Rousseau and Revolution

Chapter 4
Arbitrariness and Freedom: Hegel on
Rousseau and Revolution
Angelica Nuzzo
Introduction
In a remark to Philosophy of Right (1821), §258, introducing the structure of
the state as the highest dimension of ethical life, Hegel turns to Rousseau.
While stressing Rousseau’s ‘merit’ in establishing the ‘principle’ of the state
in the rationality of the will, Hegel’s judgement entails a puzzling criticism
that misses Rousseau’s point. On Hegel’s view, the fl aw of his theory consists
in conceiving of ‘the will only in the determinate form of the individual
will’. For, in Hegel’s rendering of Rousseau’s position, the ‘universal will’ is
only the will as made up of many individuals (Hegel, 1968, R §258 Anm.).
This judgement has been variously regarded as unfair, plainly wrong or
even ‘outrageous’. 1 It seems to covey Hegel’s misunderstanding of the doctrine
of the Social Contract. After all, Rousseau’s main point is to establish
the structure of a truly ‘general will’ (volonté générale) as the instituting principle
of the state. This he radically distinguishes both from the aggregate
which is the ‘will of all’ (volonté de tous) and from the private will of the individual.
Nothing seems farther from Rousseau’s intention than the outright
identifi cation of the general with the individual will suggested by Hegel.
In the Jena Philosophy of Spirit of 1805–6, and then in the chapter on ‘Absolute
Freedom and Terror’ in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), and fi nally in
the Lectures on the Philosophy of History Hegel offers yet another appraisal of
Rousseau’s philosophy. He sees him, this time, as the spiritual father of the
French Revolution in a sense, however, quite different from the one given to
that paternity by the French Jacobins. 2 Hegel considers the 1789 revolution
and the ensuing Terror as the direct political consequence of Rousseau’s
notion of the absolute freedom of a will that being merely individual is also
entirely arbitrary. In this framework, the development of the revolution
from the constitutionalism of the National Assembly of 1789 to the Terror
of the Jacobin dictatorship of 1793 is viewed as the necessary political and