Rousseau and Revolution

70 Rousseau and Revolution
thinks and knows itself and implements what it knows in so far as it knows
it’ (Hegel, 1968, R §258). The substantial will is the interaction of two principles:
the concrete universality of Sitte or mores and the self-consciousness
of the individual. While Rousseau recognizes the former, he does not do
justice to the latter, at least to the extent that the individual still claims an
independency of its own. He suggests that the most important of all laws
‘is not engraved on marble or bronze, but in the hearts of citizens’. Such
law is ‘mores’ (Rousseau, 1997e, Book II, chapter 7). While Hegel fully
agrees with this point, Rousseau’s conception of the general will obliterates
the fact that those customs can only be implemented by the activity of
individuals.
On Hegel’s view, if the state is the realm in which the will becomes real in
its free ‘universality’, such universality is not the starting point – a starting
point established by banning the interests and the particularity of the individual,
who is then ‘forced’, as it were, into the dimension of a communal
will. The state is rather the result of a process in which individuality itself is
‘raised’ (Hegel, 1968, R §259) to its universality or ‘educated’ to the universal
in its particularity (ibid., R §187). In the modern world the accidental
particularity of the individual can neither be negated nor set aside; in order
to make of the bourgeois a citoyen, the accidental particularity of the individual
should be justifi ed, accommodated or mediated. Otherwise, the ‘general
will’ falls inexorably back into the ‘will of all’. As we shall see, crucial to
this process of education and integration is the activity proper to the sphere
of civil society. From the outset, the distinctive function of the state is not to
negate the individuality of the will but to mediate and thereby overcome its
arbitrariness. The individual will that operates and exists in the state as substantial
will is the will ‘manifest and clear to itself’ (ibid., R §258), the will
that knows and acts according to the lived universality of the ethical customs
so that its ‘highest duty is to be member of the state’. To be citoyen is
neither one of the many possible volitions of the individual nor the product
of a merely arbitrary choice (ibid., R §259, Anm.). It is both the individual’s
highest ethical duty and the necessity that fi rst grants the individual a selfconscious
and free individuality. This may indeed sound like a Rousseauian
objective. As citizen the individual does not cease to be moved by particular
and private volitions. Her will, however, ceases to be arbitrary and embraces
the constitutive necessity of the highest ethical duty: ‘it is the determination
of the individual to conduct a universal life’ (ibid.). Only under this condition
is the individual free in a substantial ethical sense. Only in the state is
the pursuit of subjective ends compatible (and one) with the willing of the
universal or with the universal will. In sum, while for Rousseau the state is a