THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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the upper classes have disregarded his will, he does not want to engage any new suspicious advocate to distort it. Hence Rousseau's Swiss preference for small states,
small towns, where the public will can declare itself and intervene directly. Hence his mockery of the English parliament and the democratic farce which the upper
classes act out with it. The Genevan's insight is amazing on this point: the English nation, jeers Rousseau, thinks it is free, but is so only at the moment of elections; when
these are over, ‘it is a slave, it is nothing’. The completely new feature of Rousseau's Natural Right is the doctrine of the inalienable nature of freedom; to preserve it and
it alone is the purpose and measure of the true state. And just like freedom in the individual, sovereignty is untransferable, indivisible, irreplaceable, illimitable in the
nation. A person can therefore no more enter into slavery on a contractual basis than a nation can place itself in the hands of a prince: any addition of a contract based
on rule consequently drops out of the contrat social, it remains even more than in Grotius a contract of unification. And Rousseau's great question reads: ‘How can a
state be created in which there is not a single unfree person any more, in which the individual in the community does not sacrifice anything at all of his fundamental right
to freedom’ (Trouver une forme d'association qui défende et protège de toute la force commune la personne et les biens [!] de chaque associé et par laquelle chacun
s'unissant à tous, n'obéit pourtant qu'à lui même et reste aussi libre qu'auparavant? Tel est le problème fondamental dont le contrat social donne la solution [Contrat
social I, 6]). The answer to this tremendous question is understandably less exhaustive, in keeping with the bourgeois class­content; it reads: as relinquishment occurs in
everyone, in the whole community, the individual himself remains an equal part of this totality and gets back from the complete wealth of freedom it has received exactly
as much as he has given up. Through this reciprocity freedom is supposed not to be given up, and the constraint which is adopted by the state­contract is supposed to
be none other than the general will constraining its member to be free (on le forcera d'être libre). This response is as formally arithmetical as it is over­subtle; in concrete
terms it means little more than the guarantee of individual free enterprise by a syndicate of free entrepreneurs acting in solidarity. The general will, the volonté générale,
now becomes as it were only the moral Natural Right still missing in the mere, morally neutral state of nature. For it can only be inferred from ‘Emile’ and other works
by Rousseau, but by no means from the ‘Contrat social’, that man, and consequently the nation, is good at all events. According to the ‘Contrat social’, man in the state
of nature