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A Possible Explanation of Rousseau's General Will1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Patrick Riley
Patrick Riley*
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Extract

A “general will” is a philosophical and psychological contradiction in terms; will is a conception understandable, if at all, only in terms of individual actions. The problem cannot be glossed over by attempting to reduce the general will—as did T. H. Green—to a “common ego,” or to an analogical forerunner of Kant's pure practical reason. Why, then, did Rousseau make so unviable an idea the center of his political theory, and why has that idea continued to receive serious attention?

The general will has continued to be taken seriously because it is an attempted (though not explicit) amalgam of two extremely important traditions of political thought, which may be called, roughly, ancient “cohesiveness” and modern “voluntarism.” Political thought since the 17th century has been characterized, among other things, by voluntarism, by an emphasis on the assent of individuals as the standard of political legitimacy. One certainly finds this in many of the most important thinkers between Hobbes and Kant; and even Hegel, while scarcely an “atomistic individualist” or a contractarian, explicitly argued that while “in the states of antiquity the subjective end simply coincided with the state's will,” in modern times “we make claims for private judgment, private willing, and private conscience.” When a political decision is to be made, Hegel continued, “an ‘I will’ must be pronounced by man himself.” This “I will,” he thought, must have an “appropriate objective existence” in the person of a monarch; “in a well-organized monarchy, the objective aspect belongs to law alone, and the monarch's part is merely to set to the law the subjective ‘I will’.” If even Hegel allows this voluntarist turn in his own non-contractarian theory, it goes without saying that all of social contract theory can be seen as the supreme example of voluntaristic ideas.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 64 , Issue 1 , March 1970 , pp. 86 - 97
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1970

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Footnotes

1

This title was adopted not out of modesty, but simply because this article makes certain assumptions which are not universally agreed on. Most importantly, it holds that Rousseau understood “will” not only as a psychological attribute but also as a moral faculty; that there is an implicit metaphysical dimension in Rousseau without which a concept such as “willing” would be incomplete. By treating the concept of volition in psychological rather than in metaphysical terms, however, Mrs. J. N. Shklar, in her persuasive Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau's Social Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1969) is able to make the general will both internally consistent and closely related to Rousseau's individual psychology. That is, by treating individual will as a defense-mechanism, and the general will as a collective defense-mechanism (used largely as a weapon against inequality, whose effects for Shklar are mainly psychologically destructive), she is able to make the general will conceptually plausible. This reading, however, seems to involve a weakening of those (admittedly few) passages in which Rousseau speaks, in a traditional way, of volition as a moral faculty whose endorsement is the source of all moral legitimacy, e.g., “to deprive your will of all freedom is to deprive your actions of all morality” ( Contrat Social, chapter IV). This idea is clearly the foundation of Rousseau's attack on paternalism and on the equation of right and force. It is certainly possible to conceive the “general will one has as a citizen” in a psychological and metaphorical sense, if one imagines this “generality” in terms of factors wholly congruent with psychology: education, public spectacles and games, the authority of the legislator. But this can never show how a will in anything but a psychological sense can be general, simply because the education and authority congruent with psychology are not congruent with a concept of free will and of moral choice. A psychological treatment of volition does in fact hold out the best prospect of a consistent treatment of Rousseau; but it also involves a weakening of the voluntarist and contractarian elements of his philosophy.

References

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41 Ibid. (CS).

42 Ibid.

43 Since, for Rousseau, the pre-social man is a “stupid and limited animal,” and becomes a moral and intelligent being only in society, there is a sense in which man's highest nature (rather than original nature) is social. Cf. Rousseau, J.-J., Lêttre à M. Philopolis, in Political Writings, edited by Vaughan, , vol. I, p. 223Google Scholar.

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45 Ibid.

46 Ibid., p. 42.

47 Ibid., p. 113.

48 Ibid., pp. 26, 29–30, 38–40.

49 Ibid., p. 32.

50 Ibid., p. 40.

51 Ibid., p. 25.

52 Ibid., p. 38.

53 Ibid., p. 40.

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71 Ibid., p. 57.

72 Ibid., pp. 17–18.

73 Ibid., p. 57.

74 Ibid., pp. 152–155.

75 Ibid., p. 15.

76 Ibid., p. 18.

77 Ibid., p. 33.

78 Ibid., p. 31.

79 Ibid., pp. 117–118.

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