• DOI:10.1177/009059177800600404
• Corpus ID: 150956456

The General will Before Rousseau

@article{Riley1978TheGW,
  title={The General will Before Rousseau},
  author={Patrick Riley},
  journal={Political Theory},
  year={1978},
  volume={6},
  pages={485 - 516}
}

• Patrick Riley
• Published 1 November 1978
• Psychology, Philosophy
• Political Theory

will” (volontk gkltkrale)~ is central in Rousseau’s political and moral philosophy; Rousseau himself says that “the general will is always right,”2 that it is “the will that one has as a citizen”3-when one thinks of the common good and not of one’s own “particular will” ( V O ~ O F Z I ~ partictrlie‘re) as a “private person.” Even virtue, he says, is nothing but a “conforming” of one’s personal volontt particuliere to the public volontt gtntrale-a conforming which “leads us out of ourselves,”4 out of self-love, and toward “the public happiness.”s If this is wellknown, it is perhaps only slightly less well-known that, a t roughly the same time as Rousseau, Diderot used the notions of volontt gtntrale and particulitre in his Dtcyclupkdie article, “Droit Naturel” ( I 755),6 saying that the “general will” is “the rule of conduct” which arises from a “pure act of the understanding”: an understanding which “reasons in the silence of the passions about what a man can demand of his fellow-man and what his fellow-man has a right to demand of him.”’ It is “to the general will that the individual must address himself,” Diderot adds, “in order to know how far he must be a man, a citizen, a subject, a father, a child”; and that volontt gtnkrale, which “never errs,” is “the tie of all societies.”* Now the eminent Rousseau scholar and editor, C . E. Vaughan, traces the notion of volontt gtntrale only back as far as Rousseau and Diderot, without being able to decide which of them was “first” to use it.9 But Montesquieu had already used the terms volontt gtntrale and volontt particuliere in the most famous chapter (XI) of De I’Esprit des Lois( 1748),10so it cannot be the case that either Diderot or Rousseau