revolution, but of a fable in which there is no already existing society and the land is unclaimed. At the foundation of our political anthropology is a creature who comes into existence in a moment of free deliberation (shall I consent to this arrangement?) that occurs in a present unconditioned by the past. The freedom of the liberal self is the freedom of newness and isolation. Locke’s state-of-nature thought experiment is explicitly counterfactual. Its premise is that “you can understand man and his moral and practical endowments only in isolation from the settings in which he might
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