Rousseau's General Will

Abstract

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, á la Plato, of achieving perfect généralité through civic education, as in Republic 462b (“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 général; 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. However, one must (for Rousseau) have volonté générale, not a mere esprit général: for “to deprive your will of all freedom is to deprive your actions of all morality,” and “civil association is the most voluntary act in the world.”

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