V. Conclusion: Why Liberal Freedom Was Impossible from the Start
Across the preceding sections, a consistent pattern has emerged: the Founding Fathers and the Enlightenment philosophers who shaped them constructed a political vision founded on incompatible concepts. Their theories proclaimed universal liberty, equality, and self-governance, yet they simultaneously relied on structures—centralized authority, coercive law, hierarchical property relations, and institutionalized obedience—that inevitably undermine those ideals. These contradictions were not accidents of history, nor products of personal prejudice, nor failures of implementation. They were inherent in the theoretical foundation itself.
The heart of the instability lies in a profound conceptual omission: the absence of a theory of power dynamics. Because Enlightenment thinkers never confronted how power operates within social, economic, and political relationships, they mistaken compliance for consent, inequality for legitimacy, and obedience for freedom. They imagined that political authority could be justified through contracts, without noticing that contracts forged under unequal power are coercive by definition. They believed that laws could secure liberty, without recognizing that law is itself a mechanism of domination. They defended property as a natural right, without acknowledging that property relations produce structural inequality. They defined freedom abstractly, while ignoring the material constraints that shape human will. And they imagined equality in the realm of rights, while accepting hierarchy in the realm of institutions.
The Founding Fathers inherited these contradictions and transformed them into political architecture. Through representation that dilutes participation, through checks and balances that redistribute rather than neutralize power, through constitutional structures that elevate stability over autonomy, they reproduced the theoretical instabilities of their philosophical predecessors. Even in a hypothetical society free of racial hierarchy, gender inequality, or class stratification, the Founders’ political design would still fail to produce universal freedom because it treats power as a neutral tool rather than a structural force. Without a conception of power dynamics, their system inevitably naturalizes domination and mislabels it as voluntary governance.
Thus the central conclusion of this essay is not merely that Enlightenment liberalism and the American founding were flawed, but that their vision of a free society was theoretically impossible from the outset. The contradictions between autonomy and authority, consent and coercion, equality and hierarchy, liberty and law, cannot be resolved within the framework they created. They arise from a political theory that celebrates freedom while denying the power structures that make unfreedom unavoidable.
To recognize this is not to dismiss the moral aspirations contained in the liberal ideal, nor to deny the historical significance of the institutions it produced. Rather, it is to confront the intellectual limits of a tradition that attempted to build universal liberty without understanding the forces that shape human behavior and constrain human choice. It is to acknowledge that the failures of liberal democracy—its persistent inequalities, its structural injustices, its contradictions between rhetoric and reality—are not deviations from its principles but expressions of the tensions embedded within them.
Understanding this opens the door to a deeper and more honest political analysis. It requires moving beyond the Enlightenment framework to develop theories of freedom rooted not in abstract contracts or institutional arrangements, but in the concrete dynamics of power—material, social, political, and psychological. Only by doing so can we begin to imagine forms of social organization capable of producing the genuine freedom that the Enlightenment and the Founders proclaimed but could not deliver.
If you’d like, I can now:
Compile the entire essay into one continuous, clean document,
Add an abstract or introduction,
Create footnotes or scholarly citations,
Expand or refine any section,
Or transform this into a publishable academic-style paper.