ABSTRACT
Now, it seems quite acceptable in the light of the history of the question of sovereignty in the conditions of European modernity, to understand freedom, that great incitement and that great destiny, as, simply, the possibility of difference. Such a position can go quite a considerable distance towards explaining why freedom proved to be so elusive and, indeed, why freedom was so desirable. After all, and essentially, freedom involved little or nothing more than the projection into the future of idealized images of alternative social arrangements. As such, freedom could never be achieved (there is always a different set of arrangements of one kind or another) and neither could its meaning and attraction be exhausted. Rather the opposite. The only exhaustion was experienced by those who were attempting to reach what they took to be some objective condition.
