A few words may be said upon Rousseau’s relation to Hobbes [1] and Locke, simply to {104} illustrate the process by which deepening political experience awakened the ancient meaning within abstractions which had preserved it in a latent form.
[1] See also p. 93 above.
Both Hobbes and Locke use expressions, in treating of the government and unity of a commonwealth, which closely resemble Rousseau’s phrases respecting the General Will, the moral person, and the real unity.
Hobbes, for example, insisted that sovereignty must lie in a will, and that this will must be real and must be taken as representing or standing for the will of the community. “This is more than consent or concord; it is a real unity of them all in one and the same person.” [1] Only, interpreting “real” as implying inherence in tangible determinate individuals, he in fact substituted the will (taking the word in its ordinary sense) of a certain individual or certain individuals for the will of the community or moral person as such. His temperament was emphatically one of those described by Rousseau as treating the “moral person” as a fiction. But so far from abandoning for that reason all idea of actual effective unity, he replaces the fictitious or abstract unity of the “person” by the “real unity” of an actual human being or a determinate group of human beings, to be taken as the unity of the Commonwealth as such. Thus, for instance, with a logic which is irresistible on the basis which he adopts, he denies all possibility of other representation of the people where there is already a sovereign power. For the one and only representative of the people is for him the {105} sovereign, on whom the “person” of the community is, by the very fact of his sovereignty, assumed to be conferred. We may say then, in short, that Hobbes places the unity of political society in a will, and that, in his sense, a real or actual will, but emphatically not in a general will. He inherits the language which enables him to predicate unity and personality of the state, but in his mouth the terms have not recovered a true political meaning, and the social right, which they are intended to account for, remains a mere name.
[1] Leviathan, pt. II., ch. xvii. Italics mine.
Locke brings to bear a truer political experience, but a far less coherent logic. He feels that actual government is a trust, and that the ultimate supreme power remains in the community as a whole. The difficulty in his case is to understand how the will or interest of the community as such obtains determinate expression. Generally, and apart from particular causes of dissent, it is to be taken as one with the will of the governing body to which, according to the constitution, the work of government is given in trust. But the trust is conditional, and theoretically revocable; the ultimate supreme power is in the community at large, which may withdraw the trust if its conditions are violated. Of course, no determinate means of doing this in a lawful manner is, or can be, suggested, [1] and therefore the will of the people is not expressed by Locke as a real or actual will. And so the right, which was to be displayed as social, remains {106} a latent right in individuals to assent or to dissent, and society is not represented as a genuine unity.
[1] The referendum is not really such a means. It can only work within a well organised constitution, and could not be used to re-make the whole constitution—the forms and conditions of sovereignty—at a blow.
For Hobbes, then, we might venture to say, political unity lies in a will which is actual, but not general; while for Locke it lies in a will which is general, but not actual. If the two are pressed to extremes, the former theory annihilates “self,” and the latter annihilates “government.” For the former there is no true right, because the will of the state is related as mere force to the actual individual will; for the latter there is no true right, because the individual’s will remains a mere natural claim, which is never thoroughly transformed by social recognition and adjustment.
But if it were possible to inspire a logic as coherent as that of Hobbes, with a political content as large as that which animates Locke, a new ground would be won. And this is what Rousseau has attempted in his conception of a will at once actual and general; on the one hand, an absolute and determinate adjustment and recognition of rights; on the other hand, embodying in its recognitions all individual claims which represent a true individuality. Here, if such a theory were workable, we should have a genuine account of self-government, political obligation, and social right. It may be admitted that the theory is not workable in the form which Rousseau gave it. As Bentham contemptuously said, his doctrine would make all laws invalid, excepting, perhaps, those of the Republic of San Marino. But we shall see that these difficulties arise just where Rousseau failed to be true to his own best insight; and we shall find indications in his writings which suggest a different conclusion.
{107} 2. What Rousseau means to indicate by his expression, “the General Will,” may seem to many persons, as he clearly saw, to have no actual existence. It is of the nature of a principle operating among and underneath a great variety of confusing and disguising factors, and can only be defined by the help of an “as such” or “in so far as.” It is, we might say, the will of the whole society “as such” or the wills of all individuals “in so far as” they aim at the common good. It is expressed in law, “in so far as” law is what it ought to be; and sovereignty, “as such,” i.e. when truly itself because rightly acting for the common interest, is the exercise of the General Will. In its idea, as the key to the whole problem of self-government and freedom under law, it is that identity between my particular will and the wills of all my associates in the body politic which makes it possible to say that in all social co-operation, and in submitting even to forcible constraint, when imposed by society in the true common interest, I am obeying only myself, and am actually attaining my freedom. It embodies indeed the same factors as the conception of self-government, but in a shape which is a stage nearer to reconciliation. It postulates a will which in some sense transcends the individual whose will it is, and is directed upon an object of wider concern. And in one way or other, we know that this may be, and indeed always is the case, for our will is always directed to something which we are not.