General Will (volonté générale) — A central concept in Rousseau’s political philosophy: the will of the body politic insofar as it aims at the common good, distinct from the sum of particular wills. It appears in The Social Contract (1762), where the act of association has each person place his person and power under the supreme direction of the general will (Book I, ch. 6). Rousseau distinguishes it from the “will of all” (Book II, ch. 3): the latter is merely the sum of private interests, whereas the former considers only the common interest. From it follows Rousseau’s conception of sovereignty: since sovereignty is the exercise of the general will, it is inalienable (it cannot be transferred to representatives) and indivisible (Book II, chs. 1 and 2); and law, to be legitimate, must express that will. Hence the famous thesis, in Book I, ch. 7, that whoever refuses to obey the general will “will be forced to be free,” a formula Rousseau understands as the identity of freedom and obedience to a law one prescribes to oneself, and which touches Kant’s notion of autonomy. The expression circulated before Rousseau, for instance in the article “Natural Right” that Diderot wrote for the Encyclopédie. The critical tradition, from Benjamin Constant to Isaiah Berlin (Two Concepts of Liberty, 1958) and J. L. Talmon (The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, 1952), sees in the general will a risk of subordinating the individual to the collective; sympathetic interpreters reply that it is a principle of formal legitimacy, not a substantive power. See Rousseau, social contract, and state of nature.
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