General Will Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Although he was neither the first nor the last to use it, the concept of the general will is inextricably linked to the political thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). In a number of works, but especially his Social Contract (1762), Rousseau argues that a just political society is one in which the citizens promote and obey the general will. In developing this argument, Rousseau insists that the general will is not to be confused with “the will of all,” that it is always right, that it is to be found on the side of the majority when votes are counted, and that those who refuse to follow it must be “forced to be free.”

Such enigmatic and apparently outrageous claims have led to much controversy about the meaning and coherence of this concept in Rousseau’s thought. Unsympathetic critics have long dismissed what he says about the general will as either vacuous or incoherent nonsense; some have deemed it downright dangerous. In The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, for instance, Jacob Talmon (1960) charges Rousseau with “dangerous ambiguity” (p. 40), because the general will points toward both democracy, in its attention to the will of the people, and totalitarianism. The danger, Talmon says, is that Rousseau’s general will “gives those who claim to know and to represent the real and ultimate will of the nation . . . a blank cheque to act on behalf of the people, without reference to the people’s actual will” (p. 48; see also Lester Crocker’s 1968 Rousseau’s Social Contract: An Interpretive Essay).

Sympathetic interpretations of Rousseau’s thought tend to begin with a fundamental distinction he draws between man and citizen. That is, Rousseau holds that we may think of every member of the body politic in two ways: first, as a unique individual with a particular set of interests—a human, and second, as a public person who shares a common interest in the welfare of the body politic—a citizen. As a human, everyone has a private will that aims at his or her particular good or personal interests, but as a citizen, everyone has a general will that aims at the common good or public interest. The general will is different from the “will of all,” then, because the latter is the sum of private wills. If every voter decides whether to vote for or against a tax increase simply on the basis of personal costs and benefits, for example, the result of the vote will be the will of all. But if they all vote as citizens, in an effort to promote the common good, the result should be the general will.

Understood in this way, Rousseau’s other statements about the general will seem less enigmatic and outrageous, if not always clear and compelling. Thus it happens that the general will is always right, for the will of the citizen by definition aims to promote the common good. The general will is to be found in the vote of the majority, moreover, because the majority is more likely than those in the minority to be right about which policies really will serve the common good (on this point, see Brian Barry’s “The Public Interest,” 1964). Finally, individuals who break the law must be “forced to be free,” because their disobedience is the act of humans who act contrary to their will as citizens. People who know, as citizens, that paying taxes is necessary, yet nevertheless try to avoid paying their share, are refusing to obey the general will. Such a person, Rousseau says, hopes to “enjoy the rights of the citizen without wanting to fulfill the duties of a subject, an injustice whose spread would cause the ruin of the body politic” (see Rousseau, 1978, 55). Forcing such people to be free is thus a matter of being forced to obey the laws that they freely agree to as citizens.

Other philosophers who make significant use of the general will in their writings include Georg W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) and the British idealists T. H. Green (1836–1882) and Bernard Bosanquet (1848–1923), although all gave the concept a more metaphysical cast than Rousseau did.

Bibliography:

Barry, Brian. “The Public Interest.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 38 (1964): 9–14.
Crocker, Lester. Rousseau’s Social Contract: An Interpretive Essay. Cleveland, Ohio: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1968.
Dent, N. J. H. Rousseau: An Introduction to His Psychological, Social, and Political Theory. New York: Blackwell, 1988.
Masters, Roger. The Political Philosophy of Rousseau. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968.
Neidleman, Jason. The General Will is Citizenship: Inquiries into French Political Thought. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001.
Riley, Patrick. The General Will before Rousseau: The Transformation of the Divine into the Civic. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. On the Social Contract. Edited by R. Masters. Translated by J. Masters. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978. Originally published 1762.
Talmon, Jacob. The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy. New York: Praeger, 1960.
Trachtenberg, Zev. Making Citizens: Rousseau’s Political Theory of Culture. London: Routledge, 1993.

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