Rousseau and Revolution

36 Rousseau and Revolution
partial to the extent that they are not universal and are always rooted in a
limited people and place, the general will is broader in scope than the wills
shared by groups or organizations within the polity. Each of these will also
have a sense of the conditions that enable their respective project’s thriving,
but these do not aim to be as general as the society itself. The general
will therefore is also an effort to describe the scope of political identity.
Between the universal and the particular, what is general to a people is determined
by the shared context of their lives. This can be defi ned in the negative,
as Max Weber outlined, when he wrote that people recall that they
share states when they are attacked in war with other nations (Weber, 1994).
It is also conceded as people defend the need for domestic infrastructure,
for roads, technology that reliably allows for communication and transportation,
and for minimizing the decimation of a necessarily shared natural
environment. Rousseau clearly wrote in a world in which the local and
international were not quite as cross-cutting and interpenetrating as in our
own day, but he did still underscore how easily political identities could be
undermined by narrower forms of loyalty. It was very easy, he lamented, for
each citizen to minimize the signifi cance of his or her disinvestment from
political life and to see idiosyncratic individual preferences as a more meaningful
and signifi cant expression of who they were.
Although the general will can at times be reached numerically through
voting, with the signifi cance of an issue determining the requisite scale of
endorsement, Rousseau stresses that ‘that what generalizes the will is not so
much the number of votes as the common interest that unites them, because
in this institution everyone necessarily submits himself to the conditions he
imposes on others, an admirable agreement between interest and justice
which confers on common deliberations a quality of equity that vanishes in
the discussion of private matters’ (Rousseau, 1994d, 149). The general will
then not only frames what functions as law, guiding its efforts to do so is the
larger aim of minimizing the kinds of inequality that would lead to fundamentally
antagonistic interests between members that would make it impossible
for them constructively to see their fates as intertwined.
Finally, Rousseau’s general will, as Jason Niedleman has argued, stresses
two ideas at the core of the very project of democratic self-governance
(Niedleman, 2000). Its content must be willed by everyone to which its
resolution pertains and its substance must be capable of being defended as
the best outcome or as right for all who will be affected. In principle, its
content can be universally communicated. In other words, the general will
holds in tension the requirements that active citizenship alone can, the
need for popular willing, because this is what is understood to be the basis