Rousseau and Revolution

Arbitrariness and Freedom 71
universal indivisible unity because it is instituted by the general will, for
Hegel the will becomes universal because in its particularity it embraces the
ethical life of the state. The grounding relation between the will and the political
institutions or the starting point of the constitution of the state is the
opposite for Hegel and Rousseau.
For Hegel, Rousseau’s ‘general will’ has the merit of attempting to overcome
the utilitarian conceptions that base the state on the private interests
of its subjects. The state is dissolved if it is reduced to an aggregate of individuals
that holds together only contingently on the basis of the common
interests of the moment. And yet, in the end, Rousseau’s general will does
not deliver on its promise. His position is ultimately indistinguishable from
the individualist identifi cation of state and civil society and the necessity of
the political bond is undermined by the arbitrariness that institutes it. As a
consequence, Rousseau’s theory ushers in the ‘most terrible and drastic
event’ in world-history, namely, the French Revolution.
In his attempt to eliminate the dominance of particularity and yet to
propose a new dimension in which the individual can fi nd her true freedom,
Rousseau chooses the radical – and highly un-dialectical – path which
eventually dooms his entire project leading him to the opposite result of
establishing the tyranny of abstract individuality. To reach the universal of
the state the individual must be negated in her distinctive subjective particularity
and transformed into the general will. From this, however, it follows
that the general will is either the unreal, pure abstract promise of an
equality in which all individuality and difference is erased – and in this
case, on Hegel’s view, it simply expresses that which all individuals have in
common, it is merely the ‘Gemeinschaftliches’ among them. Or the general
will is nothing but the still deeply contingent aggregate of the ‘will of all’.
In both cases the result is the same. As effective political principle, the general
will is the purely abstract, arbitrary and negative work of individuality.
A clear sign that this is the case is the fact that Rousseau’s political unity is
held together by the juridical relation of a ‘contract, which is accordingly
based on the individuals’ arbitrary will and opinions, and on their express
consent given at their own discretion’ (ibid.; on Rousseau’s peculiar contractualism
see Ripstein, 1992, 61–2). Hegel’s point here is not only that a
contractual bond, being an arbitrary act of the will only establishes arbitrary
relations among individuals. The further claim is that the general will
needs to be consecrated by a contractual relation because its unity is the
merely accidental aggregate of individual wills. In other words, (1) no social
contract can produce the organic universality of the state, and, (2) if an
association of individuals needs to be formalized by a contract this is a clear