Page - 70 - in Limina - Grazer theologische Perspektiven, Volume 2:2

71 | www.limina-graz.eu Isabella Guanzini | Ideas of Freedom cant authors of modernity, the one that aptly understood the substantial incompatibility between the affirmation of the individual and the produc- tion of the common is Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who had the capacity to mesmerize and radicalize the ambivalent tendencies of his epoch. Rous- seau can be considered the modern revolutionary figure capable of theoriz- ing the return to the ancient collective sovereignty, thereby manifesting all his anachronistic “prodigious talent” (Constant 1988, 317–320). Rousseau, therefore, represents both in his life and thought an exemplary expression of the complexity and ambivalence of modern liberty. Indeed, Rousseau starts from the presupposition that the state of nature is not the natural right of each over everything, nor the peaceful situation of a spontaneous co-existence, but rather a condition of supratemporal and pre-social innocence, of which each history and society constitutes the de- formation or destruction. The dismissal of the fascination for the collective origin is induced by the emergence of another kind of liberty, in which the individuals affirm themselves according to a different vision of justice and morality that undermines the faith in the traditional moral edifices in order to make room for new and specific convictions. Such space corresponds to the appearance of an unprecedented concept of existence and conscience, according to which the individual conceives of itself in terms of liberty. “Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains” (Rousseau 1999, 45): an immediate and crystal-clear affirmation, which marks the beginning of a new anthropological epoch, as well as a new mode of doing politics and constructing the social. At the same time, in light of his pessimistic conception of human sociality, Rousseau’s audacious political project proclaims the necessity of a republic grounded in the unity of convictions and life visions, which materializes in the notion of “general will”. What is at stake here is the aporetic and radical possibility of a positive community paradoxically premised upon an a  priori asociality, which is to say of an ideal community based on an a priori non- community. It is not by chance that the author of The Social Contract, a text that the French Jacobins carried in their pockets during the days of the Revolution, tremendously suffered the burden of the human community, taking shelter during the last years of his life in an almost isolated place. In this respect, the description of his interiority he portrays in his Reveries of the Solitary “Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”