Rousseau and Revolution

78 Rousseau and Revolution
others that she is able to fulfi ll her volitions and satisfy her needs. This
interaction is the basis of the second principle of civil society, namely, the
‘universality’ that characterizes the action mediated by the reciprocity in
which the individuals are placed (Hegel, 1968, R §182). Although individual
ends are ‘selfi sh’, based on merely personal interests and motivations,
they are also social and inter-subjectively mediated for two reasons. First,
individual ends are conditioned by the relations in which they stand within
the universal context of reciprocal interaction because this context alone
allows for those ends to be realized. Subsistence, welfare and rights of the
individual are interwoven with and dependent on the subsistence, welfare
and rights of all (ibid., 183). The universality of this sphere is neither the
full-fl edged universality of the state in which individuality is fi nally integrated
nor is it the abstract yet communal universality of Rousseau’s general
will from which individuality is excluded. As the universality of the intersubjective
context in which individual interests have priority and are given free
rein, it is perhaps closer to Rousseau’s ‘will of all’.
But Hegel offers a second reason for the social or ‘universal’ character of
individual action and for the mutual dependence that binds individuals to
each other in this sphere. Here Hegel’s argument comes signifi cantly close
to Smith’s peculiar ‘impartial spectator’ 10 position. His point is that within
the sphere of civil society individual selfi sh motivations are acted upon
because they display a refl ective universality that is due to their belonging to
an individual only through their belonging to any other person. Although
the individual is a ‘concrete person’, as a citizen of civil society she is also an
abstract universal; she is one of the many equal individuals. Her motivations
are legitimate motivations in their selfi sh character because they are the selfish
motivations of all other individuals. In order to act as a citizen of this
sphere, the individual is required to recognize such double character of her
volitions – the selfi sh motivation must be recognized as a shared selfi sh motivation.
‘Citizens’ of civil society are ‘private persons’ who pursue individual
ends and actions only by way of recognizing the shared character of their
individual volitions and interests, that is, by projecting their motivations
within the standpoint of every other member of this sphere – recognizing
their own motives in the others’ and the others’ in their own. Individual
ends remain selfi sh and proper to the individual: they are not willed because
of benevolence or because of the broader public good, as is the case within
the higher unity of the state; nor are they required to renounce their particularity
and interest-based nature to fi t the requirements of Rousseau’s ‘general
will’ or to pass the universalizability test of Kant’s categorical imperative.