Thanks for responding @trostparadox :-)

"...your right to willingly and voluntarily form and participate in a “free” society of your own making..."

Here lies, I think, the heart of the misunderstanding between the two of us. There's no "my" right or "your" right. There's no "my" society or "your" society. There's only "our" society in which you and I need to find a mode of co-existing that caters to the maximum amount of freedom for the both of us. To make that work, concessions have to be made by both of us, and in those concessions are the necessary restrictions to both our liberties. So, there's no absolutely free society. Hermits are free, individuals who participate in society are not. They can't be and they know it. Rousseau made a distinction between "natural liberty" and "civil liberty," with the latter being the organized and structured collection of individuals in "civil society." The notion that each individual is "free to opt in or opt out of any social contract you care to enter into, with anyone you care to associate with," is as flawed as the notion that if you don't like your job you're free to look for another job, or if you don't like it here you can move to another country. Those answers are too easy, and the problems addressed by the questions are too complex to be properly addressed by such simple answers. Having said all this, there are certainly many criticisms to be made against Rousseau's idealism of civil society; even in his own time he had to flee and had trouble finding a place to live elsewhere in Europe. The "general will" of the people can be and often is akin to a "dictatorship of the majority." Rousseau even went so far as to say that individuals would be "forced to be free" in his ideal civil society. Search Google on that phrase and you'll find tons of descriptions, rebuttals and debunkings of his forced freedom. Personally I think he had the right idea, looked in the right direction because we want to be united in a functioning and relatively free society, just not under a traditional ruler, and the best replacement for that traditional ruler is self-governance by the people through society's general will.