[2] Lévy-Bruhl, Loc. cit. p. 330. The citation appears to be from a romance, and I have not seen the context.
[3] Letter 3 contains a profound criticism of the supposed actual “state of nature,” and it might be said with truth that the whole subject of the letters is the problem “how man is to be free without ceasing to be sensuous.”
{238} 2. Returning to our immediate subject, the Philosophy of Right, we will consider for a moment the specific relation of Rousseau’s idea of Freedom to Kantian or post-Kantian thought. It is permissible, perhaps, to embody the chief part of what has to be said in extracts from works of great original value and not very generally accessible. Not only the poets and sentimentalists of Germany, but also the great philosophers, distinctly recognised the debt of the German genius to the ideas of Rousseau. The conception of the “Social Contract” has an importance which surprises the modern reader in the political philosophy of Kant and more especially of Fichte, and it is not till we come to Hegel that the literal interpretation of the “Social Contract” is completely discriminated from the truth conveyed by the doctrine of the General Will. Apart from all questions about the literal meaning of the “Social Contract,” it is simple fact that the whole political philosophy of Kant, Hegel, and Fichte is founded on the idea of freedom as the essence of man, first announced—such was Hegel’s distinct judgment—by Rousseau. I begin by citing the crucial passage from Hegel’s History of Philosophy, which gives in a few lines the basis of his own theory of Right, as well as his view of Rousseau’s position. [1]
[1] Hegel’s Geschichte der Philosophie, iii. 477.
After explaining that Rousseau treated the right of Government as on one side, in its historical aspect, resting [1] on force and compulsion, Hegel {239} continues,
“But the principle of this justification (the absolute justification of the State) Rousseau makes the free will, and, disregarding the positive right (or law) of States, he answers to the above question [2] (as to the justification or basis of the State) that man has free will, seeing that ‘Freedom is the distinctive quality of man. [3] To renounce one’s freedom, means to renounce one’s humanity. Not to be free is therefore a renunciation of one’s human rights, and even of one’s duties.’ The slave has neither rights nor duties. Rousseau says, therefore, [4] The fundamental problem [5] is to find a form of association which shall protect and defend at once the person and the property of every member with the whole common force, and in which each individual, inasmuch as he attaches himself to this association, obeys only himself, and remains as free as before [5] The solution is given by the Social Contract; [5] it (Rousseau says) is this combination, to which each belongs through his will."
These principles, thus set up in the abstract, we cannot but take as correct; yet ambiguity begins at once. Man is free; this is no doubt the substantive nature of man; and in the State it is not only not abandoned, but in fact it is therein first established. The freedom of nature, the capacity of freedom, is not the actual freedom; {240} for nothing short of the State is the actualisation of freedom.
But the misunderstanding about the “General Will” begins at the following point. The notion of Freedom must not be taken in the sense of the casual free-will of each individual, but in the sense of the reasonable will, the will in and for itself. [6] The general will is not to be regarded as compounded of the expressed individual wills, [7] so that these remain absolute; else the proposition would be true, “where the minority has to obey the majority, there is no freedom.” Rather the general will must be the rational will, even though people are not aware of it; the State, therefore, is no such association as is determined upon by individuals.
The false apprehension of these principles does not matter to us. What matters to us is that by their means it comes as a content into consciousness, that man has in his mind Freedom as the downright absolute, that the free will is the notion of man. It is just freedom that is the self of thought; one who repudiates thought and talks of freedom knows not what he is saying. The oneness of thought with itself [8] is freedom, the free will. Thought, only taken in the form of will, is the impulse to break through [9] one’s mere subjectivity, is relation to definite being, realisation of one’s {241} self, inasmuch as I will to make myself as an existent adequate to myself as thinking. The will is free only as that which thinks.
The principle of freedom dawned on the world in Rousseau, and gave infinite strength to man, who thus apprehended himself as infinite. This furnishes the transition to the Kantian philosophy, which, from a theoretical point of view, took this principle as its basis. Knowledge [10] was thus directed upon its own freedom, and upon a concrete content, [10] which it possesses in its consciousness.”