ABSTRACT
Ever since Ancient Greece the ideal of leading an autonomous life, a life of one’s own choosing and making, occupied a paramount position in the Western constellation of values. It was passed down, in the form of free will, from Greek philosophy to Christian thought, and it was put to political use in Renaissance humanism. Political autonomy was cherished by republican and liberal writers alike yet it was Rousseau who eventually crafted the contemporary notion. While Rousseau portrayed primitive man as a free creature in A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, in The Social Contract he argued that primitive man was enslaved by his appetites and instincts and that civil liberty was the true kind of freedom:
We might, over and above all this, add, to what man acquires in the civil state, moral liberty, which alone makes him truly master of himself; for the mere impulse of appetite is slavery, while obedience to a law which we prescribe to ourselves is liberty.
