Is the freedom of the citizen promoted or threatened by the institutions of the social contract?.
Using freedom and liberty to mean the same thing, I shall discuss Rousseau's reasons for believing that men must renounce their natural liberty in favour of a liberty, bound by the clauses of the social contract and the justification he gives for the institutions he holds are necessary to preserve a legitimate authority and will go on to discuss whether Rousseau had a "negative" or a "positive" concept of liberty in mind when drawing up the social contract.
Rousseau holds that by nature men are free, but left to themselves they will inevitably enslave each other. This assumption that, in the absence of some kind of common, mutually beneficial association, men will tend towards inequality and oppression, and move ever onwards in to an unjust society of slaves and masters, lies behind Rousseau's thinking in the Social contract. He observes that the obstacles in the way of man's preservation in the state of nature must have become too great for each individual to over-come alone; and consequently that man's only hope for self-preservation is to form an association with others so that the sum of their forces might be great enough to defeat those obstacles. Rousseau observes that, "the force and liberty of each man are the chief instruments of his self preservation"(on the social contract, Bk. 1, chapter VI, p8) and asks how might man pledge these things "without harming his own interests and neglecting the care he owes to himself"(On the Social Contract Bk.1, chapter VI, p8) that is, how might a man give up some or all of his natural liberty to a group, in the hope of gaining greater freedom, without alienating or enslaving himself or, how might one give up freedom in order to gain freedom? Rousseau asserts that, "the problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before.