Rousseau's General Will: Freedom of a Particular Kind
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.1991.tb00581.x |
| Author | Patrick Riley |
| Date | 01 March 1991 |
| Published date | 01 March 1991 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Political Studies
(1991),
XXXIX,
55-74
Rousseau’s
General
Will:
Freedom
of
a
Particular
Kind
PATRICK
RILEY
University
of
Wisconsin
(Madison)
In Memoriam Michael Oakeshott
190
1-1
990
Had Rousseau not been centrally concerned with freedom, some of the structural
features of his political thought would be unaccountable. Above all, the notion of
general will would not have become the core of his political philosophy. Rousseau’s
reasons for using ‘general will’ as his central political concept were essentially
philosophical. The two terms of general will
-
‘will’ and ‘generality’
-
represent two
main strands in his thought. ‘Generality’ stands for the rule of law, for civic education
that draws
us
out of ourselves and towards the general (or common) good. ‘Will’
stands for Rousseau’s conviction that civil association is ‘the most voluntary act in the
world’, that ‘to deprive your will of all freedom is to deprive your actions of all
morality’. And
if
one could ‘generalize’ the will,
so
that it ‘elects’ only law, citizenship,
and the common good, and avoids ‘willful’ self-love, then one would have a general
will in Rousseau’s particular sense. The distinctiveness of Rousseau’s general will is
further brought out through a comparison with Kant’s ‘good will’ about which
Rousseau would have felt severe doubts.
Had Rousseau not been centrally concerned with freedom
-
above all with the
voluntariness
of
morally legitimate human actions
-
some
of
the structural
features of his political thought would be (literally) unaccountable. Above all, the
notion of
general will
would not have become the core idea of his political
philosophy. He would just have spoken,
u
la
Plato, of achieving perfect
gtntralitt
through civic education, as in
Republic
(‘do we know of any greater evil for a state
than the thing that distracts it and makes it many instead
of
one, or a greater good
than that which binds it together and makes it one?)’ or would have settled for
Montesquieu’s republican
esprit gPntral.2
He would never have spoken of
generalizing the
will
as something central but as difficult as squaring the circle
-
difficult because one must ‘denature’ particularistic beings without destroying
their (ultimate) autonomy. But one must for Rousseau have
volontt ginhale,
not
a mere
esprit gtntral:
for ‘to deprive your will of all freedom is to deprive your
’
Plato,
Republic,
462a+. Cf. the astonishingly ‘parallel’ passage in
1
Corinthians,
xii
-
which
makes one wonder how completely St Paul was rejecting ‘the wisdom of the Greeks’.
Charles Louis de Montesquieu,
Mes Pensees,
in
Oeuvres
Compktes
(Paris, Pleiade, 1949), pp.
1134,
1144:
‘It is essential in republics that there be an
esprit general
which dominates. In proportion
as luxury is established, the spirit ofparticularism is established as well’. Here one has
gkneraliti-
but
not yet
volontk.
0032-3217/91/0l/0055-20/$03.00
0
1991
Political Studies
56
Rousseau’s
General
Will
actions of all morality’, and ‘civil association is the most voluntary act in the
~orld’.~ That voluntarist side of Rousseau is brought out best by Judith Shklar,
who has argued persuasively that the notion of general will ‘conveys everything
he most wanted to say’ precisely because it
is
‘a transposition
of
the most essential
individual moral faculty [volition] to the realm
of
public e~perience’.~ (By
contrast Bronislaw Baczko over-stresses
giniralite
at tht expense of
volontk:
‘the
masterpiece in politics [on the part of Moses
or
Numa
or
Lycurgus] is to succeed
in attaching the citizen to his city by indissoluble ties,
so
that the love of country
shapes his whole e~istence’.~ In Rousseau one needs not just
love,
but
will;
it is not
just a matter of quasi-Platonic exotic ascent, in the manner of
Phaedrus.6)
Moreover, were not generalized will
-
a will of very particular kind
-
essential
in Rousseau, the Great Legislator would not have to achieve his civic results by
such tortured means, such as ‘compelling without violence’ and ‘persuading
without convincing’.’ Plato did not worry about this kind of difficulty because the
philosopher-king simply knew the eternal verities such as ‘absolute goodness’
(Phaedo
75d) which even the gods know and love
(Euthyphro
1Od-e) and
therefore deserved to educate
and
ru!e
(Republic
IV). For Rousseau what is
needed for perfect politics is ‘a
union
of will and understanding’,’
so
that the
Great Legislator’s civic knowledge is finally, at the end
of
civic time, absorbed
into an (originally ignorant) popular general will which is ultimately as
‘enlightened’ as
it
was always ‘right.’ (If Aristotle’s critique of
Protagoras
is
correct, Plato lacked any adequate notion of ~olition;~ but one can only
generalize a ‘will’ that actually exists.)
Here the history of ‘the general will’ before Rousseau is illuminating. In
Rousseau, the general will is not-natural. It is artificially produced (over time)
through the ‘denaturing’, counter-egoistic educative ministrations of Lycurgus
or Moses, although at the end of education informed, independent choice must
finally be possible (as Emile ultimately says, ‘I have decided to be what you made
me’).’’ But in the seventeenth century inventors of
volonti ginirafe
-
Arnauld,
Pascal, Malebranche, Fknelon, Bayle, Leibniz
-
the general will of God (to ‘save
all men’ after the Fall)” is
naturally
general.
How
could one ‘denature’ or
transform the will of a perfect being, make him ‘become’ over time what he
‘naturally’ was not? [For Malebranche,
for
example, the ‘generality’, uniformity
and simplicity of God’s (Cartesian) operation expresses his perfection. ‘God acts
by
volontis ginerales
. . .
in order to construct
or
to preserve his work by the
simplest means, by an action that is always uniform, constant, perfectly worthy
of an infinite wisdom and of a universal cause
. . .
to
act by
volontis particuli2res
’
Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
Du
contrat .social,
in
Political Writings,
edited by C. Vaughan (Oxford,
‘
Judith
N.
Shklar,
Men and Citizens.
a
Study
of
Rousseau’s Social Theory
(Cambridge,
’
Bronislaw Baczko, ‘Moise, legislateur
.
,
.’,in C. Hunter et al.,
ReappraisalsofRousseau; Studies
’
Cf. Plato,
Phaedrus,
252b
ff.
’
Rousseau,
Du
contrat social,
11,
I.
Rousseau,
Du
contrat social,
11,
6.
A.
W.
Adkins,
Merit and Responsibility
(Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1960).
Basil Blackwell, 19621, Vol.
11,
pp.
105,
28.
Cambridge Univerity Press, 1969),
p.
184.
in Honour
of
R.
A.
Leigh
(Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1980),
p.
126.
ID
Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
Emile,
translated by
B.
Foxley (London, Dent, 1910),
p.
435.
”
Patrick Riley,
The General Will before Rousseau
(Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1986),
pp.
4
ff.
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