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Abstract
Rousseau’s project in his Social Contract was to construct a conception of human subjectivity and political institutions that would transcend what he saw to be the limits of liberal political theory of his time. I take this as a starting point to put forward an interpretation of his theory of the general will as a kind of social cognition that is able to preserve individual autonomy and freedom alongside concerns with the collective welfare of the community. But whereas many have seen Rousseau’s ideas as a prelude to communitarianism or authoritarianism, we should instead see his project as articulating an alternative model of moral-cognitivist reasoning. In order to provide a framework for this interpretation, I propose reading his conception of the general will through the theory of collective intentionality and social ontology. I end with a consideration of how this interpretation of the general will can provide a more satisfying understanding of political and practical rationality contemporary debates over republicanism and liberalism.
Notes
1. Lending support to this thesis, Charles Taylor (Citation1989, 362) notes that: ‘Rousseau immensely enlarged the scope of the inner voice. We now can know from within us, from the impulses of our own being, what nature marks as significant. And our ultimate happiness is to live in conformity with this voice, that is, to be entirely ourselves … The source of unity and wholeness which Augustine found only in God is now to be discovered within the self.’
2. John Rawls (Citation2007, 224) makes the interesting point that ‘when all citizens conduct themselves in their thought and action reasonably and rationally as the social compact requires, the general will of each citizen wills the common good, as specified by their shared conception of that common good’. But this implies that individuals follow regulative rules of deliberation rather than think through constitutive rules requisite for the production and maintenance of the common good. In the case of the former, I think in terms of rules for deliberation, in the latter, the constitutive rules of my thinking produce social facts and therefore produce the common good as a social fact. The common good is not simply a reference point or a priori regulative ideal, but something emergent in the social world. The point is not a subtle one: for Rawls’ interpretation, each citizen possesses ‘a capacity for deliberative reason’ (Rawls Citation2007, 224). But if we read the Social Contract in terms of the Emile, as I think Rousseau wanted us to, then we can see that what he is after is a specific set of constitutive rules that govern cognition. The general will is therefore more than regulative rules or deliberative reason, it is more fundamentally a broader way of conceiving and producing the common interest.
3. Rawls also notes this important point in his reading of the general will as reflecting our common interests, or ‘the fact that our situation is one of social interdependence, and that mutually advantageous social cooperation is both necessary and possible’ (Rawls Citation2007, 225).
4. Tuomela (Citation2013, 13) further insists that this ‘weakly collectivist approach is nevertheless far from full-blown anti-individualism, because it does not regard groups as intrinsically intentional agents, but rather characterizes individual human beings as the only agentive causal motors in the social world. In a nutshell, groups accordingly can act only through their members’ activities.’
5. David Lay Williams (Citation2015, 220), for instance, has recently argued that ‘the substantive content of the general will is derived from Rousseau’s commitment to metaphysically prior values, especially the ideas of goodness and justice, notions found in earlier generations of political philosophers, such as Plato’. Although I agree with Williams that Rousseau’s concept of the general contains substantive value-concepts (to be sure, as I have been arguing, dialectically fused to constitutive rules for cognition), I think these substantive values are derived from his negative assessment of civil society and the particular forms of inequality and dependence that he outlines there. Rousseau’s ideas are therefore sociologically grounded and should be seen as derived from his assessment that interdependent relations that stress individual autonomy (a concept foreign to Plato) rather than dependent relations should inform the substantive values of any will that can rationally and truly call itself ‘general’.
6. See Gilbert (Citation1988) for a discussion of the social-ontological account of the creation of social facts. In terms of Rousseau, Richard Dagger (Citation1981, 367) maintains that we should see the general will as a ‘principle for deciding matters of public policy’ and therefore makes the general will into a maxim for decision-making not unlike Cohen. The problem with this view, as I am arguing here, is that it does not capture the depth of Rousseau’s thesis that a transformation of human social and inner life comes about with the social contract. We are not simply individuals judging issues of public concern, we need to learn to think as citizens, to possess a distinctively republican form of cognition.
7. Tracy B. Strong (Citation2015, 313) comments on this point that ‘[t]he general will is Rousseau’s formulation of the recognition of what it means to live as a human being; that is, to be capable of living with other human beings and as a human being (rather than as, say, a beast, or a slave, of a bourgeois, or a god).’
8. Hence, Rousseau is advocating the ‘we-mode’ form of thought and action that Tuomela (Citation2013, 24) elaborates: ‘the we-mode approach is based on the intuitive idea that the acting agent in central group contexts conceptually is the group, and the members are to be conceptually understood as representatives acting for the group rather than as acting from their own, private points of view. The group constitutes the social identity of each individual “we-moder.”’
9. Iring Fetscher (Citation1960, 124), for instance, argues that ‘Zur Erkenntnis dieses Interesses aber kann der Mensch erst kommen, wenn er zum Bewußtsein eines höheren Selbst erwacht ist, wenn seine Vernunft die “Ordnung” erkannt hat und sein Gewissen ihn dieser Ordnung sich liebend zuwenden läßt’.
10. Cohen (Citation2010, 27) notes this as well: ‘I assume too … that individuals recognize their interdependence. In particular, they understand the dangers they face from the uncoordinated pursuit of particular interests, and know, too, that mutually beneficial coordination is possible.’
11. Pierre Burgelin (Citation1952, 540) notes that ‘sur le plan philosophique la volonté générale, qui est raison, nous élève au monde de moralité et l’être du souverain, efficace, est plus qu’une croyance, une réalité transcendante. Et sur le plan sociologique, le Corps social est un organisme, une réalité naturelle, sinon matérielle, donc plus qu’une idée.’
12. Alfred Cobban (Citation1964, 61) comments on this point that ‘the liberty he attributes to natural man is so boundless, so absolute, that nothing but a complete change in psychological constitution can produce a capacity for political life’.
13. Rousseau is therefore trying to say that only truly autonomous subjects can be aware of, endorse, and actively support the kind of interdependent relations of which they are a part. This is modern freedom. Hence, we can see that Rousseau is emphasizing a new kind of subjectivity, not a new form of communitarianism or group-think. As Charles Taylor (Citation1989, 363) notes, he is making ‘self-determining freedom the key to virtue. He is the starting point of a transformation in modern culture towards a deeper inwardness and a radical autonomy.’ I must add to Taylor’s account that this radical subjectivity must grasp the social conditions for modern freedom, even though the ultimate root for self-determination is always the self. This is why I find it useful to interpret the general will as a form of cognition which takes place within a republican form of collective intentionality grounded in the substantive values of the common interest.
14. James Miller (Citation1984, 62) argues on this point: ‘the general will ideally expresses a concrete reality: the moi common to each in the community, that aspect of each individual’s character constituted by shared experiences and those things held in mutual esteem. Every genuine community, of whatever size or purpose, embodies such a joint sense of self and the possibility of cooperative agency that flows from it.’ Fetscher’s (Citation1960, 120) thesis seems most correct in this context, specifically that ‘Der Rousseausche Gemeinwillen ist keine juristische Fiktion, sondern eine moralische-metaphysische Wesenheit’. I take it that when Fetscher claims that the general will is a ‘moral-metaphysical’ essence that it can be fitted into the social-ontological scheme I have been elaborating here.
15. Andrew Levine (Citation1993, 28) remarks that ‘The general interest can coincide with the welfare interests of particular constituents of the “whole community”'. In fact, since there is an evident (causal) connection between what is best for the whole community and what is best for the individuals in it conceived independently, it is fair to expect that the general interest frequently will coincide with the welfare interests of many of the individual members of the whole community’.
16. Miller (Citation1984, 62) writes that ‘As a reality, thinking and acting in terms of the general will raises to the level of an explicit joint purpose what, in any vital community, already exists as a disposition tacitly held in common. As an ideal, on the other hand, the general will provides a standard of altruistic motives and shared intentions against which to measure the fallibility of self-interested men, who are often unwilling to look beyond their own private concerns.’
17. This is an important point since some tend to see Rousseau advocating methodological individualism or at least some variant of it. David R. Hiley (Citation1990, 170) suggests that: ‘What Rousseau seems to provide, then, is an individualistic account of the origin of social relations – what is referred to in recent discussion as “methodological individualism” – with a socially constituted account of the individuals that result because they are constituted by their relation to the general will’ (also see Levine Citation1993, 26ff.). But on the social-ontological account that I am suggesting here, methodological individualism is not the proper way to understand the ways that individuals cooperate cognitively with others to produce social reality. As Searle (Citation1995, 25–26) comments: ‘The requirements of methodological individualism seem to force us to reduce collective intentionality to individual intentionality … But it does not follow from that that all my mental life must be expressed in the form of a singular noun phrase referring to me. The form that my collective intentionality can take is simply “we intend,” “we are doing so-and-so,” and the like. In such cases, I intend only as part of our intending. The intentionality that exists in each individual head has the form “we intend.”’ This seems to capture more of what Rousseau has in mind: even though he is aware that thought occurs within the subject, he is grasping for a higher form of subjectivity that embraces the collective needs and the good of the relational-totality of the community.
18. Judith Shklar argues that equality is Rousseau’s supreme value since all can agree that it is in their best interest to promote that as a common end: ‘The general will must, therefore, express the fundamental common interests that all men can accept as both their advantage and duty: the prevention of inequality. The general will is a “tendency to equality”’ (Shklar Citation1969, 188).
19. Here I have in mind Gopal Sreenivasan’s (Citation2000, 554) interpretation that ‘the general will is the constrained deliberative decision of the community’. But this cannot do justice to the thesis that Rousseau puts forward since he insists that each must consider the general will himself, therefore implying that it is a matter of the individual to reason the general will according to the value-concepts that make it truly general. For Rousseau, the general will cannot be truly general – i.e. truly in the common interest – if it violates the values of equality, generality or non-servitude.
20. Richard Fralin (Citation1978, 83) correctly notes on this last principle that ‘no one can make the community serve his own interests without at the same time making it serve the interests of the other members of the community … Lack of generality in either case deprives it of its natural rectitude.’
21. As Nicholas Dent (Citation1988, 193) puts the matter: ‘It is a direct implication of Rousseau’s view that the full possession and use of personal sovereignty does not preclude, but in fact requires, following rules which take others into account, and receive their assent, so that there is no loss of personal freedom in the very fact of not being the sole, non-answerable, arbiter of all my projects and actions.’
22. On the intrinsic relation between the general will and the public interest Jean-Pierre Marcos (Citation1997, 96) writes that ‘Seul un principe d’unité peut être dit général. Le lien entre le concept de volonté générale et celui d’intérêt commun ou public est en effet tel, que l’auteur substitue parfois une notion à l’autre.’
23. Patrick Riley (Citation1978, 508) notes that the general will should therefore not be seen as leading to any kind of ‘non-individualism’, but rather that: ‘Generality rules out particularism, not “individualism”; an individual in Rousseau can have (and should have) a “general will.” And this is why Rousseau, following in a Malebranchian-Montesequean tradition, speaks against volonté particulière, not against volonté individuelle. The will of an “individual” can be either general or particular; if a general will were not the will of an individual, that individual would have no obligations qua “citizen,” since according to Rousseau “civil association is the most voluntary act in the world.”’ This view goes against Stephen Ellenburg’s (Citation1975) interpretation that Rousseau is suggesting a ‘non-individualism’ as a descriptive and normative model.