Introduction
The present book is about the role and place ascribed to the general will in modern and contemporary political philosophy. Despite the extensive nature of this subject matter, its aim is to explore three, strictly defined, research areas. The first is the history of how the category of the general will developed, from the eruption of the first controversies surrounding this issue, to the twentieth century and the writings of the last representatives of the British idealist tradition. The second is the nature of the category of volonté générale in the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in particular the misconceptions which have accrued around this question, as well as the potential ways of elucidating them, in addition to the implications each may have for the thought of Rousseau as a whole. The third area of research concerns the issues related to the idealist modification of this Rousseauian category and its potential significance for contemporary philosophical and political debates.
The fact that such a prominent place is given here to British thought is justified. The development and modification of the Rousseauian notion of volonté générale has nowhere been as significant as in Great Britain at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Until the publication of the first works of Rousseau, the term “general will” itself was mostly confined to the writings of French authors. After the French Revolution, the disdain in which writers representing nearly all existing world views held the author of the Social Contract led to the abandonment of the general will as a topic. And although there was no lack of authors in the British Isles explicitly, or implicitly, expressing their dissatisfaction with the theoretical constructs of the Citizen of Geneva, it was there that the subject was revived in the 1880s. Within this context, British political philosophy was largely represented by thinkers belonging to the idealist tradition. The potential they had noticed in the Rousseauian thesis on will as the underlying foundation of political communities blended perfectly with their own views on the nature of social and political reality.
The choice of subject matter always requires an appropriate justification. In our case, it is the scholarly importance of the subject as well as the degree to which it has been studied in the relevant literature.
As far as political philosophy and political science are concerned, the importance of reflecting on the category of the general will cannot be stressed enough. Many contemporary concepts refer to it, while an even greater number cannot avoid doing so. The theories of rational choice (K. Arrow, J. Buchanan, D. Gauthier) and public reason (J. Rawls, J. Habermas) developed by English-speaking thinkers and theorists need to be mentioned here. Not forgetting interpretations employing the concept of the general will for analyses in game theory (W.G. Runciman, A.K. Sen). References to the notion are also seemingly unavoidable when discussing topics such as natural law, public opinion, political decision-making, the legitimation of political power or sovereignty. It is difficult to overestimate the influence this Rousseauian concept has had on the theory of democratic government, or the debate on the limits of state interventionism, by supplying the theoretical foundations of social-liberal and socialist conceptions.
In spite of its significance, both for the history of thought and for political science, the concept of general will has not yet received satisfactory treatment from scholars. For can we regard the three works available on this subject, the most recent published nearly thirty years ago, as sufficient? Patrick Riley and Andrew Levine[1] - the authors of two of the works in question - respectively examined: the pre-Rousseauian meanings of the term volonté générale and its doctrinal affinity with communism in its Marxist guise. The oldest work on the subject, Rousseau and the Concept of the General Will by Frank Thakurdas,[2] published in 1976, examined the general will through Bernard Bosanquet’s corrective revision of the concept, also surveying later reactions to this revision.
The political philosophy of British idealism is the next subject area we shall be exploring. The main exponents of this tradition are Francis Herbert Bradley, Thomas Hill Green and Bernard Bosanquet. Their writings - a distinctive mix of liberalism, republicanism, conservatism and socialism - have for years provided inspiration for thinkers representing nearly every political doctrine, and social liberalism in particular. As with Rousseau’s general will, it is equally hard to overestimate the importance of British idealism for political theory and philosophy. There are historical reasons for this fact, namely the impact British thought has had on political theorists and philosophers, but also its role in shaping political practice in the United Kingdom at the turn of the century. Here we are of course talking about the New Liberals (J.A. Hobson, L.T. Hobhouse, W.H. Beveridge, Ch. Masterman, W. Clarke, Ch.P. Scott) - philosophers, economists, journalists and theorists responsible for the social reorientation of liberalism at the beginning of the twentieth century, explicitly appealing to the authority of Green and seeing him as the main firebrand of the “moralisation” of liberal thought. But they were not the only ones to refer to this thinker. There were other theorists and philosophers, sometimes also actively engaged in political affairs. First among them was Arnold Toynbee, the liberal and social activist, promoter of cooperative ideas and founder of the Settlement Movement, who was concerned with the moral and material condition of the British proletariat. Other engagé theorists included Richard Burdon Haldane, Sidney and Beatrice Webb and “Christian socialists” such as Richard Henry Tawney.
A somewhat lesser influence on Britain’s political life was exerted by Bosanquet who never took an active part in politics, and who, on account of his somewhat early retirement from academia, was less influential in shaping the mentality of the British intellectual and political elites. Nevertheless, for several years he was one of the main activists and theorists of the Charity Organisation Society and of the London Ethical Society, charitable institutions aiding the poorest.
Apart from its historical significance, British idealist thought also has significant heuristic value. Combining elements native to many political doctrines, it spawned political concepts running counter to the traditional distinctions ingrained in political theory and philosophy. This is why the writings of the idealists can provide a special inspiration. Especially today, in the context of the ongoing (for nearly 40 years) attack on contemporary liberalism - still largely equated with the thought of Rawls as expounded in A Theory of Justice (and later modified in Political Liberalism). Certain scholars are right to point out that in the domain of political thought, the idealists managed to escape the perception of justice proper to neo-Kantian liberalism, where it was placed higher than the good, and to link the idea of justice with the ethea of particular communities, thereby avoiding the charge of ethical and political relativism. It is for this reason that idealist thought can today serve as an example of a non-standard approach to liberal theory, having on many occasions been compared in the relevant literature to the conceptions of Michael Oakeshott, Philip Pettit, Joseph Raz, Charles Taylor or Michael Walzer.
The above references and annotations indicate clearly that we will be occupied with a very diverse subject matter. A book devoted to such a broad topic must necessarily aim to fulfil multiple goals. These, I believe, can be divided into two groups. The first is to supply arguments in support of the book’s main theses. These are, first, that in its programme the political philosophy of British idealism combined elements of the individualist and the communitarian position, being a precursor of today’s liberal-communitarian position, and second, that a reading of the Rousseauian conception of the general will must inevitably have a dual nature. The general will can and should be viewed as a strictly ethical concept on the one hand, and as a political and legal one on the other.
Next to proving these theses, the goal of this book is also to serve a more descriptive, rather than argumentative, purpose. Its chief aim is to present the idealist vision of the general will. Furthermore, it narrates the development of the category of the general will prior to Rousseau, and outlines the social and political philosophy of British idealism. All of this is accomplished in four chapters, divided into sections, ordered chronologically, according to the issues raised in them and substantively allowing for a consistent presentation of the argumentation used to justify the two main theses of this work.
Chapter one discusses the history of the category of the general will prior to its transformation into the widely known Rousseauian concept of volonté générale. We will examine the various forms the idea took, also as a non-political category of strictly theological import, as well as the precisions given by the author of the Social Contract concerning its attributes. We will then enumerate potential interpretations of the general will and define its relation to natural law theories. Further on, we will attempt to define volonté particulière/volonté de tous, since only the prior definition of the relationship between the categories of volonté particulière and volonté générale can enable us to set down possible interpretations of the ideal of the community and of citizenship, as postulated by Rousseau.
Chapter two will focus on the political (and where necessary, the social, ethical or even metaphysical) philosophy of British idealism, concentrating on the three most important figures in this respect: Green, Bradley and Bosanquet. Their respective positions will be described in both their negative and positive aspects. Criticism of apriorism, individualism, contractualism and modern jusnaturalism will be presented first. This will be followed by a description of the fundamental political theses of the idealists. The first, proclaiming the social origins of human identity, found its expression in Bradley’s concept of “my station and its duties”, Bosanquet’s notion of the community of ideas, as well as Green’s view of the relationship between moral duties and legal obligations. All of these suggest the contextualism of idealist thought, which sought the sources of moral principles in custom and in the law of specific communities. It is only superficially that they appear to be in conflict with the idealists’ second thesis, which underlines the teleological dimension of reality at the basis of Bradley’s concept of the “moral ideal” and of the historicist outlook of the other idealists.
In chapter three, we will analyse the role and place ascribed to the general will in the writings of the British philosophers of interest to us here. The argumentation will once again follow a two-stage pattern. Firstly, we will present the idealist critique of the Rousseauian volonté générale as undertaken by Green, followed by Bosanquet (omitting Bradley, since he did not present one). The second stage will consist in showing how the idealists modified the concept. In Bradley’s Ethical Studies, the general will becomes the will of the community, in Green - the “congeries of the hopes and fears of a people bound together by common interests and sympathy” - while it takes the form of a community of ideas in Bosanquet. The reflections of chapter three are supplemented by an outline of the subsequent fate of the idealist concept of the general will. In this context, we will relate the nature of Hobhouse’s attack on Bosanquet’s version of the concept, as well as the subsequent readings of it in the writings of the last prominent representatives of the British idealist tradition - John Henry Muirhead and Hector James Wright Hetherington, and finally the New Liberals - Hobhouse and Hobson.
Chapter four will aim to verify the validity of the statements appearing in the relevant literature regarding the importance of idealist thought in the context of contemporary philosophical and political debates. Since one of the two main arguments of this book is that idealist thought reconciles the individualist and communitarian positions, we shall need to analyse the contemporary position of liberal communitarianism. We will present its main representatives and their arguments, which state that the opposition between liberalism and communitarianism, as it is usually encountered in the literature, springs from a distorted image of liberal thought. We will also argue in favour of including representatives of the British idealist tradition among exponents of nineteenth-century communal liberalism. A key role will be played here by the theory of right found in their writings, especially by its three elements or theses: rights being based on recognition, their inevitable link to the common good and the fundamental importance of the notion of positive liberty. The book will end with a conclusion, summing up its most important findings as well as indicating potential areas for further research on topics thematically linked to the concept of the general will.