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Rousseau's Legacy in Two Conceptions of the General Will: Democratic and Transcendent

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 July 2012

Christopher Bertram
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Abstract

This paper explores the contrast between two conceptions of the general will to be found in Rousseau's work, especially in the Social Contract. The first of these identifies the general will with the decisions of the sovereign people as they legislate together; the second conceives of the general will as a transcendent fact about the society which may or may not be reflected in actual legislative decisions. Though these conceptions may be capable of reconciliation in Rousseau's own work, the tension remains and is reflected both in Rousseau's own ambivalence towards democracy and in the different ways his thought has been received and adapted in philosophy and politics.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 74 , Issue 3 , Summer 2012 , pp. 403 - 419
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2012

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References

1 Hobbes's authorization argument is found in chapter 18 of Leviathan.

2 See SC I.5, “Of Slavery.”

3 Quotations from the Social Contract are from Gourevitch, Victor, ed., Rousseau: The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

4 For a very clear account of the role of self-interest in guiding the general will, see Sreenivasan, Gopal, “What Is the General Will?,” Philosophical Review 109, no. 4 (2000): 545–81Google Scholar.

5 SC II.3.

6 SC III.15.

7 Although Rousseau has some remarks on the proper definition of freedom in the Social Contract, most notably in I.8, arguably his clearest statement of freedom as nondomination is found in the Eighth of the Letters from the Mountains where he writes, “Liberty consists less in doing your own will than in not being subject to the will of another; it consists further in not subjecting another's will to your own” (The Indispensable Rousseau, ed. Mason, John Hope [London: Quartet Books, 1979], 246)Google Scholar. The usual translation of the Letters has their place of composition as singular, following the French montagne. But it is clear that they refer to a general area, to be contrasted with the country (campagne), so I have preferred the plural.

8 Some commentators who have favored such an “epistemic” understanding of democratic choice in Rousseau have interpreted the final two paragraphs of SC II.3 as an anticipation of Condorcet's jury theorem. For reasons I explore in Bertram, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Rousseau and “The Social Contract” (London: Routledge, 2004), 109–10Google Scholar, the connection seems a tenuous one.

9 The classic exploration of the difficulties of willing a substantive policy and a democratic decision that conflicts with it is Wollheim, Richard, “A Paradox in the Theory of Democracy,”in Philosophy, Politics and Society, Second Series, ed. Laslett, Peter and Runciman, W. G. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), 71–87Google Scholar.

10 SC II.4.

11 SC II.10.

12 Book 3 of the Social Contract contains most of his discussion of government.

13 SC IV.1.

14 SC III.15.

15 SC IV.1.

16 The classic text denying a relationship between the historical Genevan institutions and Rousseau's doctrines is Spink, John Stephenson, Rousseau et Genève (Paris: Bovin, 1934)Google Scholar. The modern work that most trenchantly argues for a connection (and one that undermines Rousseau's democratic credentials) is Fralin, Richard, Rousseau and Representation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978)Google Scholar.

17 Among the advocates of the “covert critique” theory is Bachofen, Blaise, La condition de la liberté: Rousseau, critique des raisons politiques (Paris: Payot, 2002), 240–48Google Scholar.

18 The pioneering text, at least in English, reading Rousseau in this way is Dent, N. J. H., Rousseau (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988)Google Scholar; Neuhouser, Frederick, Rousseau's Theodicy of Self-Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar deepens this reading, while adding some pessimism to the idea that Rousseau's solutions would actually satisfy the demands of amour-propre.

19 Such is, of course, the theme of Rousseau's first two Discourses.

20 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, The Confessions and Correspondence, Including the Letters to Malesherbes, trans. Kelly, Christopher (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1995), 181Google Scholar.

21 Most famously, of course, in Talmon's, JacobThe Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Secker and Warburg, 1952)Google Scholar.

22 Kant, Immanuel, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals 4:434, in Practical Philosophy, ed. Gregor, Mary J. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 83–84Google Scholar.

23 See Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals 6:256–58, in Practical Philosophy, 409–11. My understanding of Kant's invocation of an omnilateral will with respect to property has been shaped by Ripstein, Arthur, Force and Freedom: Kant's Legal and Political Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), esp. chap. 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace 8:350, in Practical Philosophy, 322–23.

25 Hegel, G. W. F., Hegel's Logic, trans. Wallace, William, 3rd. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 228 (§163)Google Scholar.

26 Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), chap. 3Google Scholar.

27 Habermas, Jürgen, “Reconciliation through the Public Use of Reason,” Journal of Philosophy 92, no. 3 (1995): 128.Google Scholar