write a brief essay on rousseau's ideas on general will

• Labor Resources
• Political Videos
• NASA Climate Portal
• World FactBook
• Vietnam War Archive

Essay: Rousseau, the General Will, and the Tragedy of the Commons

Image via Wikipedia

Rousseau and the Common Will

Making some sense of Rousseau:

Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was born in Geneva. His mother died in childbirth. He was an engraver’s apprentice when he migrated to Paris. There he met Madame De Warrens, who became his lover and who converted him to Roman Catholicism . His lifelong mistress bore him five children all of whom ended up in an orphanage. Ironic considering he wrote the book “Emile,” a guide to raising and educating young children. He obviously neglected the opportunity to put theory into practice. Nevertheless, Rousseau’s ideas are profound. His writings directly influenced the leaders of the French and American Revolutions . Later, through his extensive influence on Karl Marx , Rousseau indirectly affected the twentieth century socialist revolutions in Russia, China, Vietnam etc…

” MAN is born free; and everywhere he is in chains…” Thus begins Rousseau’s political masterpiece, “On The Social Contract .” Who would not want to shake off the chains and be free? The question is, what kind of freedom is Rousseau talking about, and what are these chains he refers to?

Rousseau talks about two kinds of freedom, the freedom to act and the freedom to enjoy the fruits of action, both of which serve the goal of the preservation of life. The freedom to act is called “free will”; it differentiates men from animals and is directed by one’s desires.

In the state of nature, the “free will” of men allows them to find creative sources of subsistence as the environment changes, and each is free to enjoy the fruits of his labor because he has labored independently. Aside from the realities of everyday survival, his unfettered life is a fairly happy one. This is Rousseau’s myth of the noble savage.

In civil society , however, men must labor together and share their products. Compounding the problem, when men come to work together they begin to see differences between each other and these differences contribute to the formation of leaders and followers. With experience, one learns that those who lead obtain more plentiful shares of goods; so, driven by desires for pleasure, many will seek to become leaders, either by force or subterfuge. Under these new conditions, “free will” leads men to covet the fruits of anothers’ labor. The lack of protection of one’s freedom to enjoy his own creations puts the life of every member of the society at risk, and hence, in the civil society, “free will” has contributed negatively to man’s ultimate goal of the preservation of life.

Rousseau frequently states that preservation of life is the most fundamental goal of man’s actions. He writes,

“Man’s first sentiment was that of his existence, his first care is that for his preservation.” (Discourses, p161)

Rousseau seems to have calculated that the best bet for accomplishing preservation lay in the ability of the general will of the community to shackle the free will of individuals when in the public’s interest.

The “chain” Rousseau refers to in the famous opening line, therefore, is in fact “free will”, which was beneficial for the preservation of life in the state of nature, but detrimental to this goal in the civil society. Hence, for the civil society to achieve its end of preserving life, each individual must agree to forfeit “free will” whenever it comes into conflict with the general will of society. The goal of this is to protect everyone’s property from the desires of others– free riders, thieves and con-men for example. The general will shall be embodied in the social contract, a constitution for example.

The social contract and the civil rights it gives us are neither “natural” nor permanently fixed. Rather, the contract itself is the means towards an end — the benefit of all is only legitimate to the extent that it meets the general interest. Therefore, when failings are found in the contract, we renegotiate to change the terms, using methods such as elections and legislature; John Locke theorized the right of rebellion in case of the contract leading to tyranny. Locke’s use of rebellion was a primary influence on our founders when promoting the necessity of an American Revolution.

Rousseau asks, how do we find a way to get people to live together in groups? How to live together in a harmonious society and yet be as happy as when we were in the state of nature? He suggests that the group must act uniformly, because only through the collective efforts of all could anyone obtain the necessities of life. Accordingly, the decisions of the group must be made by all its members rather than a particular man or group of men. My sense of this is that he has a jury model in mind, whereby all members are forced to hear the evidence, weigh it reasonably and reach a consensus decision. If members are not aligned at the start it is just a matter of extending the debate until the group is swayed in one direction completely*. In this atmosphere, individual will becomes merely a slowly decaying relic to be treasured. Rousseau writes,

“So long as several men together consider themselves to be a single body, they have but a single will, which is concerned with their common preservation and the general well-being. Then all the energies of the state are vigorous and simple; its maxims are clear and luminous; there are no entangled, contradictory interests; the common good is clearly apparent everywhere, demanding only good sense in order to be perceived.” (Social Contract, bk IV)

Ideally people will think of themselves as citizens first and individuals second. They will have no hesitation in obeying the laws of the general will. But people, being what they are, will not always obey the laws thus challenging the general will. Rousseau answers that if one should be tempted or inclined to act on the basis of their individual will in a way that is threatening, or harmful, to the general will, then they ought to be forced to obey its laws through punishment. The misuse of free will leaves the goal of preserving life and property unfulfilled. Therefore the offender “should be forced to be free.” (Social Contract, bk I)**

Granted, it will be impossible to change what people desire, but the goal is to build the civil society with laws such that individuals would not gain the power to take more than what their labor truly deserves. These laws, the social contract, must represent the general interest of the whole people. To have an effective civil society is to have one body with one voice, the unity and consensus of the civil society must be preserved for there to be laws that are truly just.

In the end, in the civil society built on the general will of its occupants, one will be as free as before in two ways: First, although the individual has restrictions on free will, there arises a new individual that identifies completely with the whole of the civil community. To say that this individual is free means that the will of the community is guaranteed. Through the will of the community, which treats all its elements equally, the people of the community gain the preservation of life, which was always the goal of free will. Second, the loss of individual free will is compensated by the preservation of the individual freedom to keep the products of one’s own labor, and this freedom is just as vital as free will was.

Rousseau thinks that this can only happen in a relatively small community. All must have shared values and experience. He mentions the island state of Corsica as being an ideal place for such an experiment.

* By setting the bar for creating laws so high, I fear Rousseau has left his populace at the mercy of the tyranny of the minority. When patience wears thin coercion of that minority becomes increasingly acceptable.

** To be a member of society is to accept responsibility for following its rules, along with the threat of punishment for violating them. Most of us are comfortable with laws punishing behavior that harms people because we are concerned about others harming us and don’t plan on harming others. In this way, society works by “mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon.” However, the philosopher Michel Foucault argued that this is a repressive conception that can easily be turned against the people by unscrupulous masters, declaring that in it we are all “potential criminals”. Indeed, Foucault criticized the standard concept of “criminal” and pointed out the possible interpretations of the relationship between crime, class struggle and insanity — thus, in a world turned upside down, “we are all virtual criminals”.

We learned when Rousseau’s theory was attempted in practice, after the French Revolution for example, that there is a tendency to fear, search for and punish the bad apples who commit non-conformist acts. We observed accelerating levels of paranoia that proved to be the harbinger of totalitarianism, as evidenced by “the terror” during the French Revolution.

Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality

On The Social Contract

Democracy is a commons, not a market.” A commons is an unregulated public resource—in the classic example, in Garrett Hardin’s essay “The Tragedy of the Commons” (1968), it is literally a commons, a public pasture on which anyone may graze his cattle. It is in the interest of each herdsman to graze as many of his own cattle as he can, since the resource is free, but too many cattle will result in overgrazing and the destruction of the pasture. So the pursuit of individual self-interest leads to a loss for everyone

Related Articles

• Ideological Archeology: Rousseau (II) (politeia-station.net)

Share this:

One response to “ essay: rousseau, the general will, and the tragedy of the commons ”.

Pingback: Essay: Rousseau, the General Will, and the Tragedy of the Commons | The Offbeat Detective

Leave a comment Cancel reply

• "There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars." — Jack Kerouac

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Internet Resources

• 99 Percent Invisible
• American Rhetoric
• Antiwar.com
• Arts & Letters Daily
• Bay Area Television Archive
• BBC – In Our Time
• Bracing Views
• Brave New Films
• Broad Museum Los Angeles
• Bureau of Investigative Journalism
• California Labor Federation
• California State Parks
• Columbia Journalism Review
• Costs of War – Brown University
• DarpaWatch – Danger Room
• DiscoverTheForest.org
• Famous Trials – Home
• Filmpreservation.org
• Freedom of Information Act – FBI
• Funambulist – Paris Commune
• Huell Howser – KCET
• Huell Howser Archive
• Humans of New York
• IF Stone Website
• Internet Archive
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Internet Movie Database
• Juan Cole – Informed Comment
• Labor Notes
• LIFE Magazine Picture Archive
• Museum of Moving Image
• National Archives
• National Park Brochures and Maps
• National Parks Service
• New York Radio Archive
• New York Times
• NY Review of Books
• Open Culture
• Science Fiction Encyclopedia
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Talking History
• Ticket Stubs and Concert Archive
• TomDispatch
• U.S. National Park Service
• U.S. State Parks
• UC Berkeley News Center
• University of California Press
• Vietnam: White House Tapes (Audio)
• Washington Post
• Zinn Education Project

Radio on the Web

• A History of the World in 100 Objects
• America's Work Force Radio
• Building Bridges (WBAI NYC)
• FAIR – CounterSpin Radio
• Fortress On A Hill Podcast
• KALX Berkeley FM 90.7
• KPFA Berkeley FM 94.1
• KPFK Los Angeles FM 90.7
• KUSF Univ San Francisco
• RadioLabour.net
• Studs Terkel Radio Archive
• WBAI NYC FM 99.5
• WCBE Columbus FM 90.5
• WHCR Harlem FM 90.3
• WKCR Columbia University FM 89.9

Currently Reading

• The Last Honest Man: The CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the Kennedys―and One Senator's Fight to Save Democracy
• The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War—A Tragedy in Three Acts

Recently Read

• The Vietnam Trauma in American Foreign Policy: 1945-75 by Kattenburg, Paul M. (1980) Paperback
• Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power
• American Maelstrom: The 1968 Election and the Politics of Division
• De Gaulle (Spanish Edition)
• The Dream Life: Movies, Media, And The Mythology Of The Sixties
• Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America
• The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America
• The Constitution As Social Design: Gender And Civic Membership in the American Constitutional Order
• Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity
• The Crossing (The Border Trilogy, #2)

BBC In Our Time

• Hayek's The Road to Serfdom
• Robert Graves
• The Haymarket Affair
• Benjamin Disraeli
• Bacteriophages
• Monet in England
• Fielding's Tom Jones
• The Orkneyinga Saga

The Guardian

• UK court sides with Icelandic firm over artist’s spoof corruption apology
• French military systems in Sudan may break UN arms embargo, says Amnesty
• Fears for spread of malaria in Africa as study finds resistance to frontline drug
• ‘I have lost everything’: southern Africa battles hunger amid historic drought
• South African tiger farms illegally smuggling body parts, says charity
• Mystery surrounds John Smyth after leaving UK and Zimbabwe for South Africa
• Stop ‘draconian’ mass deportations of Haitians fleeing gangs, activists say
• Judge investigating 2023 coup was court bomb target, say Brazilian police
• Evaristos united: namesakes Bernardine and Conceição meet at book festival
• Colombia outlaws child marriage after 17-year campaign

NY Times News Feed

• Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s FDA Wish List: Raw Milk, Stem Cells, Heavy Metals
• Elon Musk Met With Iran’s U.N. Ambassador, Iranian Officials Say
• Techies Push Other Techies to Musk to Join Trump Administration
• Trump Picks Todd Blanche, His Defense Lawyer, to Be Deputy Attorney General
• Lawmakers Demand Ethics Report on Gaetz, Trump’s Attorney General Pick
• How Trump Picked Gaetz for Attorney General on a 2-Hour Plane Ride
• Trump’s Matt Gaetz Pick Unnerves an Already Jittery Justice Department and FBI
• Biden’s Swan Song: A Diplomatic Trip Overshadowed by Trump’s Victory
• What Donald Trump’s Podcast Interviews Conveyed to Young Men
• Liberal Legal Group Positions Itself as a Top Trump Administration Foe

NPR – Talk of the Nation

• The Science in Science FIction
• After 11 Years Behind The Host Mic, Neal Conan Signs Off
• Hopes And Fears For The Future Of The World, With Ted Koppel
• What's The Talk Of Your Nation?
• So Hard To Say Goodbye: Advice For Farewell Notes
• Gospel Legend Mavis Staples Comes 'Full Circle'
• A Look Ahead And A Farewell To The Political Junkie
• What Changes After Supreme Court Rulings On Prop 8 And DOMA
• 'Let The Fire Burn': A Philadelphia Community Forever Changed
• What Changes After Supreme Court Ruling On Voting Rights Act

Follow Blog

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Email Address:

Previous PN Posts

• Ramparts Magazine: Midwife of the 1960s Student Revolts
• Life Magazine Covers The Vietnam War #3 – August, 1953
• Phil and Michael Ochs – Goodbye Columbus
• Life Magazine Covers The Vietnam War #2 – January, 1951
• Stamps, Gold, And Sandinistas: A Short History of Gunboat Diplomacy in Nicaragua
• Dickey Chapelle – Trailblazing War Correspondent
• There’s A Riot Goin’ On
• Light Up For Liberty – The Lost Age of the Smoke-In
• The Punch Card As Symbol, 1964
• Vietnam Era Anti-War Stickers and Buttons
• Life Magazine Covers The Vietnam War #1 – December 1947
• Livy’s Class Warfare – 2700 Years and Counting…
• The Rise Of Freeform Radio
• Henry David Thoreau
• Anniversary: Dien Bien Phu
• The Century Of The Self (BBC)
• Nelson Mandela – Oakland Coliseum Stadium 06/30/90
• The Art of the Con: The Great American Narrative
• “If You Are Going To Try, Go All The Way” – Charles Bukowski
• Cambodia, Kent State and the Kissinger Question?
• Robert Motherwell: Elegies to the Spanish Republic
• Barcelona v. Las Palmas match played without fans amid Catalonia vote
• Drainable? America’s Swamp Has Deep Roots
• George Orwell: From 1936 to 1984
• Tony Judt – Past Imperfect, Present Impotent, Future ?
• La Marseillaise Casablanca
• Christmas Greetings from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade – Spain 1937
• Malle, Moreau and Miles – Elevator to Modernity
• Burning Down The House
• Store and Torrent – Can Solar Batteries Save Us?
• The Stand In The Schoolhouse Door – Integrating The University of Alabama, 1963
• Slipping Into Darkness Again? The Death of RFK
• UEFA Championship: the Generalisimo’s Legacy Lives On
• In Memory, Emmett Till (July 25, 1941 – August 28, 1955):
• The Man With The Movie Camera (1929)
• Hello Michelangelo- Your Conference Call ID# is MDXII
• Chamber of Commerce – The Wages of Sin
• Philadelphia Jazz City – The Great Tradition
• Guns in American Society – No Magic Bullets
• Remembering the Anti-Apartheid Movement in the East Bay
• Forward Into The Past: Utah, In Fit of Nostalgia, Brings Back The Firing Squad
• Sequestration: The Real Enemy of DoD
• Misleading Headline of the Week
• SOUTHCOM chief: Sequestration will bring ‘defeat’
• Momentous Days: March 7-8, 1965
• Neon: the 20th Century’s Sign of the Times
• John G. Morris – 20th Century Little Big Man
• The Mysterious Death of Ruben Salazar
• Pascal’s Wager: Place Your Bets
• Studs Terkel Radio Archive
• An Ode to Woody and Jack
• Billionaires: Don’t Fear The Pitchforks, The Kansans Have Your Backs
• Prelude to Freedom Summer – Hubert Humphrey 1948
• Who Spoke Up? – Voices of Protest Against the War in Vietnam
• Book Review: Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus
• Nixonland: A Colony of Reaganville?
• Toledo Electric Auto-Lite Strike 1934
• Letter from Ho Chi Minh to President Harry S. Truman, 02/28/1946
• Combat Footage: French Indochina War
• Vietnam Notebook: Geneva Peace Conference 1954
• Vietnam Notebook: Geneva 1954 and the Rise of Ngo Dinh Diem
• Pierre Schoendoerffer
• Battlefield Vietnam (Video)
• Vietnam Notebook: The Living Room War – Nightly News Broadcasts
• Vietnam Notebook: First Indochina War, Dien Bien Phu (1953-1954)
• Cold War and the Amerasia Affair
• First Indochina War: Meat Grinder War (1951-1953)
• Vietnam Notebook: The First Indochina War, Early Years 1946 – 1950
• Spanish Civil War: La Pasionaria’s Farewell Address to the International Brigades
• Vietnam: The Battle of Ap Bac, January 2, 1963.
• Vietnam Notebook: The OSS and Ho Chi Minh, 1945
• Vietnam Notebook: The World War II Years, 1940 – 1945
• Vietnam Notebook: The French Mobile Group 100 in Indochina, 1953-54
• Vietnam Notebook: French Armed Forces in Indochina, 1945-54
• Vietnam Notebook: Early 20th Century Vietnam: The Rise of Communism, Nationalism, and Ho Chi Minh
• Vietnam Notebook: – The Easter Offensive 1972
• The State of the Unions
• Vietnam Notebook: Indochina, Fall 1950: The Battles along RC 4
• Sunday Almanac: Battle of Mao Khe (March 23 – 28, 1951)
• The Three Stages of Mao’s Revolutionary Warfare
• Vietnam Notebook: YouTube Video Collection
• Vietnam Notebook: The 19th Century – From Gia Long to Paul Doumer
• Sunday Almanac: Cambodian Coup (March 18-20, 1970)
• Spy Stories: The Einstein Files
• Spy Stories: Reagan, Hoover, Kerr at UC Berkeley in the 1960s
• Joseph Grinnell (1877-1939)
• Vietnam Notebook: Battle of Dien Bien Phu Begins (March 13, 1954)
• William Elphinstone’s Retreat From Kabul (1842)
• Fort Apache Baghdad
• Vietnam – ARVN’s Identity Crisis
• Audio: LBJ and Nixon on Vietnam and 1968 Presidential Election
• The Rapture is Not an Exit Strategy
• Obama’s Win in LBJ’s Shadow
• Remembering Bloody Harlan County
• Red Cloud (1822-1909)
• Limited vs. Total War in American Military Doctrine
• The Battle of Chipyong-ni (February 1951)
• Ode to Kilgore Trout (aka Kurt Vonnegut)
• “Big Bill” Haywood (1869-1928)
• String Theory: The Evolution Of Einstein’s Unified Field
• The Ganges– River in Peril
• The Sokoto Caliphate (1812 – Present)
• Cradle of Resistance: Algeria’s Kabylia Region
• Chief Joseph – Nez Perce Warrior (1840 – 1904)
• George Washington and the Jumonville Affair (1754)
• Einstein Letter – A Glimpse Into Views About Religion
• Vietnam Notebook: Three My Lai Heroes Honored (1998)
• John Rawls and Robert Nozick: liberalism vs. libertarianism
• Thomas Hobbes: the Long Reach of the Leviathan
• Ahmad al-Mansur (1549-1603) Renaissance Diplomacy Moroccan Style
• Audio/Video: The 1960s Counter-Culture Scene
• Audio: Lenny Bruce Comes Clean
• Audio/Video: Famous Speeches of Malcolm X
• Vietnam Notebook: 1962 Diem Survives Coup Attempt
• Audio: Which Direction for the Left in 1968
• Video: Vietnam Peace Marches 1965 – 1972
• Audio: Chicago 1968
• Audio: Mario Savio – “place your bodies upon the gears” Speech
• Audio: The Fall Of South Vietnam
• Audio: How Are You Doing in Vietnam?
• Audio: Dr. Benjamin Spock in Berkeley 1968
• Audio: Sproul Hall Sit-in 1968
• Audio: My Lai Incident
• Audio: 1968 Columbia University Student Strike
• Audio: Madame Nguyen Thi Binh 1966
• Audio: Is Draft Resistance the Answer? Berkeley 1968
• Audio: Soldiers Question War – Feb 1968
• KPFA news of October 31 1968
• Audio: Martin Luther King Jr. on Vietnam 1967 -68
• Audio: Khe Sanh and Tet 1968
• Audio: Battle for Hue 1968
• Audio: Tet Offensive – The Whole World Is Watching (KPFA)
• Audio: IF Stone On Vietnam 1965
• The Binh Xuyen: Order and Opium in Saigon
• Jesse Holman Jones (1874-1956)
• A.P. Giannini: The Man Who Saved San Francisco
• Audio: The Highlander School
• Harry Bridges and the Formation of the ILWU
• Online Book: 1970 US Army Vietnam War Phung Hoang Advisor Handbook
• Vietnam: The Final Statistics
• Timeline: Algeria Since 1945
• Timeline: Vietnam Wars 1945 – 1975
• Photography: The Mexican Suitcase
• Rousseau, the General Will, and the Tragedy of the Commons
• Online Book: CIA Essay on Phoenix Program
• The Dubs Effect
• Online Book: CIA History of Rural Pacification in Vietnam

Search This Site

• 492,803 hits
• Entries feed
• Comments feed
• WordPress.com

• Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
• Subscribe Subscribed
• Copy shortlink
• Report this content
• View post in Reader
• Manage subscriptions
• Collapse this bar

• Ask LitCharts AI
• Discussion Question Generator
• Essay Prompt Generator
• Quiz Question Generator

• Literature Guides
• Poetry Guides
• Shakespeare Translations
• Literary Terms

The Social Contract

Jean-jacques rousseau, general will quotes in the social contract.

Hence, in order that the social pact shall not be an empty formula, it is tacitly implied in that commitment—which alone can give force to all others—that whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be constrained to do so by the whole body, which means nothing other than that he shall be forced to be free; for this is the necessary condition which, by giving each citizen to the nation, secures him against all personal dependence, it is the condition which shapes both the design and the working of the political machine, and which alone bestows justice on civil contracts—without it, such contracts would be absurd, tyrannical and liable to the grossest abuse.

Suppose we draw up a balance sheet, so that the losses and gains may be readily compared. What man loses by the social contract is his natural liberty and the absolute right to anything that tempts him and that he can take; what he gains by the social contract is civil liberty and the legal right of property in what he possesses. If we are to avoid mistakes in weighing the one side against the other, we must clearly distinguish between natural liberty, which has no limit but the physical power of the individual concerned, and civil liberty, which is limited by the general will; and we must distinguish also between possession , which is based only on force or “the right of the first occupant,” and property , which must rest on a legal title. We might also add that man acquires with civil society, moral freedom, which alone makes man the master of himself; for to be governed by appetite alone is slavery, while obedience to a law one prescribes to oneself is freedom. However, I have already said more than enough on this subject, and the philosophical meaning of the word “freedom” is no part of my subject here.

I have already said that the general will cannot relate to any particular object. For such a particular object is either within the state or outside the state. If it is outside, then a will which is alien to it is not general with regard to it: if the object is within the state, it forms a part of the state. Thus there comes into being a relationship between the whole and the part which involves two separate entities, the part being one, and the whole, less that particular part, being the other. But a whole less a particular part is no longer a whole; and so as long as this relationship exists there is no whole but only two unequal parts, from which it follows that the will of the one is no longer general with respect to the other.

We can no longer ask who is to make laws, because laws are acts of the general will; no longer ask if the prince is above the law, because he is a part of the state; no longer ask if the law can be unjust, because no one is unjust to himself; and no longer ask how we can be both free and subject to laws, for the laws are but registers of what we ourselves desire.

The public force thus needs its own agent to call it together and put it into action in accordance with the instructions of the general will, to serve also as a means of communication between the state and the sovereign, and in a sense to do for the public person what is done for the individual by the union of soul and body. This is the reason why the state needs a government, something often unhappily confused with the sovereign, but of which it is really only the minister. What, then, is the government? An intermediary body established between the subjects and the sovereign for their mutual communication, a body charged with the execution of the laws and the maintenance of freedom, both civil and political.

The sovereign, having no other force than the legislative power, acts only through the laws, and since the laws are nothing other than authentic acts of the general will, the sovereign can act only when the people is assembled.

The better the state is constituted, the more does public business take precedence over private in the minds of the citizens. There is indeed much less private business, because the sum of the public happiness furnishes a larger proportion of each individual’s happiness, so there remains less for him to seek on his own. In a well-regulated nation, every man hastens to the assemblies; under a bad government, no one wants to take a step to go to them, because no one feels the least interest in what is done there, since it is predictable that the general will will not be dominant, and, in short, because domestic concerns absorb all the individual’s attention. Good laws lead men to make better ones; bad laws lead to worse. As soon as someone says of the business of the state—“What does it matter to me?”—then the state must be reckoned lost.

In the end, when the state, on the brink of ruin, can maintain itself only in an empty and illusory form, when the social bond is broken in every heart, when the meanest interest impudently flaunts the sacred name of the public good, then the general will is silenced: everyone, animated by secret motives, ceases to speak as a citizen any more than as if the state had never existed; and the people enacts in the guise of laws iniquitous decrees which have private interests as their only end. Does it follow from this that the general will is annihilated or corrupted? No, that is always unchanging, incorruptible and pure, but it is subordinated to other wills which prevail over it. Each man, in detaching his interest from the common interest, sees clearly that he cannot separate it entirely, but his share of the public evil seems to him to be nothing compared to the exclusive good he seeks to make his own.

General Will Term Timeline in The Social Contract

• Quizzes, saving guides, requests, plus so much more.