Freedom in Rousseau’s political philosophy

254 Pages·1993·37.78 MB·English

by  Cullen, Daniel E.

Freedom in
Rousseau’s
Political Philosophy
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Freedom m
Rousseau’s
Political
Philosophy
Daniel E. Cullen
NORTHERN
ILLINOIS
UNIVERSITY
PRESS
DeKalb
1993
© 1993 by Northern Illinois University Press
Published by the Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb,
Illinois 60115
Manufactured in the United States using acid-free paper @
Design by Julia Fauci
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cullen, Daniel.
Freedom in Rousseau’s political philosophy / Daniel
Cullen.
"5c 17?
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
c%so ISBN 0-87580-180-3
1. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1712-1778—Contributions in
im
political science. 2. Liberty. I. Title.
JC179.R9C85 1993
323.44—dc20 93-16549
CIP
l5oro
To my mother
and to the memory of my father

Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
1 The Problem of Freedom 3
2 The Natural Paradigm 31
3 The Achievement of Democratic Freedom 70
4 Citizenship, Community, and the Politics of Identity 117
Notes 169
Bibliography 223
Index 233

Preface
The commentary on Rousseau is replete with efforts to draw
from his work a single, self-consistent theory. He has variously
been called an asocial individualist, a liberal, a conservative, a
majoritarian populist, and a totalitarian. One is tempted to say
that any coherent interpretation of Rousseau must be an astig
matism that prevents certain rays of his theory from coming into
focus. The unity of his work is indeed a complex one that, in the
interpretation I offer here, consists in an effort to ground indi
vidual freedom both in constitutional principles of right and in
community—to unite the rational assent to principle character
istic of liberalism with the affective community values associated
with conservatism and, more recently, communitarianism.
I attempt in this book to delineate and criticize Rousseau’s
theory of political freedom. The heart of that theory is an expla
nation of social equivalents for the conditions of the state of
nature that supported natural freedom. Rousseau did not share
the belief of Hobbes and Locke that self-interest could be en
lightened. The social conflicts that self-interest engenders might,
in his view, be resolved only by assimilating the individual self
to a community self {moi commun). Still, in line with Hobbes
and Locke, Rousseau conceived freedom negatively, not as self-
development through political participation. Freedom for Rous
seau meant individual independence of other wills, which in his
view was the natural and best condition for humankind. All the
prescriptions of his political theory were intended by Rousseau
to show how that independence could be established in civil
order. Thus moral freedom, possible only in society, was a way
to independence, not a value in itself. The expression of the
general will similarly had no value for Rousseau as the voice of a
mystical “Oversoul.” The general will was for him a fence to