I once described Rousseau’s general will as a logically incoherent conceptual monstrosity,[1] so what can I possibly mean by thinking that? One supposes that it is precisely a feature of the logistic incoherence of the concept that it cannot be thought. One can express in words “squared circle,” but what can it mean to think it? What I said about the general will was said only if we seek to analyze it literally—if we apply, that is, the techniques of analysis which have been honed so finely by philosophical writers during the course of the present century, the concept loses its clear and sharply defined meaning.
In the end, the logical incoherence of the general will comes from attributing to it properties which are seemingly incompatible, properties which seem to exclude one another. On the one hand, there is the sphere of the individual, the particular, and, on the other, that of the collectivity: we seem to be thinking about the same thing in terms of two mutually clashing and repelling ideas of expression. The thrust of philosophical analysis is toward the disentangling of the two, effecting an analytical disengagement, of which each element is free of the incoherence of the whole.
The perspective of the present essay is different from that. To follow the analytical course would involve two consequences that are very serious. One of them is that we would no longer be studying Rousseau. Rousseau wrote about a general will which has the characteristics that he gave to it, and if we begin to disentangle his notion in ways that he did not incline to do, we are no longer studying the general will as he wrote about it. I suppose that those who would opt for the analytical approach would think that that was no loss, that there was not anything to study since what is logically incoherent cannot be instantiated, hence there can be nothing that corresponds to Rousseau’s general will. Even if that were so, it cannot be gainsaid that Rousseau’s writings have had a certain impact on the history of political ideas, and not least among them The Social Contract, one of the main sources for Rousseau’s conception of the general will. We ought not be committed to a technique of interpretation which requires that we lose our capacity to deal with influential ideas.
I might say at this point, that I am not particularly concerned in the present essay with those historical questions regarding the impact of The Social Contract. In fact, though I would seem to focus my attention on Rousseau, and would, thus, appear to be concerned with what historical writings mean, even that is not the case. I must confess that I find it very difficult to summon up interest in Rousseau. I find unappealing all that prattling about virtue and morality from a writer who sees himself so lacking in those qualities, and, as a father, I find offensive all that cant about paternal love and the rearing of children from one who—for what I presume were reasons of self-indulgence—abandoned his own children. But apart from that and even apart from what the historical Rousseau sought to accomplish in his political theorizing and his application of the idea of the general will, there are certain features of the general will, aspects of its logic one might say, which make sense to me from the perspective that I have been trying to develop in the present work. It is a perspective that takes seriously that conceptual tension may be an inexpugnable characteristic of useful concepts, a characteristic which cannot be removed without destroying the concept entirely.
And this leads me to the second of the two serious consequences to which I averted above, namely, that there is something essential to the subject matter that the general will seeks to encapsulate[2] that would be lost if the tension it embodies—and which makes it appear to be a logically incoherent conceptual monstrosity from the literalistic perspective of the analytic approach—could be removed by analysis. If, as I believe, we have no approach to the reality we experience except by means of the mediation of our conceptual tools, it is likewise the case that we are not free to impose just any conceptual tools at will. If we have no world without a system of categories—be they Kantian or along the lines of C. I. Lewis[3] —it is not the case that our categories are the means whereby we create a world ex nihilo in the way that the religious tradition takes it that God did. I shall want to say that the domain to which Rousseau directs our attention, particularly in The Social Contract which is to be the main focus of our present interest, requires that we consider both of the elements which are in tension. These elements conjointly create the experience of logical incoherence to those whose normal approach to the concepts which interest them is analytical, and who approach concepts on the—more or less—tacit assumption that concepts must be sharply defined. To separate the terms which seem to be in tension is to lose the domain they conjointly define, and this may prove to be inadvisable.
*
According to Patrick Riley, “The general will has continued to be taken seriously because it is an attempted amalgam of two extremely important traditions of political thought, which may be designated ancient cohesiveness and modern voluntarism.”[4] I do not myself know if that is why it continues to be taken seriously—indeed, I am not all that certain that it is taken seriously by too many political thinkers in our time. But Riley is surely correct in suggesting that the general will amalgamates the two aspects he mentions. Quite apart from the general will and its discussion, particularly in The Social Contract, there is much discussion of both these items in many of Rousseau’s writings. He often refers to Sparta and to Rome as exemplifying ideals of civic virtue, societies in which idiosyncratic interest or private will is subordinated to the will of the whole. The good citizen[5] turns out to be self-effacing, one who recognizes that the claims of the city must always override his own interest, and in this respect Rousseau’s views are rather reminiscent of those of F. H. Bradley.[6] Believing, however, that for the most part human beings tend to be motivated by self-interest, that altruistic behavior is rarely to be encountered, one frequent theme in Rousseau’s writings is the need to refashion human nature so that it may accord with his political ideals. It is out of this that the well-known idea of forcing people to be free emerges. It is Rousseau’s view that society has tended to corrupt human nature, and that this is particularly the case for the modern European societies he knew.[7] It is owing to that corruption that he takes it to be the task of the political order to institute an educational regime of the sort that will effect changes in the human material of the state. Whatever the reason or ground, we see here an opposition between particular and whole, the individual and the sociopolitical community within which the individual finds himself. Thus, if Riley is right and the general will is intended to amalgamate the two traditions which he cites, ancient cohesiveness and modern voluntarism, it is not a simple amalgamation. There is an opposition, one that Rousseau seems to think may be overcome only by the forcible, if need be, subordination of one to the other, the particular to the general. I chose the word “forcible” advisedly. There may be those who think that, in the end, no force is needed, since it is the task of the statesman as educator to shape human nature so that it fits the demands of the general will. Once the job is done, the individual adapts his will to that of the whole and there is, thus, no conflict, and no force. But surely the attempt to reshape the individual so as to make him conform to an ideal that is not his is to show contempt for his individuality and to impose upon him force sufficient to effect the change deemed desirable by those who will take power.
In spite of the unpleasant things I said about Rousseau toward the beginning of this essay, as I read him he comes through to me as one who genuinely believes in freedom and advocates democracy, in whatever sense that term proves best to characterize his views.[8] Thus we will want to see why it is that he so construes the reality of the sociopolitical realm that the realization of the idea of the whole—expressed in the general will—can only be done by constraining forcibly the natural inclination of the individual to serve himself alone. I admit that my procedure will create grave reservations in the minds of readers, for I do not intend to piece together his views of individual psychology and related matters from his many writings. That, in any event, has been the preoccupation of other scholars far better at it than I. What makes my position even more problematic is that attempting to delineate the logical characteristic of the conceptual tension that I suspect lies in back of what Rousseau says, I would seem to be imposing upon him a problem that he did not himself recognize. Thus, at the end, when I have completed my presentation, I shall have to return to this question and try to justify this imposition. At this point I would say only that inasmuch as conceptual openness—and what I take to be its attendant conceptual tension—has hardly been noticed in the history of philosophy until comparatively recently, it is not really to be wondered at that Rousseau did not notice the extent to which his own position rests upon it.
I remarked above that with regard to Rousseau’s views the private will of the citizen must be subordinated to the general will. Rousseau’s position reminds one of the view that Bradley was to adopt in the nineteenth century. In the essay to which reference was made, Bradley admonishes the reader that it is his duty to take the interest of the political community as superior to his own and to seek its realization even if that is not compatible with the realization of his own private interest. I am not sympathetic to the statism implicit in Rousseau’s position and cannot accept the view that the state as educator must reshape human nature, as if the integrity of the individual counts for nothing, and the individual is to be treated as little more than an instrument for the realization of ideals not his own. But it does seem to me that one can understand—almost in the sense of justify—Rousseau’s position in a way that cannot be done for Bradley. And that centers on the contribution that Hegel made to dealing with one of Rousseau’s central problems. Obviously, there was no way that Rousseau could learn from Hegel. Bradley might have. But in spite of coming after Hegel and being recognized as Hegelian,[9] it is clear that Hegel’s profound insight into the way in which the individual and social whole—subject and substance in Hegel’s own terminology[10]—are balanced delicately without putting at risk the integrity of either, it made no impact upon Bradley’s thinking about such matters.
To say that “ancient cohesiveness” is an ideal of Rousseau is to suggest that he finds it lacking in the present.[11] And that, of course, suggests that what Rousseau finds—or claims to find—in the present is the loneliness or isolation of individuals. While I think that the general will is a descriptive concept, that it points in some degree to what is found in the actuality of the social world, it has, at the same time, a normative aspect. What Rousseau wants is to overcome the isolation and, thus, to establish the sort of community within which each citizen may find his place. It is surely not necessary to demonstrate that Rousseau was not the only thinker and social critic to see overcoming isolation as a major social problem of modern times. In particular, we may find the same set of concerns in Hegel,[12] and while, like Rousseau, Hegel found the relation of individual to whole properly balanced in Ancient Greece, it is not the case, as some seem to think,[13] that Hegel sought a return to those conditions of ancient social bliss. Hegel’s sense of history precluded any expectation that what once was could be again, and the notion that the individual could be reshaped so as to fit into the context of the general would be incompatible with Hegel’s respect for the subject and his concern with its integrity. At first reading, it may seem that the sentence immediately preceding this one deals with two discrete subjects—Hegel’s sense of history and his respect and concern for the subject—yet it is precisely these two together which mark the way in which he differs from Rousseau. This is not the place to set out in detail what Hegel thought about the relation of subject and substance in the course of history,[14] and I shall say here only enough to make the contrast that I want to make between him and Rousseau, as well as to make sense of the comparison I made above between Rousseau and Bradley.
Superficially Hegel and Rousseau share a common ideal, a social world in which the tension of individual and community is minimized, and each subject finds himself at home, as it were, in the sociocultural context of his life. For Rousseau, the desired end is to be achieved by force and manipulation. I have already noticed that in his opinion humans are such that they are naturally self-serving, and if there is any hope at all that the particular can be brought into alignment with the general, it will depend upon the availability of extraordinary individuals who can establish appropriate constitutions and can so mold the individual that he can function in acceptable ways. But what kind of freedom can we be talking about—and Rousseau does seem to be advocating freedom—if we have so little respect for individuals that we have no compunction about shaping them in this way? Rousseau’s view is to be contrasted sharply with that of Hegel. Speaking of the constitution that Napoleon attempted to give the Spaniards, Hegel says the following: “What Napoleon gave to the Spaniards was more rational than what they had before, and yet they recoiled from it as from something alien, because they were not yet educated up to its level. A nation’s constitution must embody its feelings for its rights and its position, otherwise there may be a constitution there in an external way, but it is meaningless and valueless.”[15] He immediately goes on to add: “Isolated individuals may often feel the need and the longing for a better constitution, but it is quite another thing, and one that does not arise till later, for the mass of the people to be animated by such an idea.” Whatever Hegel’s intention in the context of his remarks, what he says here may be directed clearly against Rousseau. A constitution is not something made up—”manufactured,” as Hegel says—and imposed upon a people in order to realize someone’s ideal. Unless it is felt by those whose constitution it is, unless it gives expression to what they have become in the course of their history, it represents a violation of the integrity of their own subjectivity, and for that, Hegel tells us in effect, there is no justification. For Hegel to say that the constitution that Napoleon sought to give the Spaniards was more rational than the one they had is to say that there are criteria with reference to which Napoleon’s constitution was the better of the two. Yet that does not justify its being imposed upon the Spanish people. Hegel was not a statist or proto-totalitarian. He did not accept the Rousseauian idea that it is the business of the legislature or the state through whatever instrument to reshape the subject so as to subordinate him to the general will.
In the account of the evolution of culture which is contained in Hegel’s Philosophy of History, what we find, in effect, is a sequence of world-historical stages, each of which may be understood as a way of being free. The course of development seems to be progressive, the influence, perhaps, of Enlightenment thinking on Hegel, and thus would make it seem as though each of the stages was better—in whatever appropriate sense—than its predecessor, better, perhaps, in such a way as warranting being called more rational. We have seen, however, that being better does not justify imposing it upon those who are not ready for it. Nor does it justify reshaping a people so that they become—or are forced to be—suited to it. In Hegel’s view, we have not only a course of the development of sociocultural forms—each of which embodies a way to be free—but also, at the same time, the evolution of the human capacity to find expression in the successive sociocultural forms. We have, thus, what might be understood as a twofold development with an objective and a subjective aspect, the former dealing with the succession of sociocultural types, the latter with human types having the capacity to experience the form of freedom made available by the former. All this is rather reminiscent of the twofold development of the Phenomenology, in which Hegel braces the forms of the object of knowledge, on the one hand, and the forms of consciousness on the other, as if to suggest that the object construed in any way requires that mind be capable of construing it in that way. And neither comes into the world full-blown all at once.
If the cohesiveness of the ancient polis was an ideal of Hegel’s, it is not expressed—indeed, could not be expressed—as a desire to see restored to reality sociocultural forms no longer current. Nor can the restoration of social cohesiveness be effected by a reshaping of the human being. The first would fly in the face of Hegel’s sense of history. The second would violate his respect for the subject. If it is true that the establishment of unity and the overcoming of loneliness is a problem for Hegel, it is a problem that requires a modern solution and not an ancient one. It requires a solution in which new ways of being social emerge to accord with new forms of sociality.[16] And for Hegel, that means a solution that accords with modern subjectivity. I cannot present the details of it here, but in Hegel’s view the nature of the subjective changes in the course of the development presented in the Philosophy of History. If we are to have the institutional means whereby to overcome loneliness, isolation, and alienation, conditions will have to develop to make it possible that modern subjectivity can find means for its own expression. Thus, while in one sense we may have the opposition of subject and substance, individual and state, in the course of time that opposition is overcome in a unity which is a genuine unity yet which does not fail to accord due consideration to the integrity of both of its terms.
For Rousseau, there is no overcoming of the opposition of individual and general except by coercion. In spite of what I perceive to be a genuine aspiration toward freedom and democracy, Rousseau seems not to know how the opposition is to be mediated except by the forceful imposition of one side upon the other. In principle, the opposition can go either way, and unless efforts are made to prevent it, it is possible for the individual who may be suitably placed—say, because he is a magistrate or an official of some other kind—to subject the general will to his own ends. If overcoming opposition is the only goal, it need not matter how it is done. But Rousseau is convinced that the genuine values and advantages of sociality require that the general will not be subverted. And so the general will must govern even though that requires that the individual be made subordinate to it and that the integrity of the individual be sacrificed to the need to shape its nature to the requirements of the general will. There is nothing in Rousseau that corresponds to the complementary development of subject and substance, though it would be mistaken to think that Rousseau thinks that human nature is rigidly unchanging; if that were the case it would make no sense for him to advocate that legislator or constitution giver as educator reshape the individual so that he can fit into the general will. But he seems to have no sense of the historical movement whereby subject and substance change in “mutual modification.”[17] Bradley, in spite of his claim to be a Hegelian, would seem to be like Rousseau in this regard. There would seem to be no easy, historical overcoming of the opposition we have been noticing, and the citizen must simply subordinate his will to the needs of the state.
*
The problem of the general will comes down to this: while Rousseau has at his disposal the conceptual means whereby to speak of individuals—particularly wills—he wants to be able to speak of what is non-individual. There are two aspects of this, one being normative and the other descriptive, though I rather believe that Rousseau was not particularly sensitive to or otherwise aware of the latter. Yet I would think that it is the descriptive aspect, rather than the normative, which lies in back of the logical difficulties to which the general will leads. As the battle rages, it may occur to some member of the naval force that his best interest requires that he find a place to hide. But England expects that every man will do his duty, and there the conflict of interest arises. Clearly what England expects may not be in the best interest of every Englishman, particularly if we believe that each man or woman is the best judge of where individual interest lies. There is a conflict, a tension, but the tension involved is not conceptual. Rather, in the end it boils down to our recognition that it is not possible to satisfy everyone’s wants. So far as the logic of the matter is concerned, I do not think that the tension between individuals with mutually incompatible wants or needs is any different from that between an individual and a non-individual entity—such as a state, a university, an organization, or what have you—whose interests are in conflict. The ontological character of the beings in conflict would not be the same, but that has nothing to do with the conflict. In Rousseau’s view, each individual is motivated to act for reasons of self-interest, and if he is to act on behalf of the social entity in which he participates, he will have to be reshaped and coerced. It is true that most of Rousseau’s discussions, in The Social Contract and elsewhere, are taken up with the prescriptive sphere and the conflict between interests. But that could just as easily have been done—indeed, more easily done—if he focused on the conflict between the individual and the state, the individual and society, the individual and the body politic. There is no purpose served, so far as delineating the conflict over interests is concerned, using as troublesome a notion as the general will. To be sure, the term was available, and it seems widely agreed that Rousseau took the term from Denis Diderot.[18] But the two writers did not use the term in the same way. For Diderot there was a general will of the entire human race, whereas Rousseau spoke of the general will of individual societies and even of organizations within such societies vis-à-vis their individual members. Given their differences in usage, one would have thought that reason enough for Rousseau to leave it alone. Instead, he kept it, trying to adapt it to uses of his own.
I do not wish to be understood as denying that Rousseau uses the expression “general will” in normative contexts. Clearly, he does. For him, there is clearly something superior about the claim of the general will, and it is imperative that the particular will be subordinate to it. Yet for all that, “the general will” and its problems belong to the sphere of description. It is an instrument intended by Rousseau to be used in talking about the reality of the domain with which The Social Contract—as well as others of his writings—is concerned, the domain within which human action takes place.
The domain within which human action takes place may be construed as encompassing two realms, aspects, elements, or sub-domains. I really do not know what word to choose, and I have no doubt that whatever I do will leave what I say open to the comments of critics who will discover criticism of one sort or another. I suspect that for the most part the criticisms would be ontological in character, as the critic presumed to see in the choice of word an implicit commitment to the existence of entities for which there is no room in his own ontology. If we may think of the critics as possessed of an ontology of the social domain which they would oppose to what they might take mine to be, one could say that for each of them there is a conception of what the domain consists in—what it is made up of—and this would emerge as incompatible with the ontology alleged to be encapsulated by the term. But all this is rather abstract, and, since I do not believe it to be worth the effort to invent scenarios for possible critics, I shall seek a manageable degree of concreteness by moving on to discuss two—out of who knows how many—understandings of Rousseau’s general will.
But to do that requires that we return to the point with which the previous paragraph begins in order to indicate what the two spheres are and how attention to each in isolation from the other gives rise to difficulties. (The difficulties, as we shall see in due course, are owing to the tacit commitment of the scientific and philosophical communities of the belief that concepts must be sharply defined. This commitment carries with it the incapacity of those who accept or adhere to it to be open to the possibilities that there are domains which are incapable of being described or characterized in terms of concepts which can be sharply defined.) To begin with what is most obvious, the domain in which we are interested includes people. For many, that is all it includes or contains, and writers committed to individualism in social theory in the philosophy of social science will insist that an ontology of individuals is all that is necessary for a completely adequate account of the social domain.[19] It would be analogous to an atomistic ontology of matter in motion in which fields have no reality or independent being, but it is not an analogy that I wish—or feel able—to pursue. But what would be the social analogue of field? Clearly, the position just cited would claim that it had no reality, that social “field” could be analyzed entirely in terms of individuals. I think it not unreasonable to say that Hobbes and Locke were individualists in this way, for them a commonwealth or a body politic is nothing but a collection of individuals, and that Hobbes—and, for that matter, Baruch Spinoza—speaks of collective power in ways that make clear that it is taken to be only the sum of the powers of individuals.
There are, however, writers for whom this position is far from complete. In their view the domain which interests us consists not simply of individuals but the way in which individuals are organized or related or construe their relationships to one another and to the nonhuman world or what have you. I have no need here to formulate this with precision, nor need I make an effort to distinguish between the variety of ways in which this non-individualist orientation finds expression. That is, though some writers may focus on relations of one sort or another, others on seemingly persistent social structures, and still others on culture, I shall make no effort to deal with such differences here. The point is, simply, that in their various ways those writers introduce into our domain a non-individualistic reality without which the domain is said to be incomplete and, in addition, is essential if the distribution of individuals through sociocultural space is to be understood.[20] And since the claim is made that this involves something that is not reducible to individuals and their characteristics, the claim is clearly that ontologically speaking the domain with which we are concerned is richer than it would be if the individualistic construal of it were adequate. Of course, to recognize that a claim such as this is an ontological one need not have untoward consequences. It is certainly not the case that anyone has ever claimed that social relations exist as the same way—and are apprehended or experienced in the same way—as the more familiar things which fill our world. This is not even the case for those who would speak of culture as a “reality sui generis.”[21] To be sure, there will be individualistic critics who will, for whatever polemical mileage they may derive from it, adopt a positivist stance and wonder how one could justify postulating entities which yield no sensory experience. But this is no more justified than refusing to countenance the ontology of modern physics because we have no perceptual experience of sub-atomic entities. I would only say for our present purposes what needed to be noticed is the claim that it is exceedingly difficult to describe—much less explain—what goes on in the social world without making use of terms which refer to pervasive kinds of social relations and social structure. Indeed, without that we would seem to be without the conceptual means that enable us to pick out what is genuinely social from what is the mere accidental juxtaposing of individual human beings.
What, one may wonder, has all this to do with Rousseau and his general will?
*
In my view, the problems of the general will are largely owing to the fact that while Rousseau began with an individualistic conception of the social world, he had an intuition into its inadequacy and sought to make reference to the non-individualistic aspect of the domain we have been concerned with here without having a terminology adequate to that purpose. An individualist position is inevitable for social-contract theorists inasmuch as their point of departure is a pre-social world of fully formed individuals. One could argue—quite correctly, in my view—that such a position is inherently unstable since it presents the individuals who enter into the commonwealth formed and defined by the social contract as already fully socialized. But none of the major social-contract theorists—Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau—seem to notice this problem, presumably because knowledge of non-European cultures was insufficiently available to make easy the distinction between what was natural, common to mankind, and what was conventional, in this case European. That the new natural science was perceived to be atomistic, directed at a universe made up of ontologically self-sufficient bits of matter, no doubt contributed to the seeming plausibility of the point of view in question, it being simply one more instance of the long-standing tendency to assimilate the way we study the social world to the way we study the natural world.
With all the philosophical issues that are raised by the individualistic social theorizing of the contract theorists, the point is that in point of historical fact these writers did treat the domain we are concerned with here as if it were made up entirely out of individuals. And this is true of Rousseau along with the others. Yet, as I have already said, Rousseau seemed to have a glimmer of insight into the fact that there is more to the social world than a collection of individuals, that there are continuities and norms which are not reducible to the properties of individual actors—persons—and it is necessary to be able to deal with them in any account of the social realm if the latter is to be adequate at all. And if, speaking ontologically, the individual persons possess the most reality in the domain we are dealing with, it is also true that some reality—however lesser and dependent—may be ascribed to institutional continuities and prescriptive[22] norms of behavior. We may briefly compare Rousseau with Hobbes on this point. Based upon the Leviathan alone, I would want to say that the social world is exhausted by the individuals that make it up and that norms, institutions, and traditions have no reality at all. In his view, even if traditions seem to continue and people act in accordance with them, that is only because the wielder of sovereignty—be that a monarch or an assembly of men—consents tacitly to their continuation. This consent may be withdrawn anytime the wielder of sovereignty so wills. Thus, norms, institutions, and traditions possess no independence, no ontological status, apart from the wills of specifiable individuals.[23] Rousseau, in spite of being committed to a method which is individualistic (he is unambiguous in his view that the social world comes into being by an act of will, the will of individuals who are determined to leave the state of nature) does, nevertheless, seem to recognize that what emerges from that act of will seems to have a degree of reality of its own, an existence, not to be sure of the same sort as that of individual human beings, but an existence nonetheless. This means, of course, that the domain with which we are concerned is richer in Rousseau’s view of it than in Hobbes’s view, and a proper description of it would require a language which is sufficiently rich for the purpose. Yet the language of Rousseau does not seem to be any richer than that of Hobbes. Both are individualistic, both construe the social as constructed out of individuals, and Rousseau does not really seem to have the linguistic or conceptual means with which to describe what is genuinely social, not reducible to the individual—or at least not fully so reducible. The introduction of the general will is, in my view, an attempt to compensate for that lack, an attempt to reach out to some aspect of the domain we are concerned with which cannot be fully dealt with in an individualistic vocabulary. Rousseau does not have at his disposal the kinds of descriptive—ethnographic and other—accounts available to us from which to choose the terms needed for a proper description of what is truly social. The introduction—I should more correctly say borrowing—of the term “general will” is clearly—at least on my reading of The Social Contract—an attempt to provide what is missing, but it is simply not adequate. That he should think of the collective as possessed of a will shows how still ensnared he was in the language of individuals.
In spite of attributing to the general will attributes of individuality, what Rousseau was trying to do was to characterize a social realm which encompasses both individual and non-individual elements. In the actuality of social life, the two are in delicate balance. But Rousseau lacks the conceptual means with which to portray that balance, certainly not with the sensitivity of Hegel’s depiction of the relation of subjectivity and substantiality, the individual and the sociocultural content of the individual’s life and mind.[24] The result is that his text—and it will be kept in mind that I think primarily of The Social Contract—is often read as if it were focused on one side or the other of the individual/non-individual dichotomy.[25] Coming to the reading of Rousseau—as to any other text—with the tacit assumption that concepts must be sharply defined, is insensitive to the way in which Rousseau wants to encapsulate the individual/non-individual dichotomy in the general will. Rousseau saw the tension—grounded in the reality of social being—of individual and non-individual, a social domain constituted by relatively stable structures and individuals in constant change. As a result some readers incorrectly see Rousseau’s text as advocating the submission of the individuals who make up a society to the domination by the political order understood as a general will.
Rousseau knows two things: societies are made up of individuals, and individuals are transformed by societies. He seems to believe that socialized man is stunted, that men in cities lose those natural qualities possessed by their ancestors in early uncivilized times. But this seems not to be a condition that must be accepted. It would appear that something might be done about it. In The Social Contract—and elsewhere as well—Rousseau advocates that steps be taken so as to refashion human nature. It is clear that in his view those steps were not being taken and that in the social world known to him it continues to affect men badly. One supposes, then, that Rousseau believed that societies could be changed—by men, or at least some of them—so as to be able to bring about the desired results. And this means that though individuals are transformed by society, they, or at least some of them, may be able to transform society. Thus, we see that Rousseau does seem to see that the individual and the non-individual aspects of the domain of interest to him are not radically opposite—as in the ontology of Gottfried Leibniz and other metaphysical dualists—but are in some kind of relation. Yet Rousseau does not have the conceptual or linguistic means to describe this relation. He has only the language of individuals. The story he has to tell begins in the state of nature, when it is presumed that there are only individuals, and when the social world is inaugurated by means of the social contract, that world cannot be described.[26] As I have already indicated, I think that the “general will” is intended to point to that non-individual social reality that emerges from the interaction of individuals—regardless of the seriousness with which one takes the historicity of the state of nature and the social contract—yet which comes to be independent, in some appropriate sense, of individuals and develops a character and dynamic of its own.
When I say that Rousseau has only a language of individuals, I mean that he lacks the linguistic and conceptual tools with which to describe social or sociocultural phenomena on their own terms. To be sure, he has things to say about institutions of government, but these are not described in terms of their own natures. Rather, they are characterized in terms of individuals, the qualification that individuals must have if they are to hold office. One of his most persistent concerns is that appropriate measures be taken to minimize the possibility that office holders be corrupted or in other ways serve their own personal interests rather than those of the general will. But whatever the problems of description and analysis that confront Rousseau when he seeks to deal with the social world, it is surely not to be doubted that it is, for him, a world with two fundamental aspects. One of these, the individual/particular aspect, presented a few problems of description, largely, we may suppose, because the tradition or modern political philosophy had long been used to writing about individuals, and his predecessors provided him with examples. But the other, the social/general aspect, gave him no end of trouble. The modern tradition gave him little precedent, and his attempt to articulate what was non-individual drove him to the general will. As I noted earlier, in spite of the fact that for Rousseau the domain of the social is, indeed, made up of two essential aspects, there is a tradition of Rousseauian scholarship which has tended to suppress this. Some scholars have tended to focus on the individual/particular side and see the reference to the non-individual, the general will, as the means whereby the individual is suppressed and the way opened to varieties of totalitarianism. The other takes the general very seriously, even to the extent of denigrating the particular, and it has been claimed—by Émile Durkheim,[27] for example—that Rousseau is a founder of sociology. This needs to be both illustrated and explained.
*
The reception of Rousseau and the impact of The Social Contract have been the subject of a vast literature, and it would not be possible to do justice to it here even if I were qualified to do so. But possible or not, a review of that literature would not serve the purpose of the present study. I have been trying to argue that in developing his notion of the general will, Rousseau, consciously or not, was attempting to speak of the social world in terms of its two fundamental aspects, aspects which seem to be at odds with one another, the individual and the sociocultural. Each of these aspects displays characteristics which are unlike—indeed, opposite—those of the other. Yet, I venture to suggest, the general will is intended to encapsulate both. And that, it seems to me, results in a notion with inherent tensions. But since the tacit assumption with which most of us work is that concepts must be sharply defined, Rousseau’s general will is inherently problematic, leading to the suspicion that the general will is too muddled to be saved or serviceable, or to an inclination among some scholars to focus upon one side of the sphere that the general will is intended to encapsulate to the exclusion of the other. What I want to do in the present section of this study is to illustrate this latter kind of response by examining briefly the views of two serious and respected critics. It is precisely the standing that each of the two had in their respective fields of scholarship that makes attending to their views worth the effort.
For Rousseau, democracy was surely an abstraction. How could it fail to be? Where could he have found its reality, an actual instance of a democratic society that he could have described? He most genuinely regrets that in spite of what human nature is, man is everywhere in chains, and whatever one makes of the prescriptions he offers for sociopolitical melioration, it is hard for me to doubt that he most earnestly desires a state of affairs in which the chains could be broken. Why, then, does he seem to so many scholars to be among the theoretical founders of modern totalitarianism? And why does Jacob Talmon take it that Rousseau’s role in the history of a movement he calls “totalitarian democracy” is absolutely central?[28]
There are in The Social Contract elements that we would find incompatible with our sense of democracy and life in a free society. There is, for example, the view that human nature has become so corrupted by the kinds of society which prevailed in his time, that in order to fulfill its educational function the state must use the force necessary to reshape human nature and create a new man. It is clear enough what such ideas suggest to those of us whose lives have been lived in the twentieth century. Likewise, there is a clear lack of sympathy for the existence of groups and other social institutions that mediate between the general and the particular. In Rousseau’s political ideal nothing must be allowed to stand between citizen and state, and he inclines to consider such mediating institutions as particular expressions of one-sided interests that impede the carrying out of the general. Again, all this has an unfortunate impact upon twentieth-century readers who know how totalitarian regimes convert to their own interest once independent entities such as churches and labor unions are eliminated, and where they cannot do it, attempt to root them out.
I said that for Rousseau democracy was an abstraction. I believe that human freedom was, for him, a deeply held ideal, yet he had no experience with the actuality of its realization. His account of the matter must, of necessity, be essentially a priori. I suppose that his attitude toward mediating groups and institutions is partly a consequence of his conception of the general and partly, perhaps, reflective of an attitude toward the Catholic Church not unlike that of other eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers. What he did not have was the actual experience of observing how such mediating groups contribute to the maintenance of freedom and serve to protect the individual from the power of a central authority, experience of the sort that Alexis de Tocqueville would have some decades later on his tour of the United States.[29] In addition, we must keep in mind that Talmon’s book is not devoted to Rousseau. It is, rather, a history of the origins of totalitarian democracy, and its Rousseau is the Rousseau as he was known to those who made that tradition. Rousseau counts in Talmon’s book only as he contributed to the tradition being investigated, only as he appeared retrospectively to those who made the tradition of totalitarian democracy, and that means that those passages of The Social Contract which give expression to Rousseau’s advocacy of freedom would be overlooked.[30]
As I read Rousseau, the general will is intended to encapsulate both the individual or particular and the general or what we might call the sociopolitical. Both of them at the same time, not one or the other. But taken separately, each pulls in a different direction; the particular is clearly not like the general: its characteristics are different and so are its interests. Yet having been transformed by the compact from a natural to a social or moral being, the individual can only realize itself—achieve its freedom—in the context of the general. Though the explicit language of The Social Contract would subordinate the particular to the general and speaks in a paradoxical way of forcing the recalcitrant particular to be free, it is Rousseau’s genuine conviction that he is offering a prescription for breaking the chains that everywhere bind human beings. Within the framework of Rousseau’s project the individual is expected to find his freedom within the framework of the general and, it seems to me, neither one is intelligible without the other. Yet, on Talmon’s reading, the general excludes the particular and is imposed—forcibly imposed—upon it. Why should this be?
Of course, the name Rousseau gives to the subject of his discussion is “the general will,” and it is easy, therefore, to suppose that the focus of his attention is on something general, not particular. And, perhaps, this may be re-enforced by his explicit claims to the effect that the general will is not the simple sum of particular wills. This might very well suggest that it is—ontologically?—something entirely different from particular wills. Considering, then, how the two sorts of will may be related, and given some of Rousseau’s own language to which we have adverted, it may be hard to see how the relationship can be other than superordination and subordination, with the general superordinate and the particular subordinate. While this reading can be justified by appropriate citation of texts, it does, nevertheless, fly in the face of Rousseau’s seemingly sincere desire to advocate, not subordination of the particular but freedom for mankind. It is a freedom that is presumed to be realized only within the context of a social world, and while I do not want to make Rousseau sound like Aristotle, one might almost say that the individual realizes its nature, is free, only within the framework of a social order.
But if Rousseau is trying to capture the opposing characteristics of particular and general within the single concept of the general will, that means, of course, that the general will cannot be a sharply defined concept. And that would seem to leave us with the alternative of either dismissing it as a logically incoherent conceptual monstrosity or of explicating it in such a way as to omit enough of it so as to leave us with a recognizable concept. Talmon, it would appear, has chosen the latter course.[31] He finds in the general will the basis of a totalitarian perspective, ignores those aspects of it which take seriously the individual and his claims for freedom, and focuses solely on the general and its tendency to lord it over the particular. I would suggest that this is the only way that Talmon can take seriously that Rousseau has produced a genuine concept, because, like most of us, he assumes tacitly that concepts are sharply defined even if he has never heard of Gottlob Frege and his statement about the matter. Because conceptual tension is not permitted, we cannot allow ourselves to find it when it is there.[32]
We find something similar in Durkheim’s Rousseau, although Durkheim is clearly much better disposed toward Rousseau than is Talmon. In Durkheim’s view, Rousseau is one of the founders of sociology, the discipline to which Durkheim himself made major contributions, contributions which are still taken seriously in our own time. This is no place to present an account of Durkheim’s conception of sociology, and I shall state briefly here only what I think is necessary to accomplish my present purpose.[33]
In common sense, it is hard to gainsay what seems to be a patent fact, that societies are made up of individual human beings, and that only the individual exists. And in this, common sense seems to be supported by the tendency of early modern science to be atomistic and for the epistemology of empiricism to be sense-impressionistic. Thus, there is nothing particularly surprising about the way in which writers like Hobbes and Locke wrote about the sociopolitical sphere, and even in our own time it is not uncommon for serious writers to think it relevant to observe that institutions and the like are not observable, hence have no place in a social science that purports to be empirical.[34] But this is far from being the point of view that Durkheim took to his work and which he sought to defend in many publications over the course of decades. In his view, the social is a distinctive form of reality. It is other than the individual and cannot be reduced—in whatever sense—to individual human beings. The notion we find in Hobbes and Locke that the sociopolitical world comes into being by carrying out decisions made by collections of individuals and that that world has no being or reality other than that possessed by the collection of individuals who make it up cannot, in Durkheim’s view, provide a basis for the possibility of a sociology capable of making sense of how institutions and other forms of collective behavior come into being and change in the determinate ways they do change. In his view, the social world shows itself to be independent of individuals and changes in accordance with its own laws which are not reducible to or special instances of psychological laws. Far from being merely the outcome of the decisions and actions of individuals, social reality is experienced by individuals as external to themselves, and what individuals become is in no small measure the outcome of how they are shaped by their social milieu. It is not that Durkheim actually intended to reduce the individual human being merely to the status of a cipher, a passive recipient of the imprint of society. He wanted only to insist that whatever the relation of individual and society, the latter had a reality and integrity of its own and could be studied systematically only if that were recognized. It would, however, take us too far afield to pursue these problems of interpreting Durkheim’s texts. Instead, what I want now to do is to attend briefly to how Durkheim finds in The Social Contract a forerunner of sociology as he conceives it.
This reading of Rousseau emerges quite clearly in Durkheim’s essay “Rousseau’s Social Contract,”[35] and there are passages in it which read to me as if Durkheim read himself into The Social Contract.[36] On Talmon’s reading, the general will becomes a means whereby the particular individual is kept in check and remains subordinate to those who wield power. On Durkheim’s reading, it is entirely opposite. The general—transformed into the social—is the means whereby the individual expresses his individuality and becomes free. When human beings in the state of nature come together in order to relieve themselves of its inconveniences, there comes into being something fundamentally new, something not implicitly contained in man’s pre-social nature.[37] Pre-social man is natural only—I should say bio-psychological—but with the contract sociality emerges. I use “emerges” advisedly, because what Durkheim says about the coming into being of the social world is quite reminiscent of what emergent evolutionists used to say about how the organic came into being in an inorganic environment in which it was not even contained as a potentiality. That is to say, given the inorganic realm and the laws which govern its operation, there is no way to derive the appearance of the organic by means of logical inference.[38] In spite of certain standard misreadings of his position, Durkheim did not believe in social entities that imposed their histories upon human beings and could not understand why the “obvious absurdity” that there can be societies without individuals was attributed to him.[39] But he did believe that once the social emerged it was a distinct sort of reality. It could not exist independent of individual men and women, yet it could not be reduced to individuals and their characteristics, and that it was the source of the specifically determinant content of their moral lives. It is clear that Durkheim reads The Social Contract as if Rousseau’s views were like his own, and that means he construes the general will as if it were the realm of society.
*
I said earlier that I would attempt to say something in justification of my imposing upon Rousseau’s text a perspective that he could not possibly have had, namely, that of conceptual tension. There is no reason to suppose that Rousseau could ever have thought of such a thing, but I should want to say that what is essential to his notion of the general will is precisely an inexpugnable tension between the individual and the non-individual which is entirely lost in the construal of it by both Talmon and Durkheim. Rousseau’s general will encapsulates both terms of the tension, while its construal by each of the two critics we have dealt with implicitly relieves the tension by eliminating the individual or particular from the general will. It is not, to be sure, that either one of them loses the particular. But what each does is to place it outside of the general will. Why should they do that when Rousseau clearly does not? As I have been suggesting all along, I think in back of their respective analytic procedures is the tacit acceptance of the commonly held—if only implicitly—view of scientists and philosophers that concepts must be sharply defined. Both of our critics have no doubt that The Social Contract is an important work, one because he sees it as a major intellectual impetus to a political tendency he rejects, the other because he sees it as a major precursor of the modern science of sociology. Since no work could be taken seriously if it were found to rest on imprecise notions, they simply cannot doubt that the general will is a relatively clear idea.[40]
For Talmon, Rousseau’s general will is the means whereby the individuals are held in check and are subordinate to the power of the state. For Durkheim, it is the sphere of the social, and while, in its genesis, it is an emergent reality produced by the interaction of individuals, it is independent of them—though not ontologically separate—and the source of their cultural and moral content. There never ceases to be, on either reading, some kind of interaction between the particular and the general, yet the two terms are conceptually distinct. As I read Rousseau, this conceptual distinctiveness of individual and non-individual, particular and general, is precisely what we do not find in the general will. I am inclined to think that it encapsulates Rousseau’s intuition that in the reality of social experience the two are conjoined in an uneasy tension. The general points to the structural stability without which the continuity of social life cannot be imagined. The particular—or interaction of particulars—points to the constantly changing within the life of society. Stability and change are conflicting notions, and our sense of what is analytically acceptable precludes our ascribing such conflicting predicates to one and the same subject at the same time. Yet for all that, by and large societies are always stable and changing at the same time. Rousseau tried to express both, and by means of a notion—the general will—which has become famous for its conceptual peculiarity. It is possible to suggest that only by using concepts which are inexpugnably tension-laden that we can expect to describe realities which are themselves inherently in tension. And it is interesting to see how the strength of our tacit commitment to concepts as sharply defined forces us either to dismiss tension-laden concepts entirely or to interpret them so as to eliminate the tension. I rather sympathize with Talmon’s opposition to the totalitarianism he attacks in his book and have always had a strong sympathy for Durkheim’s sociology. Yet it seems to me that both of these writers have missed the point of the general will.
See my “The Problem of the Given in Buber’s Conception of the Interpersonal,” in Arthur A. Chiel, ed., Perspectives on Jews and Judaism: Essays in Honor of Wolfe Kelman (New York: Rabbinical Assembly, 1978), 142.
Of course, neither the general will nor any other concept seeks to do anything, and I might have said “that Rousseau seeks to encapsulate by means of the general will.”
Clarence Irving Lewis, Mind and the World-Order (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1929).
Patrick Riley, Will and Political Legitimacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 99.
The literature is vast. One could cite, however, Judith N. Shklar’s well-known study, Man and Citizens (London: University of Cambridge Press, 1969).
See F. H. Bradley, “My Station and Its Duties,” in Ethical Studies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1876, 1935).
If there is, in fact, anything special about Rousseau’s perceptions of his own city of Geneva, there is nothing about our present interests that requires an examination of it.
There seems to be a variety of senses, but they cannot be explored here. See James Miller, Rousseau: Dreamer of Democracy (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984), especially pp. 26–48.
At least more Hegelian than some others. I myself think that the direction of Bradley’s Appearance and Reality, 2nd ed. (London: Williams & Norgate, 1897) is all too wooden and lacks the subtly and historical sensitivity of Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit or Philosophy of History.
G. F. W. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, tr. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942); cf. my “The Meaning of ‘State’ in Hegel’s Philosophy of History,” Philosophical Quarterly 12 (1962): 60–72. (Were I writing the paper now, I would not say what I do about dialectic, and metaphysical necessity, but I continue to stand by the main point of it.)
“The present” in this context refers to Rousseau’s own present, not ours.
For a good review of Hegel’s work from the standpoint of his concern with the social issue, see Raymond Plant, Hegel (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press 1973).
Cf. J. Glenn Gray, Hegel and Greek Thought (New York and Evanston: Harper & Row 1968) (originally published as Hegel’s Hellanic Ideal, 1941) for an account of Hegel’s relation to the Greeks which points to the conclusion that Hegel sought a solution that synthesized the Greek ideal with the Christian perspective on the subject. Gray’s thesis is stated concisely in his “Conclusion.”
I did discuss this more years ago in “The Meaning of ‘State’ in Hegel’s Philosophy of History.”
Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, paragraph 274.
I have discussed this in “The Meaning of ‘State’ in Hegel’s Philosophy of History,” to which reference has already been made, but that paper was written at a time when I believed that Hegel’s view of history was flawed by a metaphysical necessitarianism and I had a view of Hegel’s dialectic I now consider mistaken. (These errors are corrected in my “Dialectic and Necessity in Hegel’s Philosophy of History,” in L. Pompa and W. H. Dray, eds., Substance and Form in History, Edinburgh and New York: Edinburgh University Press, 1981, 42–57.) Apart from that, I continue to believe that the account of Hegel’s views of subjective and social, as well as the claim that by “state” Hegel refers to what we now call “culture,” given in the earlier paper, is substantially correct.
A mode of expression I have borrowed from the title of Harold P. Nebelsick’s Theology and Science in Mutual Modification (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).
See Riley, Will and Political Legitimacy, 244, n. 42; see also Riley’s “The General Will before Rousseau,” Political Theory 6 (1978): 485–516.
See John O’Neill, ed., Modes of Individualism and Collectivism (London: Heinemann Educational, 1973), part 3; Steven Lukes, Individualism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973); and J. O. Wisdom, “Situational Individualism and the Emergent Group-Properties,” in Robert Borger and Frank Cioffi, eds., Explanation in the Behavioural Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 271–96. A recent criticism of this point of view may be found in David-Hillel Ruben, The Metaphysics of the Social World (London, Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), although earlier criticisms are found in O’Neill, part 4.
See Orvis Collins and June M. Collins, Interaction and Social Structure (The Hague, Paris: Mouton, 1973).
See Alfred L. Kroeber, “The Superorganic,” in The Nature of Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 22–5l, and Leslie A. White, The Science of Culture (New York: Grove Press, 1948. See also David Bidney, Theoretical Anthropology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953), ch. 2, and my “Bidney’s Humanistic Anthropology,” Review of Metaphysics 8, 3 (Mar. 1955): 493–509.
As distinct from statistical norms.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. M. Oakeshott (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1946), parts one and two passim.
See my “The Meaning of ‘State’ in Hegel’s Philosophy of History.”
One could exaggerate the claim that the reason for this is Rousseau’s lack of an adequate terminology. Hegel’s terminology enables him to make the point more easily, yet he has been the victim of misreading no less than Rousseau.
Rather like the way in which Martin Buber takes it that Thou—in contrast to It—cannot be described. See my “The Problem of the Given in Buber’s Conception of the Interpersonal,” and the references to Buber given there.
Émile Durkheim, Montesquieu and Rousseau: Forerunners of Sociology (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1960).
J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Secker & Warburg. 1961, 1952), 38–49.
See the “Forward” in A. de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution (New York: Anchor, 1955) for a discussion of the preference of despots for an atomistic society of isolated individuals, and Democracy in America, vol. ii (New York: Punguin,1956) for an account, particularly in the second and third books, of the importance of families, associations, and other non-governmental groups in keeping the condition of equality in a democratic society from leading to a state of affairs in which a central-governmental power comes to confront its isolated citizens.
I do not presume to suggest that an account by Talmon of Rousseau for Rousseau’s own sake might have been more even-handed. I remember being present during the 1969–1970 academic year at a session, in Jerusalem, of the Israeli Society for the Political Sciences at which Rousseau was being discussed by Talmon and a visitor from Poland (whose name I no longer remember), in which Talmon insisted upon a totalitarian Rousseau and the visitor a democratic Rousseau. It is quite remarkable that intelligent readers can read the same texts in such disparate ways, though I now suspect that it is a normal response to conceptual tension.
Which he must, of course, since as the historian of totalitarian democracy he cannot dismiss Rousseau.
I do not say, of course, that the language of Rousseau does not actually speak of changing human nature and forcing men to be free, and that an ideal pleasing to the Leninist mind could not be formulated in his terms. But I do say that Rousseau had no idea of what Leninism is like, that he would most likely have been appalled by its practice, and that he seemed genuinely bothered by his belief that “man is born free, and yet we see him everywhere in chains.” If freedom is not possible without changes of a general, sociopolitical kind, the chains, nevertheless, must be removed from each individual.
See Durkheim’s Rules of Sociological Method, tr. S. A. Solovay and J. H. Mueller, ed. G. E. G. Catlin (Glencoe, IL: Free Press,1950) (first published in France, 1895), as well as the essays in his Sociology and Philosophy, tr. D. F. Pocock (London: Routledge, 1953) (first published in France, 1924).
See the papers of those contributors to K. Knorr-Cetina and A. V. Cicourel, eds., Advances in Social Theory and Methodology: Toward an Integration of Micro- and Macro-Sociologies, (Boston, London: Henley, 1981) who defend the micro-sociological standpoint.
Durkheim, Montesquieu and Rousseau, 65–138.
For example, ibid., 83, 98–99.
Ibid., 81.
See my “The Two Theses of Methodological Individualism,” in Modes of Individualism and Collectivism, 277–86, 280f.
Émile Durkheim, Suicide, tr. J. A. Spaulding, ed. G. Simpson (New York: Free Press, 1951), 319f.
I say “relatively clear” because I suppose they would have allowed that there are more sharply defined concepts in physics and mathematics.