Rousseau's General Will Is the Idea Behind Every Power Grab for the People

There is a kind of politician who never says "I want power." He says "the people want." He does not rule you; he embodies you. He is not imposing his preferences; he is reading your real ones, the ones you would have if you were thinking clearly, which happen to match his. If you disagree with him, you are not an opponent. You are confused, and he is here to help.

Every conservative has met this politician. What most have not met is his philosophical grandfather, a Genevan watchmaker's son who published a short book in 1762 and gave tyranny the best slogan it has ever had. The book is Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract, the idea is the general will, and the sentence that sums it up is one that should make every free person put down the book and check the exits.

The sentence

In Book I, chapter 7, Rousseau explains what happens to anyone who refuses to obey the general will. He must be compelled to obey it by the whole body, which means, in Rousseau's words, nothing other than that he will be "forced to be free."

Read that again slowly. Rousseau is not being careless. He has a theory behind it. When you join the political community, he says, you put yourself and your rights under the direction of the general will, a collective will aimed at the common good. The person who dissents is mistaken about his own true interest. Compelling him to obey is not coercion; it is a correction, a service to the real self he has failed to notice.

It is a beautiful trap. Nobody can be oppressed, because the law expresses the will of the one who is bound by it. And whoever gets to say what the general will is has an unlimited licence.

Defining the terms

The general will is not the will of all. Rousseau is careful about that, in Book II, chapter 3. The will of all is the sum of private wills, what people in fact want when you add them up. The general will is what the community would want if every citizen thought only about the common good. Those two can differ, and when they do, the general will wins.

Rousseau also says that the general will is always right. It always tends toward the public good, he writes in the same chapter. If it can never err, it cannot be wrong to follow it. And since an actual vote might not reveal it, the real general will might be heard in a minority, even in one man, who sees what the others have missed.

Now we have the three components of every modern power grab: an authority that cannot be wrong, a majority that may be mistaken about its own interest, and an interpreter who decides which is which.

The argument in five premises

Here is the case against it, laid out so that each step can be checked.

1. The general will is, by definition, always right. Rousseau says so, so anything done in its name is justified before the facts are in.
2. The general will is not identical to what people say they want. The will of all can be wrong; the general will cannot. So the visible opinion of the people is not the final authority.
3. Someone must therefore identify the general will. It will not announce itself. A person, a committee, a party or a vanguard will say what it is.
4. Whoever identifies it has authority that no election, court or constitution can limit, because any limit would stand against the general will, which is always right.
5. Therefore the theory authorises unlimited power in the hands of whoever claims to speak for the people, and the more sincerely he believes it, the more dangerous he is.

That is not an unfair reading. It is the structure of the theory. Rousseau's defenders will say he never intended tyranny, and perhaps he did not. But the question for a theory of government is not what the author hoped. It is what the theory permits.

What the Jacobins did with it

We do not have to guess how this works in practice, because it was tried. The French Revolution put Rousseau on its banners within a generation of his death.

King Louis XVI was executed on January 21, 1793. In the spring of that year the Convention created the Committee of Public Safety, which became the engine of what history calls the Terror. In September 1793 the Law of Suspects authorised the arrest of people who had shown themselves, by their conduct or their words, to be enemies of liberty, a category with no clear edge. On June 10, 1794, the Law of 22 Prairial stripped the Revolutionary Tribunal's defendants of counsel and left the court with two verdicts, acquittal or death. Maximilien Robespierre, the Committee's most famous member, spoke of virtue and terror together, and called terror an emanation of virtue.

The theory fit. If the general will is always right and the Revolution embodies it, then opposition is not a competing opinion but a crime against the people. Robespierre was himself guillotined on July 28, 1794, by the Convention that had given him the power, a detail the theory could not explain and every Jacobin learned in person. The Terror consumed the revolution's own leaders along with its enemies, as theories of this kind always do. Within five years Napoleon Bonaparte had seized power and the Revolution that had promised to free mankind from kings had produced an emperor.

Rousseau had also written, in the last book of the Social Contract, that a civil religion should be imposed by the state, with penalties for anyone who behaved as though he did not believe its articles. A man who is forced to be free may also be forced to believe. This is the point the Founders' generation would not accept, and we will come back to it.

The steelman

A fair treatment states the other side first, as Rousseau's friends would.

Rousseau's admirers say he has been caricatured. He was a critic of inequality and of the vanity of the rich, and he was right that a society can be rotten in ways the law does not reach. He insisted that sovereignty belongs to the people and not to kings, a claim the Americans made too. His general will was meant to protect the weak against faction, since a state captured by the powerful will legislate for the few. And his argument that citizens must put the common good above private advantage is a conservative sentiment. A republic needs citizens who care about the whole. The Jacobins distorted his theory, they say; they did not apply it.

There is truth in that. Rousseau did not invent the guillotine. The reply is that the Jacobins did not need to distort anything, because the theory offered them no tool for stopping themselves. A theory that gives no limit on the sovereign has no defence against the sovereign's abuse. That is not a bug that careless disciples introduced. It is the design.

Madison's opposite answer

In November 1787, a Virginian published an essay under the name Publius that answers Rousseau without naming him. It is Federalist 10, and we dissect it in Federalist 10 Explains Why a Large Republic Tames Faction Best.

Madison begins with the problem of faction, which he defines as a number of citizens, whether a majority or a minority, united by a common passion or interest adverse to the rights of other citizens or to the permanent interests of the community. Rousseau's remedy was to abolish factions, to have each citizen vote alone, with no partial associations to cloud his thinking. Madison's reply is that the cure is worse than the disease: it is to destroy the liberty that nourishes faction, which would be as foolish as to wish the extinction of air because it feeds fire.

The causes of faction, he says, are sown in the nature of man. You cannot remove them. You can only control their effects. And the way to do that is not to find the one true will but to multiply interests: a large republic, many competing groups, representatives who refine and enlarge the public view. In the extended republic, no faction is likely to become a majority and seize everything.

Compare the two systems.

• Rousseau wants unity, one will, and no intermediate bodies. Madison wants diversity, many interests, and everyone checking everyone else.
• Rousseau distrusts representation; he wrote that a people who think they are free because they choose representatives are free only on election day. Madison builds a republic on it, as a filter and a brake.
• Rousseau says sovereignty is indivisible. Madison divides it three ways in the national government and again between nation and states, which is the opposite structure. See Montesquieu Warned That Liberty Dies Where One Hand Makes and Enforces Law for the older teacher both Americans and Jacobins read.
• Rousseau's authority is unlimited because it is always right. Madison's authority is limited because it is never trusted. In Federalist 51 he says that ambition must be made to counteract ambition.

The Founders did not believe the people were always right. They believed the people were entitled to rule and likely to be wrong sometimes, and they built a constitution that survives both facts. A republic built on the general will asks the people to be angels. A republic built on Madison asks only that they be what they are.

Where the Rousseau strand lives now

Nobody today quotes the Social Contract in a press release, but the move survives whenever a movement says it speaks for the people against the people's own stated preferences.

Watch for the signs. A leader says the vote is not the point; the point is the "real" will behind it. A government agency says the public did not understand its own interest, so the agency decided. A reform is imposed over opposition on the ground that the opposition will thank us later. A party calls a rival not mistaken but illegitimate. Anyone who disagrees is said to be manipulated, false-conscious, a dupe.

Each of these is a small version of "forced to be free." Each places someone above the ballot, the court and the text, in the name of the thing the ballot, the court and the text exist to serve. Our look at the soft power that never says no, in Tocqueville Saw Soft Despotism Coming, a Power That Never Says No, describes how it feels from the inside: gentle, helpful and unanswerable.

The Founders' reply is in the Declaration's own grammar. Governments derive their just powers "from the consent of the governed", and consent is something the governed give, not something a leader attributes to them. If the people have not consented, then it is not their will, however sure the leader is. We explore the difference in Consent of the Governed Was a Precise Idea in Locke, Not a Slogan.

The Founders' safeguards

The Constitution's structure is the antidote to the general will, clause by clause.

Because no one can be trusted to identify the people's real will, the Constitution does not try. It counts actual votes. It staggers elections, so that no single wave takes everything. It gives the House two years, the President four and the Senate six. It requires a bill to pass two chambers and survive a veto. It protects the individual in the Bill of Rights against the majority, because a majority that can be wrong can also be cruel. And it puts a written text above every official, so that "the people" are bound by what they ratified, not by what a leader says they would have wanted.

None of this is as thrilling as a leader who embodies the nation. That is the point. A government dull enough to be boring is a government unable to claim your soul, and the Founders knew the price of excitement. We see the other side of the case in Madison Explained the Republic Versus Democracy Difference in Federalist 14.

The case in brief

1. Rousseau's Social Contract (1762) says the general will is always right and that a dissenter may be "forced to be free."
2. A will that cannot err, identified by someone other than the voters, gives that someone unlimited power.
3. The Jacobins proved it in 1793 and 1794: the Law of Suspects, the Law of 22 Prairial and a Terror that devoured its own architects.
4. Madison's Federalist 10 answers with the opposite structure: control the effects of faction by multiplying interests, dividing power and trusting no one to be an angel.
5. Whenever a leader says he knows the people's real will better than their votes, the Rousseau strand is at work.

What you can do: read Federalist 10 in full tonight, and the next time someone claims to speak for "the real will of the people", ask him which election he is quoting.