Enchanted Ground? Rousseau, Republicanism, and Switzerland

Patrick Vincent Republican and Communitarian critiques of liberalism in the last thirty years have highlighted how Rousseau’s political thought defies Isaiah Berlin’s classic division between positive and negative liberty. Building on both the republican language of civic virtue and the natural law tradition of individual rights, Rousseau’s social contract theory attempts, through reason and affect, to harmonize our contradictory desire for individual autonomy and the public good. This hybrid understanding of Rousseau, very different from post-war critiques that saw in him only the precursor of totalitarianism, follows the trend in recent political theory to view the opposition between virtue and rights as a false one, and to argue that republicanism should not be understood as an alternative to modern liberalism but as an important precursor.