be artfully designed to maintain freedom, rather than left haphazardly to destroy it. No literal recreation of the state of nature is possible, but its structure is replicable on the plane of Political Right. At the center of Rousseau's design is a social contract which will leave each man as free as he was before the onset of social relations, while attending to the enlarged requirements of his preservation. Its achievement would relieve the tension between independence and community that has bedeviled modern political thought. The gulf between Rousseau and us concerns whether this tension can be dissipated, or merely managed. The latter view is reasonable only if one denies what Rousseau asserts: that the tension is unbearable. Rousseau warns that we are condemned to unhappiness so long as the freedom we enjoyed outside community remains unavailable within.
