Or, at least, would be inconceivable, were it not that perhaps the most influential theory of the state in our own time has been built upon it. What is termed the idealist theory of the state is broadly the argument that individual freedom means obedience to the law of the society to which I belong. My personality, it is said, is simply an expression of the organized whole to which I belong. When I say that I am seeking to realize myself, I mean in fact that I am seeking to be one with the order of which I am a part. I am not independent of, or isolated in, that order, but one with it and of it. As it realizes itself, so am I also realized. The greater and more powerful it becomes, the greater and more powerful do I become as a consequence. The more fully, therefore, I serve it, the more fully do I express myself. True liberty is thus so far from being an absence of restraint that it is essentially subordination to a system of rational purposes which receive their highest expression in the activity of the state. To be one with that activity may well then be regarded as the highest freedom a citizen can know. In the whole history of political philosophy there is nothing more subtle than the skill with which the idealist school has turned the flank of the classic antithesis between liberty and authority. From the Greeks to Rousseau it was always conceived that a man’s freedom is born of a limitation upon what his rulers may exact from him; since Rousseau, and, more particularly, since Hegel, it has been urged that conformity to a code, and even compulsory obedience to it, is the very essence of freedom. So startling a paradox needs, at the least, explanation. Liberty, it argues, is not a mere negative thing like absence of restraint. It is rather a positive self-determination of the will which, in each of us, seeks the fulfilment of rational purpose as this lies behind, and gives unified meaning to, the diversified chaos of purposes in each of us. We desire freedom, that is to say, in order that we may be ourselves at our best. The right object of our wills, the thing which, did we know all the facts, we would truly desire, this is clearly that for which we would seek freedom. This is our real will, and the highest part of ourselves. This will, moreover, is the same in each member of society; for, at bottom, the real will is a common will which finds its highest embodiment in the state. In this view, therefore, the state is the highest part of ourselves. For it represents, in its will, what each of us would seek to be if the temporary, the immediate and the irrational, were stripped from the objects we desire. Its object is what alone we should aim at were we free to will only our permanent good. It is, so to say, the long and permanent end that, in the ultimate analysis, we come individually to will after private experience of wrong direction and erroneous desire. The more intimately, therefore, we make our will one with that of the