Rousseau and Revolution

Arbitrariness and Freedom 75
will. 8 Although Rousseau seems to sidestep the problem and concentrate on
the necessity and suffi ciency of some agreement as the condition for the social
bond (whereby at stake is not a common interest but the decision to endorse
a common perspective for deliberation), he is aware of the contingency and
arbitrariness that undermines such agreement precisely because of the persisting
difference between general and private will. He recognizes that ‘while
it is not impossible for a private will to be in accord on some point with the
general will, it is impossible at least for this accord to be durable and constant ’.
Rousseau recognizes that ‘chance’ (ibid., Book II, chapter 1, my italics) presides
on the accord between individual and general will rendering the social
bond a union that remains fundamentally arbitrary and accidental.
In addressing the question of ‘whether the general will can err’, Rousseau
returns to this issue: ‘There is often a great deal of difference between the
will of all and the general will. The latter considers only the general interest,
whereas the former considers private interest and is merely the sum of
private wills’. And yet, the general interest must result from the arithmetic
process of canceling out ‘the pluses and minuses’ among the private wills so
that ‘what remains as the sum of the differences is the general will’. This is
Rousseau’s rationalization of the contingency of the political bond in which
differences need to be accommodated. Difference plays a role on two levels.
At stake is fi rst the private, contingent difference that separates the many
individual interests – to accommodate this difference is occasionally possible
and is the problem of the ‘will of all’. But there is also the structural,
unavoidable difference that separates the private will from the general
will – such difference cannot be accommodated but only overcome by the
arbitrary decision of the private will that makes itself general. Even this act,
however, does not guarantee the permanent coincidence between the individual
and the universal – the need for the tacit engagement clause is a
clear sign thereof. The point of Rousseau’s arithmetic explanation seems to
be that while in the ‘will of all’ private disagreements must cancel each
other out, for action is possible only if some agreement is reached, in the
case of the general will differences do not need to disappear (because in
fact they don’t) but be only rendered ineffectual. Individuals must agree
that despite all private divergence they can still agree about how to resolve
their disagreements (see Ripstein, 1992, 55). In the general will, individual
differences are maintained but not allowed to become grounds for decision.
On Hegel’s view, this is the point of Rousseau’s construction that is still
at the mercy of pure arbitrariness. For this is precisely what Willkür does: it
proves its freedom by making abstraction from all determinate content and
simply willing the universal. Ultimately, however, that private differences do