The Philosophical Theory of the State

by Bernard Bosanquet

Now all this makes it clear that in endeavouring to point out the signs of the General Will, Rousseau is really enthroning the Will of All. He aims at eliciting a direct opinion, uncontaminated by external influence or interest, from each and every member of the citizen body. In this aim, what is present to his mind is of course the popular idea of the ancient City-State. But the actual working even of Athenian or of Roman institutions was far more subtle and complex than this. And more especially, the very core of the common good represented by the life of a modern Nation-State is its profound and complex organisation, which makes it greater than the conscious momentary will of any individual. By reducing the machinery for the expression of the common good to the isolated and unassisted judgment of the members of the whole body of citizens, Rousseau is ensuring the {117} exact reverse of what he professes to aim at. He is appealing from the organised life, institutions, and selected capacity of a nation to that nation regarded as an aggregate of isolated individuals. And, therefore, he is enthroning as sovereign, not the national mind, but that aggregate of private interests and ideas which he has himself described as the Will of All. He is so far aware of this that, as we have seen, he refuses to contemplate a great modern nation as a political whole, because he fails to conceive how, for such a community, the General Will can satisfactorily find expression. But in as far as he commits himself to the view that the sovereign, constituted as he would have it, “necessarily is what it ought to be,” or “is incapable of injustice to any of its members,” so far he has forgotten the dangers of the Will of All, and has affirmed the absolute supremacy of the popular will in the very sense against which his conception of the Will of All is a protest. The notion of primary assemblies and of direct participation in citizen life has no doubt a real lesson for the political theorist; but it does not point to reducing the whole political system of a great state to a model which never, perhaps, thoroughly fulfilled its idea except under very special conditions.

4. The other and more fruitful direction of Rousseau’s speculations upon the General Will is to be found in his remarks on the function of the Legislator. We will approach them by help of a short restatement of the problem as it now stands.

It was observed above that what Rousseau had before him in his notion of the General Will might {118} be described as the “Will in itself,” or the Real Will. Any such conception involves a contrast between the Real Will and the Actual Will, which may seem to be meaningless. How can there be a Will which is no one’s Will? and how can anything be my Will which I am not fully aware of, or which I am even averse to?

This question will be treated more fully on psychological grounds in a later chapter. For the present, it is enough to call attention to the plain fact that often when people do not know what they mean, they yet mean something of very great importance; or that, as has commonly been said, “what people demand is seldom what would satisfy them if they got it.” We may recall the instances [1] in which even Mill admitted that it is legitimate to infer, from the inherent nature of will, that people do not really “will” something which they desire to do at a given moment. The example of slavery is a striking one. A man may contract to become a slave, but no civilised government will enforce his contract at law, and the ultimate reason for the refusal is, as Mill in effect points out, that man’s nature is to exercise will—to have liberty—and a resolution to divest himself of this capacity must be taken as ipso facto void, by contradicting the very essence of humanity. [2]

[1] P. 69 above.

[2] “Liberty is the quality of man.” (Rousseau, Contrat Social).

Now the contradiction, which here appears in an ultimate form, pervades the “actual” will, which we exert from moment to moment as conscious individuals, through and through. A comparison of our acts of will through a month or a year is {119} enough to show that no one object of action, as we conceive it when acting, exhausts all that our will demands. Even the life which we wish to live, and which on the average we do live, is never before us as a whole in the motive of any particular volition. In order to obtain a full statement of what we will, what we want at any moment must at least be corrected and amended by what we want at all other moments; and this cannot be done without also correcting and amending it so as to harmonise it with what others want, which involves an application of the same process to them. But when any considerable degree of such correction and amendment had been gone through, our own will would return to us in a shape in which we should not know it again, although every detail would be a necessary inference from the whole of wishes and resolutions which we actually cherish. And if it were to be supplemented and readjusted so as to stand not merely for the life which on the whole we manage to live, but for a life ideally without contradiction, it would appear to us quite remote from anything which we know. Such a process of harmonising and readjusting a mass of data to bring them into a rational shape is what is meant by criticism. And criticism, when applied to our actual will, shows that it is not our real will; or, in the plainest language, that what we really want is something more and other than at any given moment we are aware that we will, although the wants which we are aware of lead up to it at every point.

To obtain something which approximates to a real will, then, involves a process of criticism and {120} interpretation, which may be either natural or intellectual; that is to say, it may proceed by “natural selection,” through the method of trial and error, or it may be rapidly advanced at favourable moments by the insight of a great mind. But some forwardness in this criticism and interpretation, bringing with it some deposit, so to speak, of objects of volition in which the private will, so far as it is distinguished at all, finds harmony and expansion, must be coeval with social life, and, in short, with humanity.

It is such a process of interpretation that Rousseau ascribes to the legislator. He fathers on him the whole labour of history and social logic in moulding the customs and institutions of mankind. And in agreement with our general attitude to Rousseau’s historical imagination, we may take what he says of legislation and the legislator as an expression of his views on the function of customs and ordinances in the constitution of will. It is very remarkable, considering the other aspect of his views, that he should have conceived so distinctly, as the following passage shows that he did, the immense contrast between a real will and anything which could be presented as a whole in the momentary consciousness of human beings.

Here is his statement of the problem.