Introduction
Human beings never exist in isolation: they live in society, sharing rules, institutions, and culture. Yet social life can be seen as a constraint: laws, norms, and the gaze of others limit our desires and behaviors. But without society, would we truly be free? Or would we instead fall back into a state of nature where only the law of the strongest prevails?
Thus, social life appears both as a limitation and as the very condition of the realization of freedom.
Problematic question:
→ Does society prevent us from being free, or does it, on the contrary, make freedom possible?
I — Society limits the individual and restricts freedom
- Social rules (moral, legal, customary) impose limits on individuals.
- Rousseau (Discourse on Inequality): society corrupts man, who is naturally good and free, by enslaving him through property, comparison, and competition.
- The pressure of the social gaze (Sartre: “Hell is other people”) can imprison individuals in roles and judgments that undermine their autonomy.
II — But society is necessary to escape the state of nature
- Without social rules, the law of the strongest prevails: absolute freedom for each leads to generalized violence.
- Hobbes: in the state of nature, life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”; only an organized society can protect individuals from this permanent war.
- Laws, far from destroying freedom, create security and guarantee rights for all.
III — True freedom is realized in and through social life
- Rousseau (The Social Contract): by accepting laws that we collectively give ourselves, we do not lose our freedom but achieve it in the form of civil and political liberty.
- Hegel: the individual becomes truly free only within ethical life (Sittlichkeit), that is, by participating in institutions (family, civil society, State).
- Social life, by opening access to culture, education, and dialogue, enables man to transcend himself and to fulfill his humanity.
Conclusion
Social life should not be understood only as a constraint that restricts our desires. On the contrary, it is the very condition of genuine freedom, which is not simply the absence of obstacles but the ability to live together under just and common rules. Isolated, the individual knows only an illusory freedom; it is in society that freedom acquires meaning.