We may, perhaps, approach Rousseau’s thought more successfully by starting from the idea of what is implied in the nature of will, as a characteristic {108} of an intelligent being. We may then find ground for conceiving that my will or yours, as we exercise it in the trivial routine of daily life, does not fulfil all that it implies or suggests. It is narrow, arbitrary, self-contradictory. It implies a “true” or “real” or “rational” will, which would be completely, or more completely, what ours attempts to be, and fails. Thus, it has been said that what Rousseau really aimed at, with his conception of the General Will, was the will “in itself,” or the will as it would be if it carried out what its nature implies and demands.
We can see that some notion of this kind floats before Rousseau’s mind from the predicates which he assigns to Sovereignty and the General Will, which are for him nearly convertible terms.
Sovereignty, for example, is inalienable and indivisible; [1] that is to say, it is a simple consequence of the nature of a body politic, “that by which a people is a people.” You can no more alienate or break it into parts than you can alienate or break into parts the use of your own judgment. To be capable of sovereignty means to be a people “as such” or “as a whole,” that is a living and choosing people. The people may of course give general orders to subordinates to hold good till revoked, as I may give a power of attorney for more or less specified purposes to another man. But that is the delegation “of power, not of will.”
[1] Bk. II., chs. i. and ii. Here Rousseau is following Hobbes very closely.
We see the author’s intention still more clearly when he maintains that the General Will is always {109} right, [1] and is indestructible. [2] Though it is always right, as Will, yet the people may be misled in their knowledge and judgment of details; though it is indestructible in the human breast, yet a man may vote at the polling booth on another issue than that which he would have before him if he consulted the General Will. He may answer by his vote not the question, “Is this for the public good?” but the question, “Is this for my private good?” If so, he does not indeed extinguish the General Will in himself, but he evades it. Or, as we might say, the man does not altogether cease, however ignorant or interested, to possess a man’s leaning towards making the real best of himself, though his private interest may at times so master his mind as to throw the higher or common good into the second place. Thus, the relation of the general will to a community is plainly apprehended by Rousseau much in the spirit of the doctrine that man always aims at something which he takes to be good. And so the General Will is as much implied in the life of a society as some sort of will for good in the life of an individual. The two, in fact, are not merely analogous but to a great extent identical. The General Will seems to be, in the last resort, the ineradicable impulse of an intelligent being to a good extending beyond itself, in as far as that good takes the form of a common good. Though this impulse may be mastered or cheated in a degree, yet, if it were extinct, human life would have ceased.
[1] Bk. II., ch. iii.
[2] Bk. iv., ch. i.
We need not enter at length upon the question whether the good which extends beyond oneself {110} is adequately described as the good which is general or common to oneself and others. It is plain that the unity of myself with others in a common good is the same in principle as the unity of myself with myself which I aim at in aiming at my own good. Thought and language, we should bear in mind, unite me to myself just as they unite me to others, and they expand my being by binding my own life into a whole no less than by making intercourse possible between my fellow men and myself. Just so, the good at which I aim extends beyond my trivial or momentary self—that is to say, is universal as against myself as particular—in ways which are not prima facie exhausted by saying that they include the good of others. But again, just like thought and language, the good which enables me to enter deeper into communion with myself or with the world must always have an aspect of extending that communion to others; and therefore, for the purposes of social philosophy, we may treat the universal good or self as also in its nature a general or common good or self. It is that at least, though it may be more, in accordance with the logical relation between the rational universal, and the numerical generality.
This 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. But it has rightly been observed [1] that he did not really distinguish this conception, analogous as it is to what Plato or Aristotle might have said {111} of the “divine reason which is the source of the laws and discipline of the ideal polity,” from the legal idea of the sovereign “in the sense of some power of which it could reasonably be asked how it was established in the part where it resides, when and by whom and in what way it is exercised.” We will point out, however, the negative and positive indications which he furnishes as to where it is not and where it is to be looked for. That he fails to emancipate himself from the fallacies which he acutely indicates is a phenomenon for which the reader is, I trust, sufficiently prepared.
[1] Green, Principles of Political Obligation, p. 82.