Rousseau and Revolution

74 Rousseau and Revolution
indeed the basis for Rousseau’s distinction between the general will and the
‘will of all’. Although not as the mere sum of private interests, the general
will still expresses that which all the individuals have in common – a shared
perspective or a common volition. Accordingly, it cannot accommodate
that in which the individual wills differ. This opens a gulf between the two
that signals the arbitrariness of the bond based on the act of the general
will. What remains outside of the general will is the individual’s ‘absolute
and naturally independent existence’ – the same existence that, on Hegel’s
account of the Terror, is disposed of by state-enforced repression. As we
shall see, Hegel’s civil society is meant to address and accommodate (instead
of repress) the resurging private interest of the individuals in its divergence
from the general will. In Rousseau’s model, by contrast, the fact that private
and general will do (logically as well as existentially) differ constitutes an
element of instability for the social bond: the general will remains an ideal
construct that in the moment of acquiring reality is immediately (and dangerously)
threatened by the possibility of reverting to the will of all. The
possibility that rights and duties do not correspond may give raise to ‘an
injustice whose growth’, Rousseau recognizes, ‘would bring about the ruin
of the body politic’ – hence the need for the additional guarantees of loyalty
required by the sovereign or the necessity of the tacit engagement
clause implicitly entailed in the social compact lest it be ‘an empty formula’:
‘that whoever refuses to obey the general will will be forced to do so by the
entire body. This means merely that he will be forced to be free’ (Rousseau,
1997e, Book I, chapter 7, my italics). The tacit engagement clause expresses
the split within the individual whereby private subjectivity and public universality
remain unreconciled. Coercion on the ground of freedom is a
neces sary choice of the individual precisely because she knows that divergence
from the general will is always a possibility. 7 But this very possibility
sanctions, at the same time, the arbitrariness of the political bond.
The disconnect between private and general will carries over to the beginning
of Social Contract, Book II, where Rousseau establishes the inalienable
character of sovereignty. Only the general will can work for the purpose for
which it was instituted, that is, the ‘common good’. No representative can
replace it. The sovereign ‘cannot be represented by anything but itself’.
While private interests are many and opposed to one another, ‘it is what
these different interests have in common that forms the social bond, and,
were there no point of agreement among these interests, no society could
exist’. Given, however, that what constitutes the social bond is the organic
commonality or the shared perspective of the general will, the problem is yet
again what to do with that in which the private interests differ from the general