The Gift of Law: Liberty, Legitimacy and Autonomy in The Social Contract

Abstract

I examine Rousseau’s claim that any given will can be either itself or another, and cannot be commuted (to representatives, for example), through an investigation of liberty and legitimacy in The Social Contract, with respect to which Rousseau elaborates his notion that we prescribe laws to ourselves. Through an examination of the logic of the general will, I attempt to show that, while the theory of legitimacy is radical, it is faced with serious problems that concern the identification of the we (or the I) that is supposed to be prescribing laws to itself, and that when we are (I am) supposedly doing so, the identity of the will is far from clear.