General Will Essay -- Philosophy, Rousseau

The enigma is to find a norm of association which will defend and cling to with the whole common force the person and goods of separately associate, and in which each, charm uniting himself with tout ensemble, whitethorn still obey himself alone, and remain as dethaw as before.Rousseau (1762)a, ll. 57bThus Jean-Jacques Rousseau sets out his aim, and quite a terrible aim it is. He hopes to establish an appropriate norm of association (i.e. consanguinity between individual and state) in which all individuals and their possessions ar protected, to the greatest outcome possible, by the state (or body politic) each individual gives himself wholly to the full general cause of the state and all individuals act freely and of their own volition. It should be noted here that the state, in Rousseaus picture of things, is constituted wholly and exclusively of the individuals subject to these criteria. There is no separate institutional government whose members shed a materially diff erent relationship to the whole, and so the people are simultaneously the holders of power and the legal subjects in the body politic. In the designer capacity they are referred to by Rousseau as citizens, and the active group do up by them is called the sovereign, a public person, formed by the union of all other persons (l. 41). Rousseau sums up the stipulations of his solution succinctly thus the essential alienation of each associate, together with all his rights, to the whole community (ll. 1718). This is not intended to be as unilateral as it may sound. The key concept that brings together Rousseaus social contract theory is the bifurcation of each state members resolve into the general will and the individual will the characteristic being most importantly that the g... ...es with Rousseauist hallmarks have historically existed does not broom the debate, since these societies generally confirm rather than alleviate my doubts. Those groups that existed before Rousseaus t ime were eer small to very small, this being the only environment in which I find his propositions at all practicable. In those larger scale policy-making systems influenced by Rousseau, such as Marxist communismf and the totalitarianism of Adolf Hitlers Nazi partyg, on that point is evidence of some of the flaws mentioned above coming to the fore the propagandist Nuremberg Rallies, for example, could be seen as broad manipulation of the general will and little defensive measure of the claim that each member of such societies obeys himself alone, and remains as free as before. At least, not free in the way that we would understand the term in the twentyfirst century.