GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

SOCIETY. IT* NATURE AND ORIGIN 505
moral authority of a society which is capable of the moral
redemption of its members; the uniting agency, because,
Rousseau holds, in so far as men are moved by a rational
desire for the common good, they will all come to the same
conclusions and desire the same ends; the source of moral
authority capable of redeeming
the members of the
society in which it is embodied, because, though it is the
will of society, it is also the individual's own will, so that
in obeying it the individual is obeying himself.
Rousseau, then, thinks of society and in this respect
his political philosophy constitutes an advance upon that
of Locke as an organization imbued by a definite moral
purpose. Locke, it is true, writes much of the common
good and of the part which society should play in promoting
it, but his conception of society remains fundamentally
that of a police State existing for the purpose of protecting
the rights of property. l Locke's State, in fact, confers rights
but does not exact duties. Rousseau, however, conceives
that a man may have duties to the State. He has, for
example, the duty of obeying the General Will; he has
also the duty of willing in accordance with it, of willing,
that is to say, the common good. It is in virtue of the fact
that society does exact these duties, that it performs the
office of redeeming its members by calling them to the
pursuit of altruistic ends.
Truths Embodied in Rousseau's Conception of the
General Will. The foregoing considerations will serve
to introduce the first of the important political truths which
Rousseau's doctrine of the General Will embodies.
. (i) The very fact that the morally redemptive factor in
society, the General Will, is conceived as a will, commits
Rousseau to what may be called a dynamic conception of
society. His community is one in which laws are constantly
being made, if only because his community is one in which
it is constantly being willed that so and so should be done.
Prior to Rousseau, the view that society should actively
1 See p. 493 above.