“Laws are, strictly speaking, only the conditions of civil association. The people which submits to the laws ought to be their author. Only the associates can have the right to regulate the conditions of the society. But how are they to regulate them? Can {121} it be done by a common agreement, by a sudden inspiration? Has the body politic an organ for pronouncing its acts of will? Who will give it the necessary foresight to form such acts and to publish them before they are needed? Or how is it to pronounce them at the moment when they are required? How is a blind multitude, which often does not know what it wills, because it rarely knows what is good for it, to execute for itself so great and difficult an enterprise as a system of legislation? Of itself, the people always wills the good, but it does not always see it. The general will is always right, but the judgment which guides it is not always enlightened. It must be made to see objects such as they are, and, sometimes, such as they ought to appear to it; it must be shown the right road which it seeks, must be protected from the allurements of private will; places and times must be brought close to its eyes, and the attractions of present and visible advantages counterbalanced by the danger of remote and latent evils. Private persons see the good which they reject; the public wills the good which it does not see. All alike need guidance. The former must be obliged to conform their will to their reason; the latter must be taught to know what it wills. [2] Then, from the public enlightenment there results the union of understanding and of will in the social body; and hence the precise co-operation of the parts and the greatest power {122} of the whole. Hence springs the necessity of a legislator.” [1]
[1] Contrat Social, bk. II., ch. vi.
[2] There is a prima facie contradiction in this rhetorical antithesis; if all private individuals were enlightened, but selfishly interested, there could be no public good will. The contrast must lie between different classes of persons, if it is to have a meaning.
In the following chapter [1] Rousseau touches the essence of laws and institutions in a few words, which only embody a contradiction or a miracle because he is thinking of the legislator’s work as a creation accomplished at one blow.
“In order that a people at its birth should have the capacity to appreciate the sound maxims of policy and follow the fundamental rules of political reason, it would be necessary for the effect to become the cause; for the social spirit, which is meant to be the work of the legislation, to preside over the legislation itself, and for men to be, before laws are made, what they are meant to become by their means.”
The legislator then, in face of this contradiction, must have recourse to supernatural sanctions.
[1] Contrat Social, II. vii.
But the paradox precisely expresses the fact. Laws and institutions are only possible because man is already, what they gradually make more and more explicit; because he has a general will, that is, because the good which he presents to himself as his own is necessarily in some degree a good which extends beyond himself, or a common good. The criticism or interpretation which elicits the general will or actual social spirit, by removal of contradictions, and embodiment in permanent form, is essentially one with the work which Rousseau ascribes to the legislator. And his paradox is removed when we understand that the legislator is merely one of the organs of the social spirit itself, as it carries out its self-criticism and self-interpretation, in part by trial and error {123} and in part by conscious insight and adjustment. The habits and institutions of any community are, so to speak, the standing interpretation of all the private wills which compose it, and it is thus possible to assign to the General Will an actual and concrete meaning as something different at once from every private will, and from the vote of any given assembly, and yet as standing, on the whole, for what both the one and the other necessarily aim at sustaining as the framework of their life. It is needless to observe that such a representation of the Real Will is imperfect, since every set of institutions is an incomplete embodiment of life; and any given system of life is itself also incomplete. It is more important to remember that, though always incomplete, just as the system of sciences is an incomplete expression of truth, the complex of social institutions is, as we have seen, very much more complete than the explicit ideas which at any given instant move any individual mind in volition.
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