 On one prominent view, with both Kantian and Rousseauvian roots, freedom requires that we obey only those laws or rules that we could rationally give to ourselves. To be subject to the will of others, or to the arbitrary forces of nature, is to be unfree. We thus express our nature as rational and autonomous beings by acting in accordance with maxims that we could will to be universal laws, or we express our political autonomy by acting in accordance with those laws that appeal only to the common good, and thereby represent the general will of all citizens. Insofar as one holds this conception of autonomy to be of fundamental importance, autonomy might thus provide the basis for public reason. By ensuring that our moral or political principles are justifiable or reasonably acceptable to all those to whom the principles apply, public reason appears to ensure that each of us is, in some important sense, governed only by principles that we can rationally give to ourselves. Some leading philosophers of public reason appear to make this connection between public reason and autonomy. Gaus, for example, appeals to Rousseau’s statement that the fundamental problem to which the social contract is meant to be the solution is to find a way of imposing rules to regulate our common life “in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before” (Gaus 2011, 1. Also see Rawls 1996, 219; Neufeld 2022).