Excerpt:

In his  Lectures  on the  History  of  Philosophy  Hegel credits  Rousseau  with an epoch-making innovation in the realm of practical  philosophy,  an innovation  said to consist  in the fact  that Rousseau  is the first  thinker  to recognize “the free will” as the fundamental  principle of political philosophy.’ Since Hegel’s own practical  philosophy  is explicitly  grounded in an account of the will and its  freedom, Hegel’s assertion is clearly intended as an acknowledgment of his deep indebtedness to Rousseau’s social and political  thought.  What is not so clear, however,  is how this  indebtedness  is  to be understood: What precisely does it mean to say that the  political  theories  of Hegel and Rousseau share the same first  principle? In this paper I intend to follow  up on this interpretive  suggestion of Hegel’s by elaborating, much more explicitly  than he  himself does, the sense in which Rousseau’s political thought is  founded on the principle of the “free will.” While accomplishing  this  task will put us in a better  position  to clarify  the obscure philosophical strategy  behind Hegel’s own social theory,  my primary  interest  here is to illuminate  the foundations  of Rousseau’s political  thought,  especially  its account of the connection  between freedom  and the general will. I argue that it is necessary  to distinguish  two  ways in which Rousseau takes the general will to secure, or realize,  the freedom of individual citizens,  namely, by functioning  as an  embodiment as well as a precondition of such freedom. Under-  standing both of these points will lead us to see that Rousseau’s  thought  rests  on two distinct,  though not incompatible,  accounts of  how citizens  whose actions  are constrained  by the general will  are in  fact  subject only to their  own wills  and therefore  free in their  obedience to the general will. As we shall see, these two accounts are  implicitly  based upon distinct  conceptions of political freedom, which, for reasons I discuss below, can be characterized respectively  as “subjective”  and “objective” conceptions of freedom. My  claim is that  to ignore either  of these conceptions  is to leave out an  essential element of Rousseau’s understanding of how citizens  achieve their freedom within  the rational state.

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