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Understanding the General Will Richard Dagger University of Richmond, Rdagger@Richmond.Edu University of Richmond UR Scholarship Repository Political Science Faculty Publications Political Science 9-1981 Understanding the General Will Richard Dagger University of Richmond, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.richmond.edu/polisci-faculty-publications Part of the Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons Recommended Citation Dagger, Richard. "Understanding the General Will." Western Political Quarterly 34, no. 3 (September 1981): 359-71. doi: 10.2307/ 447216. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Political Science at UR Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Political Science Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of UR Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. UNDERSTANDING THE GENERAL WILL RICHARD DAGGER Arizona State University EW CONCEPTS in the historyof politicalthought have proved so troublesome as Rousseau's notion of the general will. Rousseau must bear much of the blame for this, of course, for the discussion of the general will in his Social Contractis uncharacteristicallyterse and abstract. Troublesome as it has been, though, there is reason to believe that we are now approaching an adequate understanding of the general will. I say this because there seems to be growing agreement among Rousseau's commen- tatorsthat the general will not only can be understood,but that it can best be understood in rationalisticterms.' Indeed, where explications once were couched in termsof "real" and "higher" wills,one is now more likelyto find the general will explained in terms of the prisoners' dilemma and Pareto- optimality.2 While I do not accept all of these rationalisticreadings of the general will, I do share the general convictionthat we can make sense of Rousseau's concept, and his argument,without resorting to metaphysicsor psychology. What I shall offerhere, accordingly,is in some respectsonly a variationon a theme now well known to studentsof Rousseau's politicalphilosophy. It is an importantvariation nonetheless, for it enables us to reconcile passages in the Social Contractwhich otherwiseappear to be contradictory.That, at least, is what I shall argue in this essay. I proceed in the followingmanner. First I set out a general account of what Rousseau means by "the general will"- an account which resembles in its main lines, if not all its details, Brian Barry's analysis of the general will.3 This account is defended in the second part of the essay, where I show how it helps us to understand two of the more controversialaspects of Rousseau's argument in the Social Contract.In part three I extend this account (and provide the variationmentioned in the last paragraph) by drawing a distinc- tion, implicitand almost unmarked in Rousseau's writings,between thegen- eral will and a general will. With the aid of this distinction,I argue, we can make sense of Rousseau's baffling and apparently contradictoryremarks about voting. Once this is demonstrated, I conclude by raising some ques- tions about the utilityof the concept of the general will. NOTE: I wish to thank Terence Ball, Peter Fuss, C. B. Macpherson, and thisjournal's anony- mous referees for their valuable commentson earlier draftsof this paper. 'I include the following,inter alia, in this category:Glen Allen, "La Volontede tousand La Volonte generale:A Distinctionand Its Significance,"Ethics 71 Uuly 1961): 263-75; George Kateb, "Aspects of Rousseau's Political Thought," PoliticalScience Quarterly 76 (December 1961): 519-43; James McAdam, "What Rousseau Meant by the General Will," Dialogue 5 (1967): 498-515; Roger Masters,The PoliticalPhilosophy of Rousseau (Princeton: Princeton Univer- sityPress, 1968), esp. pp. 323-35; and JudithShklar, Men and Citizens:A Studyof Rousseau's Social Theory(Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1969), esp. pp. 184-97. Further examples of rationalisticreadings of the general will are cited in the next two footnotes. 2 For an explanation of the general will in termsof the prisoners'dilemma, see W. G. Runciman and A. K. Sen, "Games, Justice and the General Will," Mind 74 (1965): 554-62; for an explanation in terms of Pareto-optimality,see Virginia Held, The Public Interestand Indi- vidual Interests(New York: Basic Books, 1970), pp. 99-107. Brian Barry, "The Public Interest," in Political Philosophy,ed. Anthony Quinton (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1967), esp. pp. 119-26. For similar interpretations,see Andrew Levine, The Politicsof Autonomy:A Kantian Reading of Rousseau'sSocial Contract(Amherst, Mass.: Universityof Massachusetts Press, 1976), pp. 40-43, and John Charvet, The Social Problemin the Philosophyof Rousseau (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1974), chapter 4. 360 WesternPolitical Quarterly I The idea of the general will rests on a fundamentaldistinction between two aspects of a person. Everyone,in Rousseau's view, may be thoughtof as both a man - an actual, identifiableperson - and a citizen. Insofar as we are men, we are each unique; each of us, that is, has his own particular identityand set of interests.Insofar as we are citizens,however, we are alike in thatwe are membersof the public; and as membersof the public we share a common interest in the welfare of the body politic. Everyone, con- sequently,has both a particularinterest as a man and a general interestas a citizen. From the distinctionbetween man and citizen Rousseau moves to a correspondingdistinction between the particularor privatewill and the gen- eral will. The private will aims at the fulfillmentof the particularinterest of a man, an actual individual,while the general will seeks to furtherthe inter- est of the citizen. Since the interestsof all citizensare the same, the object of the general will may be said to be the common good or public interest- that is, the interestwe all share as members of the public. Rousseau distinguishes the private fromthe general will in this manner: "the privatewill tends by its nature toward preferences,and the general will toward equality." (II,1:59.)4 As men withprivate wills, we naturallytend to grant precedence to our own interestsand desires. The private will is partial both because it is the will of an identifiable individual, one who is only part of the body politic, and because it is biased: it places a higher value on the interestsof the self than on the interestsof others. The general will, in contrast,tends to equality because it necessarilygrants equal consideration to everyone's interests;or, at least, to everyone withinthe body politic. Because it focuses on the com- mon interestwe share as citizens, the general will is impartial:it considers only the interestsof the abstractperson Rousseau calls the citizen. Since we are all the same qua citizen,the general will is devoted equally to all. An example may help to clarifythis distinction.Consider the case of someone who has the abilityto be an unusually adept burglar. Such a person may well find it in his interest,as a man, to put his skills to use. His private will may then be to steal fromothers in order to satisfyhis own desires. The general will,however, directs our potentialburglar to obey the law. Since it is the will of the citizen, the general will requires us to ignore at times our particular interestsand personal attributes- our possessions, our position in society,our abilities- and to think of ourselves onlyas members of the public. Laws against burglary are in the interestsof all citizens, if not all men; and if our potentialburglar thinksof himselfonly as a citizen,he will recognize that he ought to respect the law. As I understand it, then, the general will performs much the same functionas John Rawls's "veil of ignorance."5 Rawls argues that a hypotheti- cal social contract will produce generally acceptable principles of justice if the parties to that hypotheticalcontract choose these principlesfrom a prop- erly defined "initialsituation." The main feature of this situationis the "veil of ignorance,"which deprives the parties to the contractof most informnation about their personal identities.More precisely,the parties do not know what their socioeconomic positions are, what abilities or disabilitiesthey have, or 4All citations in parentheses refer to the book, chapter, and page number in On the Social Contract,ed. Roger Mastersand trans.Judith Masters (New York: St. Martin'sPress, 1978). The reference here is to Book II, chapter one, page 59. 5See John Rawls, A Theoryof Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UniversityPress, 1971), ?24, "The Veil of Ignorance." Understandingthe General Will 361 even what their particular aspirations happen to be. Thus Rawls asks the individual to blind himselfto his private interestsand to assume an abstract identityso that the principles he choosesfor all will be acceptable to all. Behind the veil of ignorance, Rawls points out, "No one knows his situation in societynor his natural assets,and thereforeno one is in a position to tailor principles to his advantage."6 In this way the veil of ignorance forces the parties to the contract to adopt a common viewpoint; or, to put it in Rous- seau's terms, the veil of ignorance leads the parties to promote their com- mon interestas citizensrather than theirprivate interests as men. The terms are different,but the point is much the same. There is also a moral dimension to the general will,just as there is to the veil of ignorance. Rousseau does not invoke the general will simply as a counterweightto selfishinterests. This would be futile,for one's interestas a man may well outweigh one's interestas a citizen. An industrialistmay find, for instance, that when all things are considered it is not in his interestto installpollution-inhibiting devices in his smokestacks,even though it is in his interestas a citizen to reduce air pollution. Rousseau's claim, however,is that in some cases we ought to consider onlyour interestsas citizens.The purpose of the general will, therefore,is to provide a principle which will lead to just public policy.
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