ABSTRACT
Religious liberalism maintained control by denying the individual's capacity to create cultural knowledge. Yet, its images of an immortal individual soul created a tension that led to a rupture of emergent individuality. Even as the new political individual railed against external authority and made its way in a new world opened up by will, senses, and rationality, it could not fully come to trust itself. At the heart of freedom lay self-doubt. While Locke had enabled the individual to break free from cultural oppression, emotions had become suspect, and the new political individual lacked a trustworthy internal experience. However, despite his alienation from himself, the political individual found a route to a new stability, a balance between internal and external forces.
