Rousseau was our best diagnostician of the tension in social life between our desire to be self-determining and our need for others – what Kant would later call our “unsocial sociability.” Rousseau's First and Second Discourses remain among the most acute diagnoses of this tension, and his Social Contract gives the best expression of the dilemma for social theory created by it: “[how to] find a form of association that defends and protects the person and goods of each associate with all the common force, and by means of which each one, uniting with all, nevertheless obeys only himself and remains as free as before.” Rousseau's formulation suggests a way of thinking about democratic citizenship that is neither a form of liberal individualism nor its communitarian counterimage of citizenship constituted by antecedently given civic virtues. That, at least, is what I shall argue.