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2001

General Will Richard Dagger

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GENERAL WILL

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General will Barry, Brian, "The Public Interest" in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supplementary vol. 3 8 (1964): l-18

Bosanquet, Bernard, The Philosophical Theory of the State, 4th edition, London and New York: Macmillan, 19 51 (1st edition 1899) Dent, N.J.H., Rousseau: An Introduction to His Psychological, Social, and Political Theory, Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 1988 Held, Virginia, The Public Interest and Individual Interests, New York and London: Basic Books, 1970 Jones, W.T., "Rousseau's General Will and the Problem of Consent", Journal of the History of Philosophy, 25/r (1987): IO 5-30 Masters, Roger D., The Political Philosophy of Rousseau, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1968 Riley, Patrick, The General Will before Rousseau: The Transformation of the Divine into the Civic, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1986 Runciman, W.G. and A.K. Sen, "Games, Justice and the General Will", Mind, 74 (1965): 554-62 Shklar, Judith N., General Will entry in Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas, edited by Philip P. Wiener, New York: Scribner, 1973-74: vol. 2 Talmon, J.L., The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, London: Secker and Warburg, r 9 5 2; New York: Praeger, 1960 Trachtenberg, Zev M., Making Citizens: Rousseau's Political Theory of Culture, London and New York: Routledge, 1993

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Although he was hardly the first to employ it, the concept of the general will is inextricably linked to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In Du Contrat Social (The Social Contract, 1762) Rousseau draws a fundamental distinction between man and citizen. That is, we may think of every person as a unique individual with a particular set of interests and as a member of the public who shares a common interest in the welfare of the body politic. As a man, everyone has a private will that aims at his particular good or personal interests; as a citizen, everyone has a general will that aims at the common good or public interest. This general will, Rousseau insists, is different from "the will of all"; it is always right; it is to be found on the side of the majority when votes are cast (presuming that "the characteristics of the general will are still in the majority"); and those who refuse to follow it must be "forced to be free". Rousseau's enigmatic account of the general will has provoked a remarkable range of reactions. As SHKLAR's useful survey indicates, philosophers such as G.W.F. Hegel, T.H. Green, and Bernard Bosanquet followed Immanuel Kant in regarding the general will as a "higher will" that is somehow more real than the actual wills of individual men and women. On BOSANQUET's interpretation, the "indestructible impulse towards the Good, which is necessarily a common good, the substantial unity and filling of life by the interests through which man is human, is what Rousseau plainly has before him in his account of the General Will" (p.ro3). The general will is thus a "Real Will'', according to Bosanquet, and this Real Will is the foundation and justification of all "State" action. Such "metaphysical" readings of Rousseau, however, seem to have given many of Rousseau's 20th-century critics additional reason to dismiss the general will as either vacuous or incoherent nonsense. Other critics have deemed it downright dangerous. TALMON, writing shortly after World War II, combined both views when he charged Rousseau with "dangerous ambiguity" (p.40). The general will is ambiguous because it points toward both democracy, in its attention to the will of the people, and totalitarianism, for it "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). Rousseau's ambiguity thus contributes to the danger of "totalitarian democracy". More sympathetic readings have predominated in recent years as scholars have looked for ways to make sense of Rousseau's discussion of the general will. One way to do this is to try to recapture Rousseau's intentions by examining his use of the term in light of its use by his predecessors and contemporaries. Thus MASTERS (pp.323-34) and Shklar explain what the term meant for such thinkers as Montesquieu, Diderot, and Pufendorf in order to establish the problems Rousseau was addressing and to highlight the distinctiveness of his conception of the general will. RILEY takes this approach further and deeper by tracing the concept to a theological debate in the 17th century that centred on the question, does God "have a general will that produces universal salvation? And if he does not, why does he will particularly that some men not be saved?" (pp.4-5). By way of Pascal, Malebranche, and others, these questions entered social and political thought in the form of an opposition between the general, or the impartial, and the particular, or the selfish.

Understanding how this oppos1t1on developed and how it informed Rousseau's thinking thus enables us to see how Rousseau could be both an advocate of the general will and a champion of individuality: "Generality rules out particularism, not individualism; in Rousseau, an individual can and should have a general will" (p.249). Other scholars have turned to philosophical analysis rather than history to make sense of the general will. The two approaches are not mutually exclusive, as Masters demonstrates, but the commentators who take the analytical path typically prefer a close scrutiny of Rousseau's texts to the investigation of the context in which he wrote. For these commentators, the task is to show how those aspects of the general will that seem paradoxical, contradictory, or nonsensical are really insightful and coherent, if not necessarily complete or persuasive. DENT, for instance, provides an analysis of Rousseau's claim that the general will "must 'both come from all and apply to all"' (p.175) that meticulously sets out the relationship between individual volition and the public interest in Rousseau's compressed argument. This philosophical analysis of the general will often has proceeded by way of concepts drawn from economics and game theory. Thus BARRY draws on Condorcet's jury theorem to defend Rousseau's insistence that majority-rule voting is, in the right circumstances, the best way to declare or express the general will. In similar fashion RUNCIMAN & SEN explain the general will in terms of game theory's "prisoners' dilemma", in which individuals would do better, individually as well as collectively, to pursue their common interest than their self-interests. The Pareto principle, which holds that a policy is in the common interest if it makes some member of a group better off without worsening the condition of any other member, provides the basis for a rival explanation in HELD. JONES also believes that Rousseau's general will is similar to the Pareto principle, but he argues, with particular reference to Runciman & Sen, that "such readings of The Social Contract go astray if they also read Rousseau as a rationalchoice theonst" (p.rr8). His essay includes a brief response to "metaphysical" or "Hegelian" readings of Rousseau and a helpful explication of the five procedures Rousseau relies on "to permit the general will of the assembly to emerge" (pp.rro-12). Despite their differences, commentators sympathetic to Rousseau typically agree that the general will is not simply the sum of individual wills. If it were, why would Rousseau distinguish "citizen" from "man" and "the general will" from "the will of all"? According to TRACHTENBERG, however, the general will ts the aggregation of individual wills: "the 'ingredients' of the general will ... are the individual members of society's conceptions of their own welfare" (p.9). His defence of this claim may not be persuasive, but it is subtle, sophisticated, and an original contribution to the continuing effort to make sense of the general will. RICHARD DAGGER