What is a free person? This is the quintessential question that underlies Jean-Jacques Rousseau's political theory. In Rousseau's political philosophy, the relationship between law and freedom, that is, the relationship between coercion and freedom, is the condition for understanding freedom as autonomy, as well as for determining the significance of the free person. From this point arises the so-called "Rousseauian paradox," that is, what is coercion in freedom. What does it mean that someone is free because they are forced to be free? How is it possible for coercion and freedom to coexist? The sovereignty of law is also sovereignty. The paradox of the relationship between law and freedom is already inscribed in the relationship between freedom and sovereignty. How, then, can we understand Rousseau's position that only where there is law is there freedom? These problems, formulated as questions, highlight the problematic that, like an underground river, flows from Plato and Aristotle—namely from Plato's Republic, the Laws, and the Statesman, but also, of course, Aristotle's Politics, which constitute the birth certificate of democratic republican political theory and emerge—through Rousseau and Kant, into today's theoretical problematic and public debate. The relationship between law and freedom, that is, coercion and freedom—the Rousseauian political paradox—is the guiding problem in the research, critique, and interpretive work of this book, in which the author also examines the way in which Rousseau's political theory is constituted, especially in the Social Contract, as a theory of freedom as autonomy. St. D. *** Stefanos Dimitriou was born in 1968 in Athens. He is an associate professor of Political Philosophy in the Department of Political Science and History at Panteion University. He studied at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Ioannina and pursued postgraduate studies as an IKY scholar in Paris. In 1998, he was awarded a Doctorate in Philosophy at Paris VIII, completing his dissertation in political philosophy under the supervision of Professor Jacques Poulain. From 2000 to 2004, he taught in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Patras, and from March 2004 to the winter semester of 2018, he taught political philosophy in the Philosophy Department of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Ioannina as an assistant professor (2003) and as an associate professor (2009). In September 2017, he was elected associate professor in the Department of Political Science and History at Panteion University. His research and teaching work spans ancient Greek, modern, and contemporary political philosophy, as well as the theory of democracy. He was a member of the editorial board of the magazine O Politis. He is a member of the editorial board of the magazine Axiologika and the Board of Directors of the Saki Karagiorga Foundation. Since 2000, he has been a regular collaborator-columnist and book critic for the newspaper I Avgi. Other works by him: • Le conflit de la modernité: Formes et limites de la critique postmoderne de la raison, Septentrion Presses Universitaires, 2001. • Θεμελίωση και ανασκευή: Επιχείρημα, νοηματική ταυτότητα και φιλοσοφική αξιολογία, Βιβλιοπωλείον της «Εστίας», 2003. • Ηθική και πολιτική: Δικαιολόγηση των πεποιθήσεων και πολιτική φιλοσοφία, Πόλις, 2008. • Freedom and Sovereignty: Political Freedom and Sovereignty in the Third Book of Aristotle's Politics, Polis, 2016. • Politics in Plato's Statesman, MIET, 2016. on the cover: Nicolas-Henri Jeaurat de Bertry Allegory of Democracy with a Portrait of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1794)