Rousseau: The General Will

In one line

Rousseau says you can be governed and still be free, if the law you obey is a law you helped make and which aims at the good of everybody including you.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: Rousseau seeks a form of association which defends the person and goods of each member with the whole common force, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone and remain as free as before; his solution is the total alienation of each associate with all his rights to the whole community, so that sovereignty rests permanently in the people acting as a body, and the law they make expresses the general will, which aims always at the common interest.

The problem he sets himself

Rousseau's book opens with the sentence everybody quotes and few can place: "Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains." Read the next lines, because they contain the actual project. He says one who thinks himself the master of others remains a greater slave than they; that he does not know how the change came about; but that he thinks he can answer the question what can make it legitimate.

That is the whole book in one sentence. Rousseau is not asking how the state arose. He is asking what would make it rightful.

He rejects two answers immediately.

Force cannot make right. If force alone justified obedience, then the moment a people could shake off the yoke and did so, it would do still better, since it would be regaining its liberty by the same right by which it was taken. An obligation that disappears when the strength behind it disappears was never an obligation.

Nobody can contract into slavery. To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, and an agreement which gives everything on one side and nothing on the other is void for want of any equivalent.

The contract

Rousseau states the terms of the compact himself, and this is the passage to quote: "Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and, in our corporate capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole."

Three features of that formula do all the work.

The alienation is total. Everybody gives everything. This sounds worse than Hobbes and is not, for the reason in the next point.

Everybody gives to everybody, so nobody gives to anybody. Rousseau's own argument is that in giving himself to all, each man gives himself to nobody, and since there is no associate over whom he does not acquire the same right as he yields others over himself, he gains an equivalent for everything he loses, with more force to preserve what he has.