ABSTRACT
The charge of illiberalism is of course generally premised on the claim that Rousseau defined liberty falsely, and that the institutions he prescribed for its fulfilment in fact thwart or destroy it. Rousseau's reflections on liberty in the light of autonomy, democracy, political engagement, citizenship, patriotism, the rule of law, the bearing of arms, and subjection to reason, were the stock-in-trade of most definitions of liberty, apart from those stipulated by Hobbes, up to his own day. As a political ideology liberalism is of course as absent from the periods in which Hobbes and Rousseau lived as it is alien to their writings. As distinct from Hobbes, however, Rousseau is alleged by his liberal critics to have believed in an illusory form of freedom which was realised when men were bound by civil laws or 'artificial chains', as Hobbes described them.
