Rousseau and Revolution

General Will between Conservation and Revolution 101
We are dealing here with one of the central paradoxes of Rousseau’s
philosophy. The individual must give up the whole of his rights and liberty
to the general will in order to maintain the indivisibility of this will. However,
he can legitimately do so only if, in return, he recovers it all, rights
and liberty. This central paradox is even more apparent in the fact that,
despite the demand of a total alienation, another central notion in the Social
Contract is that of inalienability. More precisely, it is asserted that, while the
general will is indivisible, the exercise of this will, namely sovereignty, is
inalienable. Now, as hinted at by Rancière, it can be argued that it is exactly
because of this indivisibility that the concept of the general will can be used
in order to legitimate a revolution.
Revolutionary Inalienability
Rousseau’s philosophical formulation of the notion of inalienability is that
‘sovereignty, since it is nothing but the exercise of the general will, can
never be alienated’ (ibid., 57). A more concrete political formulation is
given a few lines later:
If [ . . . ] the people promises simply to obey, it dissolves itself by this very
act, it loses its quality of being a people; as soon as there is a master, there
is no more sovereign, and the body politic is destroyed forthwith. (Ibid.)
Here, the notion of inalienability most clearly implies a radical subversive,
indeed anarchist, conception of the concept of the general will. The ‘body
politic’, that is to say, the general will, does simply not exist if ‘the people’
obeys any ‘master’. Now, one might ask, what would that mean more concretely?
What would a society look like, where nobody obeys any master?
A possible answer can be found in Rousseau’s refutation of any kind of
political representation (‘Sovereignty cannot be represented for the same
reason that it cannot be alienated’ (ibid., 114). More technically, the idea is
that, while the executive power can be entrusted to one or more persons,
only the people as such can legitimately exercise the legislative power. The
only legitimate legislative assembly is the whole of the people because ‘the
Sovereign can act only when the people is assembled’ (ibid., 110).
This, however, is obviously impossible. Rousseau himself – despite his claim
that ‘the bounds of the possible in moral matters are less narrow than we
think’ (ibid.) – is perfectly aware of the fact that, except in very small states,