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that Hegel does indeed offer a legitimate and incisive critique of Rousseau’s
concept of the general will.
Ripstein argues that Hegel’s problem with the general will
is that Rousseau provides no rational criterion to determine its content.
Without a rational criterion to determine the content of the general will, any
content is as good as any other, and is thus arbitrary (Ripstein 1994, 444).
Kain, on the other hand, contends that Hegel’s criticism lies in the fact that
Rousseau’s general will must be distinct from particular interest. By making
particular interest external to the general will, particular interest becomes
heteronomous in Rousseau’s thought and cannot have any ethical justification.
Rousseau cannot accommodate the realities of modern life, such as
trade and commerce, and thus cannot make his political theory tenable in
a modern context (Kain 1988, 345). Finally, Redding locates the difficulty
in Rousseau’s conception of the will as having the form of an individual will
inappropriately applied to a corporate body. By conceiving of the general will
as possessing the same structure as the individual will, Rousseau commits
the error of taking what is objective and universal and making it subjective
(Redding 1996, 221).
I agree with these critics that Hegel does present a substantive
critique of the general will. However, I disagree with their reconstruction
of Hegel’s argument. One general problem faced by every interpretation of
this issue is that Hegel says relatively little about Rousseau’s work. What can
be said must be gathered from a scant number of passages. This situation
leads to the possibility that numerous conflicting interpretations could be
consistent with Hegel’s central claims. However, one criterion that an interpretation
of Hegel’s critique of Rousseau must satisfy is that it gets Rousseau
right. Otherwise, Hegel’s objections to Rousseau are the product of misreading
and they fail to be substantive. I argue that Ripstein and Kain fail to fulfill
that condition—that they do not correctly represent Rousseau’s views in their
interpretation of Hegel. On the other hand, Redding’s interpretation correctly
understands Rousseau’s thought but fails to show why the general will
ends up being arbitrary and nonuniversal. As such it is incomplete.
I offer an alternative to these reconstructions by demonstrating
that Hegel’s critique is based on a rejection of Rousseau’s implicit
social ontology. Rousseau’s social ontology is grounded in his adoption of
Lockean sensationalist psychology. Given Rousseau’s psychological assumptions,
the will must be conceived of as the property of a single unified entity,
as is the case with an individual consciousness. The entity Rousseau has in