ABSTRACT
The questions raised by the notion of freedom are central to people's self-understanding as both individuals and as a collective, but what it actually means to be free offers no simple or easy answers. The historian Quentin Skinner, whose influential work on political thought has increasingly turned to a so-called genealogy of liberty, stresses that the idea of freedom can be associated with a series of key approaches, which together are as problematic as they are pressing. The harmonious ideals that Hugo imagines cannot be divorced from an imperfect reality in which people are alienated from an integrated mode of being. Accompanying this development in critical thinking has been a resurgence of interest in the place of Romanticism within the history of ideas. Not by chance, Paul de Man has been one of the most recognizable voices in these efforts to reclaim a philosophical context for readings of Romantic writers and artists.
