Rousseau’s Happiness of Freedom

Abstract

Even before Kant, says Hegel in his Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie (Lectures on the History of Philosophy), the “principle of liberty” had ascended in Rousseau’s Contrat social. After all, according already to Rousseau, man has “liberty in his spirit as the altogether absolute” (in seinem Geist die Freiheit als das schlechthin Absolute).¹ And it is that breakthrough of the idea of freedom and the reason of laws based on it “as the final absolute obligation” (“als letzte absolute Verbindlichkeit”) in the drafting of the constitutions of the French Revolution that Hegel celebrates in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History as a “glorious mental dawn.” Kant reflects upon this dawn with the lapidary principle of his philosophy of law and state: “There is only one innate right, the birthright of freedom…it is the one sole original, inborn right belonging to every man in virtue of his humanity” (Das angeborene Recht ist nur ein einziges—Freiheit…ist dieses einzige, ursprüngliche, jedem Menschen kraft seiner Menschheit zustehende Recht).² Thus, it is not freedom that requires a special legal title in order to be exercised, but its limitation that requires a reason. Consequently, Kant does not name individual basic rights.