The General Will and the Question of Stability

tation—for example, about the level of poverty at which people are so poor as to sell themselves and thus lose their personal independence.

§3. The General Will and Moral and Civil Freedom

1.This brings us to the tenth question: How is the general will related to civil and moral freedom? Rousseau believes that the society of the social compact achieves in its basic political and social institutions both civil and moral freedom. The social compact provides the essential social background conditions for civil freedom. Assuming that fundamental laws are properly based on what is required for the common good, citizens are free to pursue their aims within the limits laid down by the general will (SC, 1:8.2). This is quite straightforward.

The deeper question concerns moral freedom. In his accounting of what we gain from the society of the social compact, he says the following: “To the foregoing acquisitions of the civil state could be added moral freedom, which alone makes man truly the master of himself. For the impulse of appetite alone is slavery, and obedience to the law one has prescribed for oneself is freedom” (SC, 1:8.3).

Similarly, moral freedom consists in obeying the law one has prescribed for oneself. And we know that that law is the fundamental law of the society of the social compact: namely, the laws enacted from the point of view of the general will and properly based on citizens’ fundamental shared interests. So far so good, but there seems more to it than this.

2.Perhaps we have only to pull together what we have said. I assume that all the requisite conditions are satisfied for the society of the social compact to obtain. Obviously Rousseau is not talking about the case when they do not. With this granted, in that society citizens achieve their moral freedom in these respects:

One respect is that, in obeying the law and conducting our civil freedom within the limits that the general will has laid down, we are acting not only in accordance with the general will, but from our own will. The reason is that we have freely voted along with others in laying down those limits, and this holds whether we were in the majority or not (again assuming the requisite conditions). (On this see SC, 4:2.8–9.)

Another respect is that the law we give to ourselves satisfies the condi-

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tions of the social compact, and the terms of this compact issue from our nature as we now are. That is, those terms depend on our fundamental interests, and these are always our fundamental interests, given by our nature in Rousseau’s sense. This is so even if, when we look at disfigured and distorted members of corrupt societies, it may appear that they are not, although those cases are not relevant here. In those societies people may be mistaken about what their fundamental interests really are, though they surely know from their vices and misery that something is grievously wrong.

3. Again, we might worry about the terms of the social compact because of our social interdependence. Recall that this interdependence is one of our basic assumptions in setting up the compact situation. Doesn’t this weigh down and constrict our freedom? Yet for Rousseau this interdependence is also part of our nature. This is shown in some of the attributes he says are necessary to the legislator, as the person who “dares to undertake the founding of a people” (SC, 2:7.3). Integral to his view is that our fundamental interests and our capacities for freedom and perfectibility can come to their fullest fruition only in society, or more specifically, in the society of the social compact. So much is clear even from the Second Discourse.

Another matter that may cause difficulty is the thought that the social compact is an event that happened some time in the past. However, in the case of Rousseau, I do not think he views it—or perhaps better, that we need not view it—that way in interpreting him. Rather, I take a present time, ongoing, interpretation: this means that the terms of the social compact arise out of the conditions that always obtain in a society well-ordered in Rousseau’s sense. Thus, citizens are always socially interdependent in such a society. They always have the same fundamental interests. They always have the same capacity for free will and to achieve moral and civil freedom under appropriate conditions. They are always moved by amour de soi and amour-propre, and so on. This follows this present time interpretation, once the situation of the social compact is set up in Rousseau’s way.

The terms of the social compact, then, simply issue from the way citizens fundamentally are now, at any time, in a society realizing those terms. So following and acting from laws satisfying those terms, citizens act from a law they give to themselves. They achieve their moral freedom.

In conclusion: moral freedom, then, once properly understood, is simply not possible outside of society. This is because that freedom is the ca-

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pacity to fully exercise and to be guided by the form of deliberative reason appropriate to the situation at hand. That, for Rousseau, is what moral freedom is. And it cannot be realized without attaining skills attainable only within a social context: all the skills necessary for language in which to express thought, and beyond that the ideas and conceptions required to deliberate correctly and much else. It is also not possible without significant social occasions in which to exercise the requisite powers to their fullest.

§4. The General Will and Stability

1. There are still questions about the general will we haven’t discussed, and indeed we can’t cover them all. This is because almost everything in the Social Contract bears on the idea of the general will in some way. We should consider two other questions, so I turn to them briefly.

Recall that in the last lecture I listed four questions that must be distinguished in considering any political conception of right and justice, including Rousseau’s: namely,

(1)What does the conception say are the reasonable or true principles of political right and justice; and how is the correctness of these principles established?

(2)What workable and practicable political and social institutions most effectively realize these principles?

(3)In what ways do people learn principles of right and acquire the motivation to act from them so as to preserve stability over time?

(4)How might a society realizing the principles of right and justice come about; and how has it in some actual cases, if any such exist, come about?

We have interpreted the idea of the social compact as addressed to the first two questions. For Rousseau the principles of political right are those that meet the terms of that compact, and these terms require that certain principles and values be realized in that society’s basic structure. The third question is about the psychological forces that help to maintain stability and how they are acquired and learned. The fourth question is about origins and the process whereby the society of the social compact might arise.

In SC, 2:7–12, of the Social Contract we find the curious figure of the legislator (or law-giver), the founder of the state who gives the people their

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fundamental laws. The law-giver is not the government or the sovereign, and because it is his role to set up the constitution, he has no role in that constitution. Nor does he have a role as a ruler, “For . . . one who has authority over laws should also not have authority over men” (SC, 2:7.4). He has no right to impose his will on the people. While he is viewed as having extraordinary wisdom and knowledge, he has no authority for his work as a law-maker, and yet he must somehow persuade the people to accept his laws. Historically, this has often been done by persuading the people that the laws are given to them, through him, by the gods. Religion and persuasion, it seems, are required at the founding of a just state.

2. What is the role of the law-giver in Rousseau’s doctrine? I believe this figure is Rousseau’s way of addressing the last two of the questions just listed. If we look at SC, 2:6.10, we find passages that bear on each of those questions. Thus, Rousseau says:

Laws are properly speaking only the conditions of the civil association. The people that is subject to the laws ought to be their author. Only those who are forming an association have the right to regulate the conditions of society. But how will they regulate these conditions? Will it be in common accord, by sudden inspiration? . . . Who will give it the necessary foresight to formulate acts and publish them in advance?

. . . How will a blind multitude, which often does not know what it wants because it rarely knows what is good for it, carry out by itself an undertaking as vast and as difficult as a system of legislation? . . . The general will is always right, but the judgment that guides it is not always enlightened. . . . Private individuals see the good they reject; the public wants the good it does not see. All are equally in need of guides. The former must be obligated to make their wills conform to their reason. The latter must be taught to know what it wants. . . .

From this arises the necessity for a legislator.

Here Rousseau has in mind the fourth question, that of origins and transition: he is asking how, given the great obstacles that must have obtained in the absence of a free, equal, and just social world, how a society of the social compact could ever have come about. Surely, Rousseau suggests, it requires a kind of rare good fortune in the person of a law-giver. Lycurgus of ancient Greece is mentioned as an example of a historical figure who played this role, abdicating his throne to give his homeland laws

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(SC, 2:7.5). Only such a law-giver will know enough about human nature to know how laws and institutions need to be arranged in order to transform people’s characters and interests so that, given historical conditions, their actions accord with what those arrangements enjoin. And only such a lawgiver would be able to persuade people to follow those laws in the first place.

3. That Rousseau is also concerned with the question of stability is shown in other things he says. Thus, in SC, 2:7.2, he says: “If it is true that a great prince [Rousseau’s term for government as a collective body] is a rare man, what about a great legislator? The former only has to follow the model that the latter should propose. The latter is the mechanic who invents the machine; the former is only the workman who puts it together and starts it running.” He adds: “At the birth of societies, says Montesquieu, the leaders of republics create the institutions; thereafter, it is the institutions that form the leaders of republics.”

Later in SC, 2:7.9, Rousseau says: “In order for an emerging people to appreciate the healthy maxims of politics, and follow the fundamental rules of statecraft, the effect would have to become the cause; the social spirit, which should be the result of the institution, would have to preside over the founding of the institution itself; and men would have to be prior to laws what they ought to become by means of laws.”

And so it is that: “This is what has always forced the fathers of nations to have recourse to the intervention of heaven and to attribute their own wisdom to the Gods” (SC, 2:7.10).

That Rousseau is talking about the third question of stability is clear once we put it in the form suggested by the above: namely, how does it happen that political institutions come to generate the social spirit that would be necessary, at the founding, to enact laws establishing those institutions. For if institutions do generate the spirit that would enact them, they will be enduring and stable.

How far-reaching is the change from the state of nature (the early stage of history of the Second Discourse) that is brought about by the legislator’s work is evident from what Rousseau says earlier in SC, 2:7.3:

One who dares to undertake the founding of a people should feel that he is capable of changing human nature, so to speak; of transforming each individual, who by himself is a perfect and solitary whole, into a

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part of a larger whole from which the individual receives, in a sense, his life and his being; of altering man’s constitution in order to strengthen it; of substituting a partial and moral existence for the physical and independent existence we have all received from nature. He must in short take away man’s own forces in order to give him forces that are foreign to him and that he cannot make use of without the help of others. . . . So that if each citizen is nothing, and can do nothing, except with all the others, and if the force acquired by the whole is equal or superior to the sum of the natural forces of all the individuals, it may be said that legislation has reached its highest possible point of perfection.

This is an extraordinary paragraph. It illustrates the extent to which Rousseau views us as socially dependent on the society of the social compact even though we are personally independent (that is, not dependent on any other particular persons). The powers we acquire in society are powers we can only use in society and then only in cooperation with the complimentary powers of other persons. Think of how the trained powers of musicians reach their fullest fruition only when exercised with other musicians in chamber music and orchestras.

4. What Rousseau says about the law-giver is clear enough once we grasp the two questions he is addressing, admittedly in an unusual way. There is nothing mysterious about the role of the law-giver, however rare such a figure may be.

Taking the question of historical origins first, it is evident that the society of the social compact might come about in many ways. For example, it could happen that gradually over several centuries, through a series of violent religious wars, people eventually came to think it no longer practicable to use force in such struggles and reluctantly came to accept as a modus vivendi the principles of liberty and equality. Religious toleration seems to have come about in some such way. All thought the division of Christendom was a terrible disaster, nevertheless toleration seemed better than unending civil war and the destruction of society.

So later generations may come to endorse certain principles on their merits, much as after the wars of religion ceased, the principles of religious liberty were gradually accepted as basic constitutional liberties. It is a commonplace that early generations may introduce principles and institutions for different reasons than the reasons that those coming later, who have

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