Rousseau and Revolution

General Will and National Consciousness 37
of legitimacy in democratic regimes and rational willing since democratic
outcomes are what we seek from democratic procedures. Thus the general
will is also an effort to grapple with how to make an abstract sovereign
people present in politics by, as Margaret Canovan has argued, uniting the
individual and collective dimensions of citizenship in the realization of the
general will (Canovan, 2005).
The Case of Corsica
Rousseau clearly argues that the general will is more audible in healthier
societies in which public life is real and primary, with coherent and demonstrable
meaning for its members. As living projects, polities begin to die at
birth. One can prolong their coherence, but even where health does exist
it is fragile and can easily erode fi rst and foremost as people regularly come
‘to view what [they owe] the common cause as a free contribution, the loss
of which will harm others less than its payment burdens him’ (Rousseau,
1994d, 141). Once this becomes a norm, the social bond that was given
public expression in and through the general will ‘is broken in all hearts’
and ‘the basest interest brazenly adopts the sacred name of the public good’
(ibid., 198). Still, in these circumstances, Rousseau insists that the general
will is neither annihilated nor corrupted. It is easily ignored for it is largely
rendered mute. Once the conditions for maintaining the organizing core
of a polity crumble, societies can be mended neither by reform nor by
revolution.
On the other hand, there are general wills that are still emerging or still
in the making. Rousseau considered this to be the case with the island of
Corsica for which he was asked to play the role of legislator. Christopher
Kelly writes that what interested Rousseau in this task was precisely the
island’s reputation as a European backwater, as the opposite of French and
English models of eighteenth-century strong states. Kelly writes, ‘Rather
than seeing Corsica as merely the uncivilized abode of bandits in need of
colonial rule by a continental power, he regarded it as the one place in
Europe still capable of receiving a sound legislation’ (Kelly, 2005, xxiii).
Formerly colonized by the Moors and then the Genoans, the framing
question of Rousseau’s work was how the island could aim to become a
genuinely post-colonial state: how to move it out of conditions of economic
dependence and poverty. He surmised that this would require fi guring out
how to transform its primarily agricultural economy into an asset, most
ambitiously how to translate its produce into international capital. Rousseau