Rousseau and Revolution

80 Rousseau and Revolution
6 See Ripstein, 1994 who, however, while stressing Hegel’s distance from Rousseau,
does not explain Hegel’s own articulation of the relation between right and will.
7 For a persuasive reading of this passage see Neuhouser, 1993, 380 ff. (388–9 for
the ‘capriciousness’ of the will in the political institution).
8 While the difference of the private wills among themselves is the problem of the
‘will of all’, the problem of the general will regards the difference that divides it
from the private will.
9 For a different, ‘Hegelianized’ reading of Rousseau on this point, see Neuhouser,
1993, 386, who sees a ‘dialectical’ mediation in Rousseau’s account of individual
dependence within the political order; and 393 where the Hegelian distinction
between ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ freedom is brought to bear on Rousseau’s
relation between individual and general will. In my view, by contrast, while such
mediation belongs for Hegel to the sphere of civil society and not to the state,
Rousseau has not reached a dialectical integration of the individual will within the
whole, that is, there is a residual arbitrariness that ultimately condemns even the
general will to individuality.
10 I endorse here Darwall’s characterization of Smith’s ‘impartial spectator’ as a
standpoint ‘from within’ the other’s moral life (Darwall, 1999, 141 and 147). See
also Nuzzo, 2009.