Rousseau and Revolution

66 Rousseau and Revolution
traces spirit’s ‘absolute freedom’ back to the Enlightenment’s notion of ‘utility’,
which expresses consciousness’ relation to the world: anything has
meaning only insofar as it serves one’s purposes. In the world of utility,
spirit gains its ‘absolute freedom’ as ‘universal subject’. ‘The world is for it
absolutely its will, and this is universal will’. Such will is not an ineffectual
abstraction. It is ‘real universal will’ as the ‘will of all individuals as such’
(Hegel, 1986, 3, 432, my italics). This is Hegel’s rendering of Rousseau’s
‘general will’: to constitute itself as real the general will must be the ‘will of
all’ individuals. This is the answer to the problem of the Social Contract: to
bring together what ‘right sanctions’ with what ‘is prescribed by interest, so
that justice and utility do not fi nd themselves at odds with one another’
(Rousseau, 1997e, Book 1, opening). The problem of the general will has
its root in the diffi culty of reconciling the universality of an action in which
‘what appears to be done by the whole is the direct and conscious deed of
each’ (Hegel, 1986, 3, 433) with a utility that can only be the aggregate of
particular contingent utilities. Rousseau’s task sounded famously: ‘Find a
form of association which defends and protects with all common forces the
person and goods of each associate, and by means of which each one, while
uniting with all, nevertheless obeys only himself and remains as free as
before’ (Rousseau, 1997e, Book 1, chapter 6). For Hegel, the revolution
brings to light the tragic outcome of this claim. It shows that the general will
fails to reconcile the demands of freedom with those of utility; and that
instead of rendering the individual free the sovereignty of the general will
achieves only the tyrannical repression of all individuality.
Rousseau’s ‘indivisible’ sovereignty (ibid., Book II, chapter 2) triumphs
on the scene of world history. As Hegel announces:
The undivided substance of absolute freedom ascends the throne of the
world’ and no power can resist it. For within such substance all inner
articulation is abolished. The old asset of the ancien régime crumbles as the
reconstitution of the Estates Generals into the National Assembly abolishes
the old corporative distinctions. The only form of subsistence is the
absolute substance of the general will. Nothing else subsists as particular:
‘negativity has permeated all its moments’. (Hegel, 1986, 3, 433)
The absolute character of this freedom is the dissolving work of negativity
aimed at all particularity. It follows that individual consciousness can be realized
only to the extent that ‘its end is the universal end, its language is the
universal law’, its work is ‘a work of the whole’ (ibid.) – a work that remains
universal and never reaches particularization. Although all particularity of