Rousseau and Revolution

72 Rousseau and Revolution
sign that such association is not a truly universal and necessary unity but is
still dominated by the arbitrary will of individuals or factions. On Hegel’s
account, such associations do not belong to the realm of the state but to
civil society.
The Arbitrariness of the Will: Rousseau’s
Revolution and Hegel’s Civil Society
Hegel defi nes right as the ‘Dasein of the free will’ (Hegel, 1968, R §29). 5 Yet
he criticizes the tradition culminating with Rousseau and Kant that explains
right in terms of the will – as a voluntary ‘limitation’ of the individual will
(ibid., R §29 Anm). 6 Hegel rejects the attempts to legitimate right in terms
of a will construed as merely arbitrary will (Wille as Willkür). Insofar as they
view the will as sheer Willkür, Rousseau, Kant, Fichte and the French Revolution
offer examples of the failure of deriving the juridical and political
institutions and norms necessary for the actualization of freedom from a
will that remains arbitrary. By contrast, Hegel’s aim is to overcome the arbitrariness
of Willkür in a will that is objectively and substantially free. This is,
however, a will that presupposes and requires the state and its institutions as the
basis of freedom. While the pursuit of the ‘general will’ may bring Rousseau’s
project close to Hegel’s, its realization remains, on Hegel’s view, trapped in
the inescapably individualistic structure of the ‘will of all’ because Rousseau’s
systematic starting point is Willkür.
But what constitutes the arbitrariness of the will? With regard to its form
the will is the fi rst, abstract manifestation of subjective freedom. In its selfrefl
ection, the will is independent of and ‘stands above its content, that is, its
various drives’ and the many different ways in which these drives are actualized
and satisfi ed. And yet, since volition in order to become actual must be
volition of a content, the will is also ‘tied to this content’. This, however, is
not taken in the specifi city of ‘this or that content’ but as content in general,
as the possibility of one. The will is the capacity of choosing its own
content, that is, its own determination (ibid., R §14). This structure defi nes
the ‘freedom of the will’ as ‘Willkür ’, as will in its sheer ‘contingency’. The
arbitrariness of the will is due to two dialectically interdependent factors:
fi rst, ‘free refl ection, the capacity for abstracting from everything’; second,
‘dependence on content and material given either from within or from without’
(ibid., R §15). This structure accounts for the arbitrariness of Rousseau’s
general will. But this is also the structure that guides Hegel’s account of the
French Revolution in the Phenomenology. The general will can only will a