The Three General Wills in Rousseau

• In Event: Poster Session: Political Thought and Philosophy & International History and Politics
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Political Thought and Philosophy: Historical Approaches

Abstract

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s interpreters may disagree on its meaning, but nearly all have assumed that his texts share a conception of the general will. This paper finds that assumption to be a mistake. I argue that between 1755 and 1762 Rousseau gave the general will three distinct definitions, each conflicting with the others and together revealing a remarkable evolution to Rousseau’s thought. In Political Economy the general will is a transcendent standard of right, while in the Social Contract it is an aim toward a common good discerned through deliberation. In the former, deliberation is neither necessary nor sufficient for the general will to be expressed; in the latter it becomes both. Between these works—chronologically and conceptually—comes the suppressed “Geneva Manuscript” of the Social Contract that amalgamates both views in an unstable third, giving a Legislator complete epistemic authority over the polity. Though neglected in the literature on the general will, the Geneva Manuscript clarifies how Rousseau discovers moral freedom and the discernment it requires.

This genealogy of the general will improves our understanding of Rousseau’s works in two ways. First, my analysis shows how a long-standing interpretive impasse between formal and transcendent readings of the volonté générale rests on a confusion. Strictly formal accounts, such as those offered by Leo Strauss and Roger Masters, treat the general will as a set of procedural constraints with no substantive commitments; on Strauss’s reading “cannibalism is as just as its opposite." By contrast, Judith Shklar, Christopher Bertram, and David Lay Williams find in the general will a normative standard that transcends the assembly, such that a people’s will is general only when it embodies values such as justice. While both approaches are insightful, both overlook the role Rousseau gives to the will and understanding of citizens. I argue that in the Social Contract, Rousseau derives both formal constraints and substantive values from a single source: the citizen’s will toward the common good.

This reading also recovers the origins of Rousseau’s commitment to democratic sovereignty. All three texts exhibit a growing interest in what citizens know and how their knowledge makes them free, but only the Social Contract develops an account of what I will call “deliberative discernment,” the faculty of citizens to collectively discover the good they share. The work of discernment, carried out in carefully structured assemblies, is so vital that in its absence moral freedom becomes impossible. In this the Social Contract offers a new model of the democratic mind yet to be fully explored.

Author

• Jason Swadley Canon, Drury University