1. Jean Jacques Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages, translated by John H. Moran in Two Essays on the Origin of Language: Jean Jacques Rousseau and Johann Gottfried Herder (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 72.

2. I say that this is clear. However, in Emile, Rousseau famously remarks, “But what is to be done when they [i.e., our three educations by nature, men, and things] are opposed? When, instead of raising a man for himself, one wants to raise him for others? Then their harmony is impossible. Forced to combat either nature or social institutions, one must choose between making a man or a citizen, for one cannot make both at the same time.”Emile: Or On Education, translated by Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 39. Influenced by remarks such as this, some readers of Rousseau have argued that his notions of human being and of citizen are fundamentally opposed. Indeed, this idea is powerfully developed as one of the central organizing themes of Judith Shklar's rightly influential book Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau's Social Theory (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Accordingly, for Shklar and other readers of Rousseau who share this basic idea, participation in civil society may be necessary for making the transition from the condition of natural independence to the condition of citizen, but such participation cannot be necessary for making the transition to the condition of full humanity.

This issue is clearly complex and I mention it in order to set it aside as beyond the scope of this article. By way of indicating some of the complexities of this issue and setting it aside, I would like to make just three remarks. First, the issue of the relation between Rousseau's conceptions of human being and of citizen is hardly decided by this remark from Emile. For it is not at all clear that the conception of citizen at issue in this remark and in terms of which there is a tension between human being and citizen is Rousseau's. I would like to at least suggest here that, for Rousseau, a citizen does not exist for others but with others. Existing for others is one way of characterizing the condition that Rousseau relates to amour-propre in the Second Discourse and that is clearly not his desired ideal of the citizen. Indeed, existing with others may require precisely not existing for others. That is, the ability to exist as a citizen with others may require the ability to exist in a condition of isolation until those with whom one may exist present themselves. Second, the understanding of Rousseau's conception of citizen elaborated by Shklar (and so upon which at least one influential account of the tension between human being and citizen rests) is by no means required or uncontroversial. Tracy Strong has powerfully argued that, for Rousseau, the concept of citizen is the concept of the human; it is the concept of one who is able to acknowledge in himself and others the common conditions of human being and to join with others on that footing of the common. He remarks that “citizen” does not “designate only for Rousseau the members of a society or political system. It designates, more importantly, a being in whom the thought of the common is realized.” Strong, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Politics of the Ordinary (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994), 76. Finally, beyond the remarks from The Social Contract, which I will quote immediately, there is also Rousseau's striking remark in the Geneva Manuscript that “we do not really begin to become men until after we have been citizens” (Geneva Manuscript, I,ii,15). This text is included in On The Social Contract, edited by Roger D. Masters and translated by Judith R. Masters (New York: St. Martin's, 1978). Further references to the Geneva Manuscript will be included in the text as Geneva Manuscript, followed by book, chapter, and paragraph numbers.

3. Jean Jacques Rousseau, On The Social Contract, edited by Roger D. Masters and translated by Judith R. Masters (New York: St. Martin's, 1978), 56. Further references to The Social Contract will be to this edition and will be included within the text by book, chapter, and paragraph numbers.

4. Jean Starobinski offers a representative expression of this widely held view:

The Social Contract... contains no discussion of present or future historical conditions. The hypothetical contract is situated at the beginning of social life, just as man emerges from the state of nature. There is no question of destroying an imperfect society in order to establish freedom and equality. Rousseau thereby sidesteps the practical problem of how to effect the transition from the present society to the perfectly just one.... In one fell swoop, with no transition, he moves from the state of nature to the decision that establishes the primacy of the general will and the law of reason.... He is not explicit about what sort of action might bring about the change he describes. The social pact is not an evolutionary development that follows naturally from the Second Discourse; it belongs, rather, to another dimension, a purely normative dimension, outside of historical time. We begin ex nihilo, without asking what conditions must be met in order for the political ideal to be realized.... Such a hypothetical society is not subject to the inevitable historical misfortunes that condemned actual humanity to fall into an irrevocable state of corruption. It is, rather, an ideal model against which corrupt society can be judged. (Jean Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, translated by Arthur Goldhammer [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988], 30)

5. I have begun to contest this view and to argue that The Social Contract is centrally concerned to realistically and practically address the issue of the concrete origination of a society of freedom and mutuality in “The Nature of Society and the Problem of Its Origination in Rousseau's The Social Contract” (unpublished manuscript). A version of this material appears as the first part of an extended interpretation of The Social Contract, titled “The Citizen as The Legislator: The Conversation of Constitution in Rousseau's The Social Contract,” in my “Constituting Mutuality: Essays on Expression and the Bases of Intelligibility in Rousseau, Wittgenstein, and Freud” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1996).

6. I have modified the Masters translation of the final clause. Masters has the following: “which means only that he will be forced to be free.” My grounds for this modification will become clear in section 5.

7. Some scholars have argued that Rousseau's political thought, together with his view of the moral and psychological qualities of men and women, essentially excludes women from participation in political life. Susan Okin's Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979) develops this argument powerfully. Accordingly, my substitution here and throughout of human for Rousseau's homme is controversial. Justification of this substitution is beyond the scope of this article.

8. I characterize these three features deliberately loosely. Three instances of work sharing one or more of these features that I have found especially helpful are Judith Butler's The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), Richard Schacht's The Future of Alienation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), and Joshua Cohen's “Reflections on Rousseau: Autonomy and Democracy,”Philosophy and Public Affairs 15 (1986): 275-97. Butler's text is, in this context, especially rich in that she is trying to work out a view that accepts in one form or another the first two features while insisting on the importance of desire and broadly erotic identification as central to the constitution of the subject.

9. Given my desire to sketch what can seem to be the common starting point for any genuine interpretation of this engagement, I will be characterizing this natural-seeming line of thought in a deliberately general manner, at a level of generality before specific differences begin to emerge. Accordingly, the central aspects of what I am calling the natural-seeming line of interpretation are quite widely shared. See, for example, N.J.H. Dent, Rousseau: An Introduction to His Psychological, Social and Political Theory (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 193-200; Hilail Gildin, Rousseau's Social Contract: The Design of the Argument (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 44-45; Arthur M. Melzer, The Natural Goodness of Man: On the System of Rousseau's Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 96-100; James Miller, Rousseau: Dreamer of Democracy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 181-85; Frederick Neuhouser, “Freedom, Dependence, and the General Will,”The Philosophical Review 102, no. 3 (July 1993): 363-95.

10. In what follows, by way of shorthand, I will often speak of what, on the natural-seeming interpretation, citizens owe the common cause simply as “conformity to the law.”

11. Joshua Cohen introduced this term and powerfully developed this line of thought in his previously cited essay, “Reflections on Rousseau: Autonomy and Democracy.” In its development by Cohen, the social-autonomy model of freedom is explicitly appealed to by Frederick Neuhouser as the background in terms of which and against which he develops his account of being forced to be free in his previously cited “Freedom, Dependence, and the General Will.” A similar view is also expressed in N.J.H. Dent's discussion in his, also previously cited, Rousseau. With the exception of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, the most elaborated theoretical development of this general line of thought is to be found in Rawls's A Theory of Justice (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1971) and in his “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Philosophy,”Journal of Philosophy 77, no. 9 (September 1980): 515-72.

12. This remark occurs in the context of Rousseau's discussion of the inalienability of sovereignty and so along with remarks about the impossibility of the sovereign giving over the authority that only it possesses to any given individual as its representative. However, the scope of the remark is not restricted to promising to obey a given individual but applies equally to a promise simply to obey laws. Justification for this claim will emerge shortly.

13. A remark Rousseau quotes from Tacitus may be recalled here: “And this in their ignorance, they called civilization, when it was but a part of their servitude” (III,ix,4 note).

14. While my understanding of the general will differs from his, in emphasizing the aspect of will, I have been importantly influenced by Patrick Riley's Will and Political Legitimacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).

15. It is because will cannot, as opposed to ought not, be alienated or represented that Rousseau maintains that it is impossible, as opposed to impermissible or unwise, for sovereignty to be alienated or represented. In the mere attempt to alienate or represent sovereignty, the general will is thereby lost and, insofar as any active will remains at all, is immediately replaced by either a particular will or a corporate will.

16. While there are, I believe, differences in our understandings of the grounds of this matter, here I have been instructed by, and I am in deep agreement with, Tracy Strong's discussion of sovereignty in Rousseau. He remarks, for example, that “sovereignty does not exist over time, or even in time” and further that “sovereignty and thus the being of political society is held to exist solely in the present tense.” From these claims, Strong goes on to draw a deep conclusion about Rousseau's place within and difference from the tradition of social contract theories. In particular, he argues that “[i]nsofar as the idea of obligation is a binding of the will to a future, Rousseau rejects the idea that political society rests on obligation.” These quotations appear on p. 91 of Strong's previously cited Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Politics of the Ordinary. His entire discussion (spanning pp. 88-94) is especially relevant and helpful in this connection.

17. “The principle of political life,” Rousseau maintains, “lies in the sovereign authority. The legislative power [the general will] is the heart of the State; the executive power [government] is its brain, giving movement to all of its parts. The brain can become paralyzed yet the individual is still alive. A man can remain an imbecile and live. But as soon as the heart has ceased to function, the animal is dead” (II,xi,3).

18. While certain aspects of the passage are somewhat obscure, I take Rousseau to say this fairly directly in the Political Fragments. He remarks, “one should be careful not to confuse the essence of civil society with that of sovereignty. For the social body is the result of a single act of will, and its entire existence is only the sequel and the effect of a prior engagement whose force does not cease to act until this body is dissolved. But sovereignty, which is only the exercise of the general will, is, like it, free, and is not subject to any kind of engagement. Every act of sovereignty, like every instant of its existence, is absolute, independent of the one that precedes it; and the sovereign never acts because it wanted, but because it wants.”The Collected Writings of Rousseau, vol. 4, edited by Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly (Dartmouth, MA: University Press of New England, 1994), 24. What is obscure here is the precise contrast that Rousseau intends between the “essence of civil society” or the “social body” and sovereignty. It seems to me that Rousseau must mean by these terms what has been taken to be the essence of civil society or taken to be the social body. For, in The Social Contract, he is clear that “sovereignty” or “Sovereign” is one of the names for that “moral and collective body” or “public person” formed in and through the social compact.

19. I want to make explicit that my argument here does not imply and is not meant to suggest that for Rousseau a genuine society does not have laws and institutions. It does imply that, for him, a genuine society has genuine laws and institutions only through a current general will—only if there is a current general will through which the people continuously will those laws and institutions. Neither established laws and institutions nor anything else substitutes for or ensures the active presence of a general will.

20. Following his declaration that man is born free and everywhere in chains, Rousseau has this: “How did this change occur? I do not know. What can make it legitimate? I believe I can answer this question” (I,i,1). What I have been suggesting ought to make it clear that, as I understand him, Rousseau is not going to show how our chains or our condition of enchainment can be made legitimate. He is not, that is, going to show how through the social compact we agree to our chains and in that way render them legitimate. He is rather going to show us how, through the continuous rediscovery of and willing of a general will, it is possible to have laws that are not chains.

21. In my previously cited “The Citizen as The Legislator,” I have argued in detail that Rousseau's two accounts of the origination of society in The Social Contract (I,vi-vii and II, vii)—accounts that are often taken to be in some tension with one another—are to be brought together and understood as jointly providing a unified account of the form of participation through which a general will, and so a genuine society, may be continuously constituted.

22. I will not be concerned to argue here for the distinction between the general will and the common interest. I will simply suggest that the common interest is closer to what Rousseau calls “the will of all” and which he clearly distinguishes from the general will. What I will argue is a conflation of the private will and private interest is quite common in studies of Rousseau. It may be seen, for example, in Neuhouser's “Freedom, Dependence, and the General Will” (on pp. 368-369) and throughout N.J.H. Dent's article “Particular Will” in his A Rousseau Dictionary (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1992).

23. It might seem that such an individual should in all cases be stopped. But this thought rests on the error of treating the common interest as equivalent to the general will.

24. Jean Jacques Rousseau, The First and Second Discourses, edited by Roger D. Masters, translated by Roger D. and Judith R. Masters (New York: St. Martin's, 1964), 37-38. Translation modified slightly.

25. While I cannot argue for the claim here, Rousseau's conception of private interest, as I have just briefly sketched it, importantly distinguishes his effort to recover private interest in the name of recovering the possibility of genuine society from what may appear to be the similar efforts of J. S. Mill or various other liberal thinkers. For Rousseau, “private” has something of the sense of “inner” or “true” or “genuine.” It contrasts not with “public” or “common” but with “outer” or “apparent,” with our interests and passions as they have come to be shaped by our amour-propre and by what Rousseau calls our living outside of ourselves. To recover private interest is to recover yourself, your genius. And as for Emerson after him, and as for Kant before Emerson, I would like to suggest that for Rousseau, genius is not what distinguishes one from others but is rather to be understood as the level of oneself that is, or may be discovered to be, common to others. Accordingly, Rousseau is not concerned to recover the possibility of private interest in the name of recovering genuine society understood, as in Mill, as an arena for the expression and cultivation of one's particularity or distinctiveness and as an arena that is sustained by the expression of particularity or distinctiveness. Rousseau is concerned to recover the possibility of the private as what is, or can be discovered to be shared, common. It is because character and genius are, or can be discovered to be, common that when they are expressed, individuals are able to see through each other—not as though they were transparent, but in that each is able to find the other in himself or herself and so to see what is seen through the seeing of the other.

26. “To renounce one's freedom is to renounce one's status as a man, the rights of humanity and even its duties” (I,iv,6).

27. The formulations in this paragraph have been provoked by conversations with Richard Schacht. I mean them to bear on ideas he has developed in his essay “Alienation and Social Life: Social Structure, Social Alienation, and Social Change,” reprinted in his previously cited collection of essays The Future of Alienation.

28. I should also add, lest there be any confusion on this point, that, as we know, coercive state power may be able to drive people into the streets to be present at state-sanctioned rallies, it may be able to dictate their behavior at such events, it may compel them to place a ballot into a ballot box, and, over a period of time, it may even succeed in producing in individuals a feeling that they wish to do these things and that they do them willingly and as an expression of their own best natures. However, these are clearly not the forms of participation that Rousseau requires of citizens as I have begun and will continue to elaborate them. My claim is not that coercive power cannot compel behavior that may look to others like participation or that may come to feel like participation to the individuals involved. My claim is that coercive power cannot compel genuine participation of the sort that Rousseau requires.

29. This is how the claim is taken in all of the literature that I know on this topic.

30. I have made two connected modifications to the Masters translation of these remarks. In the first, I have returned “so to speak” to the place that it occupies in Rousseau's original. It modifies “changing,” and so suggests a specific question about the sense in which a change is involved. In the second remark, I have translated “étrangères” as “strange” rather than, as in Masters, “foreign.” Of course “foreign” is perfectly correct as a translation of “étrangères.” Here, however, it closes an interpretive question that “strange” leaves open. “Foreign” implies that these forces are not in any sense native to the individual, that they come to the individual from the outside or from something or someone beyond the individual. “Strange,” on the other hand, allows that interpretation while also leaving open the possibility that these forces are the individual's but are dormant or unrecognized or even unknown to him. We might say that they are strange in being estranged. It also suggests that the individual will find these forces strange exactly in their being his. They are, in this sense, strange to the individual in the way that, as Rousseau suggests in the First Discourse, his genius is strange to him.

31. In a moment I will suggest that it is not simply the obligations of citizenship that are evaded in the turn to coercive power. It ought to be considered explicitly and consecutively at some point why it is that in political philosophy, and to a significant extent also in moral philosophy, it is difficult to imagine methods of constraint that do not involve the use of power. In view of Rousseau's recurrent suggestion that the move to citizenship is a move out of the condition of childhood into the condition of adulthood, the following remarks suggest one line into this question. “The device of beating children down—by superior force, by contrived logic, or by vicious sweetness—makes it unnecessary for the adult to become adult. He need not develop that true inner superiority which is naturally persuasive. Instead he is authorized to remain significantly inconsistent and arbitrary, or in other words, childish, while beating into the child the desirability of growing up. The child, forced out of fear to pretend that he is better when seen than when unseen, is left to anticipate the day when he will have the brute power to make others more moral than he ever intends to be himself.” These remarks might well have been found in Rousseau's Emile. In fact, however, they are from Erik Erikson's Young Man Luther: A Study of Psychoanalysis and History (New York: Norton, 1958), 69-70.

32. The range and variety of Rousseau's engagements with this problem show that, for him, it was a problem within which the fields of political philosophy, moral philosophy, moral psychology, and aesthetics find a common intersection. It seems to me that, through Rousseau, even if not only through Rousseau, such a common intersection is being rediscovered and is becoming a site for productive work once again. Some recent and provocative work in this connection includes Irene Harvey's essay “Exemplarity and the Origins of Legislation,” in Unruly Examples: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995); Christopher Kelly's Rousseau's Exemplary Life: The “Confessions” as Political Philosophy (New York: Cornell University Press, 1987); David Marshall's “Rousseau and the State of Theater,” in his The Surprising Effects of Sympathy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); and Tracy Strong's previously cited Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Politics of the Ordinary.

33. Plato, The Republic, translated by G.M.A. Grube (New York: Hackett, 1974), 521c. Further references to The Republic will be to this translation and will be given in the text by Stephanus numbers. Given that relations between The Social Contract and The Republic are widely discussed in the literature on Rousseau, it is hard to imagine that this connection has not been made before. However, I have not seen it made in the literature on Rousseau that I know. I am grateful to Stanley Cavell for sending me back to this moment in Plato.

34. To recognize that The Republic opens in this way, one has to accept that its opening word, katebēn (in English, “I went down”) (327a), depicts Socrates going down into the cave—fulfilling the obligation of the philosopher, who has seen the light, to “in turn go down [katebēn] [into the cave] to live with other men and grow accustomed to seeing in the dark” (520c). If that suggestion is accepted, then the whole of the ensuing conversation may be seen to take place in the cave and with individuals who are, as yet, still chained in illusion. I do not imagine that this suggestion will be easy to accept. To do so, one would need to have not only quite specific beliefs about Plato's ambitions and powers as a writer but also quite specific ideas about the place of writing in philosophy. However, the conception of philosophical argumentation and of rigor within contemporary Anglo-American philosophy, as a price of its very real and significant virtues, has made such ideas about the place of writing in philosophy all but unavailable.

The connection between the opening word of The Republic and the injunction to the philosopher in 520c is made and is shown to indicate a central feature of the nature of Plato's task throughout the text, by Nickolas Pappas, in his Plato and the Republic (New York: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1995). Pappas remarks that in the Allegory of the Cave, “Socrates repeatedly uses the same verb for `go down' or `decend,' in explaining the philosopher's chore, that he used in the opening to the Republic to describe his own arrival at the scene of his discussion” (516e, 519d, 520c). Plato wants us to realize that he will justify his city the hard way, not by beginning in consensus and clarifying the theory, but by beginning amid radical disagreement and nevertheless finding some common ground on which to build his argument (p. 18).

35. Insofar as, for Rousseau, the constraining power of philosophy is in principal open to all, Rousseau may be understood as contesting Plato's idea that philosophy is and can be only the concern of the few. This is to say that, while accepting Plato's idea, Rousseau is at the same time transforming it.

36. In his early essay “Schopenhauer as Educator,” Nietzsche offers the following remarks: “And the young person should be taught to regard himself as a failed work of nature but at the same time as witness to the grandiose and marvelous intentions of this artist: nature has done badly, he should say to himself; but I will honor its great intentions by serving it so that it may one day do better. By coming to this resolve he places himself within the circle of culture; for culture is the child of each individual's self-knowledge and dissatisfaction with himself.”Untimely Meditations, translated by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 162.

37. I mean these last remarks to open a path to understanding the vexed and, to my mind, poorly treated topic of Rousseau's claims that a conspiracy of persecution and refusal is directed toward him, a path that I cannot follow here. My claim that Rousseau incessantly refuses our efforts to turn aside may seem to be contested but is actually confirmed by his recurrent accounts of his being refused by society and withdrawing from it. For what is key in these accounts, in this connection, is the fact that Rousseau depicts them in his writing. They become parts of his continuing efforts to confront those whose refusal Rousseau has depicted himself accepting.

38. John Locke, First Treatise of Government, edited by Peter Laslett (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988), bk. 1, chap. 1, sec. 1.

39. I do not mean to be claiming that the mode of self-presentation that I will go on to characterize is unique to philosophy. My claim is rather that, for Rousseau, it is also a form of philosophy and represents one form of philosophy's constraining force.

40. The concept of constraint through attraction to an exemplar has been elaborated, with respect to Emerson, by Stanley Cavell in his Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). I believe that a similar notion is at work in Tracy Strong's characterization of Rousseau's work as directed toward making the human “available.” See Strong's previously cited Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Politics of the Ordinary.

41. See, for example, Kant's Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, Ak. 413.

42. The thoughts in this and the preceding paragraph are indebted to Daniel Brudney, who offered them in response to an earlier version of this article.

43. In this article, I have linked this persistent refusal of freedom to the private will. Let me simply note, however, that this is not, and is not meant to be, a full account of Rousseau's diagnosis of the reasons for our refusal. Such an account would require, at least, an essay of its own. However, what I have said here about what the work of freedom requires ought, it seems to me, to shape how one thinks about what such an account might include and for what specifically it would have to account.

44. Rousseau pretty clearly did not appreciate the kindness. Refusal of recognition was, for him, hardly less damaging than literal slaying. And, in at least one respect, it is for him perhaps more damaging since it allows us a luxury that the citizens of Athens, perhaps short-sightedly, refused—namely, the ability to deny that we have done anything at all.

45. Versions of some of this material have been presented to the philosophy departments at Creighton University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I would like to thank the participants at each of these occasions for their questions and comments. I would also like to thank Bill Bracken, Bill Bristow, Daniel Brudney, Stanley Cavell, Paul Franks, Arata Hamawaki, Amy Kass, Frederick Neuhouser, Hilary Putnam, and Tracy Strong for comments on and suggestions about earlier versions of this material. Finally, I would like especially to thank Nancy Bauer and Katalin Makkai, each of whom not only commented on earlier versions of this material but also offered absolutely decisive suggestions in the late stages of composing this article.

The Force of Freedom

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