A different kind of freedom?

The western liberal tradition has been that individual liberty is fundamentally the ability to "do your own thing" with minimal interference from the state. It is sometimes mocked as being no more than a "Liberty pile": a list of things that you are, or are not, permitted to do; the latter hopefully being very short. But a wholly different concept of liberty does exist. It is found in the prayer of St. Ignatius Loyola,in the phrase, "Christ,whose service is perfect freedom". A similar concept is advanced by Rousseau in his "Social Contract", with his argument that "true freedom" is to be found in following the "General Will".
   The doctrine of the General Will is best understood in the following analogy. Suppose the members of a sports team (football, cricket, rugby or whatever) are asked what they would hope for at the next match. Every team member would reply, "I'd want the team to win, and I'd like me to have a brilliant game". In Rousseauist terminology, the desire for victory for the team is the "General Will". All team members should subordinate their individual desires for personal glory to the cause of team victory; and, indeed, individuals who are deemed to be playing solely for their personal glory are not respected by their fellow team members. Rousseau, however, confuses the picture by calling this overaching commitment to the team as "freedom", and saying that those who refuse to give it must be excluded: these people are not being "free", but merely perverse. As with Loyola, freedom is not to be found in "doing your own thing", but in total commitment to a greater cause.
   This is all very well for a small, voluntary organisation like a football team, or a religious faith, (or, for that matter, a company), but is it at all applicable to a much larger and essentially non-voluntary body, such as a state? Rousseau acknowledges that it can really only apply to very small communities, but Hegel, in the early 19th century, believed it held good for the State of his day, within which all the citizens would gain true freedom in return for absolute commitment. Hegel's dictum on this has been translated as, "The state is the march of God through the world". Bertrand Russell mocked this as "freedom to obey the policeman".
   Karl Marx was much influenced by Hegel in his early days. He always maintained that, because of the inevitability of class conflict and exploitation, "bourgeois liberty" was a fraud, because most people could not afford to make meaningful life-choices. After the establishment of Communist society, however, there would no longer be any conflict between individual desires and the good of society as a whole. But obviously, this Utopian society was never actually brought into existence. What Marxist governments maintained, however, was that they were well on the way to achieving Communism, and that therefore all citizens had a duty to submerge their individual desires in this movement, because it represented not the "march of God", but the march of historical inevitability. Those who resisted this were exhibiting not personal freedom, but "petty-bourgeois individuality", or some such condemnatory term, or were even perhaps active saboteurs.
    It cannot be denied that many people experience a sense of fulfilment in immersing themselves in some greater cause; but on the whole, "doing your own thing"; making your own lifestyle choices, seems preferable to compulsion.