Rousseau's General Will - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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The non-democratic state: Platonism, Fascism, Theocracy, Monarchy etc.
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By Il Duce
#1684796
I have been reading Rousseau's books and the part which interests me the most is the idea of the 'General Will'. He believes the general will is the will of everyone and those who stand against it must be convinced to follow it. It is the true path to freedom when people work as a collective. This means we must surrender our individual rights to follow this will for our own benefit. Rational law makers dictate the general will and we must obey them.

It makes me wonder, did people like Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini use this idea to support their own political ideals? Is there any proof of this?
By Manuel
#1696302
Naturally. It is one of the cornerstones of collectivist thought, and forms the basis for all totalitarian ideologies.
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By Il Duce
#1696643
That is what i also thought. It amazes me that the main understanding platonism and dictatorship thread doesn't suggest reading Rousseau's 'social contract'. I suggest anyone who is interested in this area to read this book.
By Manuel
#1696647
You should also read up Hobbes' Leviathan.

The only two good works to come out of the Enlightenment.
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By Il Duce
#1697144
Leviathan is a good book, but i find that his fear of human nature (Selfish, power seeking and such) being the reason why we have states and a social contract too simple. I liked Rousseau's idea more where humans were naturally good, but were turned to selfish, power seeking individuals by society.
By Smilin' Dave
#1698635
I'm not familiar with the work, so bear with me. To what extent was Rosseau suggesting that 'General Will' was an almost independent entity? If it were, then that would be where previous regimes might differ, with the leadership claiming not simply to be acting for the General Will, but that the regime itself was derived from the people.
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By Il Duce
#1698762
FROM http://www.quebecoislibre.org/05/050715-16.htm

The General Will

The idea of the general will is at the heart of Rousseau's philosophy. The general will is not the will of the majority. Rather, it is the will of the political organism that he sees as an entity with a life of its own. The general will is an additional will, somehow distinct from and other than any individual will or group of individual wills. The general will is, by some means, endowed with goodness and wisdom surpassing the beneficence and wisdom of any person or collection of persons. Society is coordinated and unified by the general will.

Rousseau believed that this general will actually exist and that it demands the unqualified obedience of every individual. He held that there is only one general will and, consequently, only one supreme good and a single overriding goal toward which a community must aim. The general will is always a force of the good and the just. It is independent, totally sovereign, infallible, and inviolable.

The result is that all powers, persons, and their rights are under the control and direction of the entire community. This means that no one can do anything without the consent of all. Everyone is totally dependent on everybody for all aspects of their lives. Such universal dependency eliminates the possibility of independent individual achievement. In addition, when the individual joins society in order to escape death or starvation, he can be a sacrificial victim ready to give up his life for others. Life is a gift made conditional by the state.

All power is transferred to a central authority or sovereign that is the total community. Major decisions are made by a vote by all in what Rousseau calls a plebiscite that is something like a town meeting without the benefit of debate. A legislator proposes laws but does not decide on them. The legislator is a person or an intellectual elite body that works out carefully worded alternatives, brings people together, and has people vote with the results binding on all. The authority of the legislator derives from his superior insight, charisma, virtue, and mysticism. The legislator words the propositions of the plebiscite so that the "right" decision will result. The right decisions are those that change human nature. The unlimited power of the state is made to appear legitimate by the apparent consent of the majority.

Between plebiscites, the government (i.e., the bureaucracy) governs by decree. The government interprets the laws and settles each case based on the perceived merits. Both executive and judicial, the government is a bureaucracy with huge discretionary powers. The legislator is over and above this bureaucracy. In a total democracy, the real government is the bureaucracy that applies the law to day-to-day situations.

Rousseau was an advocate of the ancient idea of the omnipotence of the lawgiver. Rulers are in some way attuned to the dictates of the general will and able to incorporate these dictates into specific laws. No one can challenge these laws because their source is the wise and beneficent general will. Rousseau permits no disobedience of the general will once its decisions have been made. Man's will must be subordinated and he must abide by the general will even though he thinks he disagrees with it. The person who "disagrees" with the general will must be mistaken.

According to Rousseau, each person wants to be good and therefore would want to obey the general will. It follows that when a person disagrees with the general will, he would actually be acting contrary to his own basic desires and that it would be proper to use force to attain his agreement with the general will. The general will reflects the real will of each member of society. By definition, the general will is always right. The general will is the overriding good to which each person is willing to sacrifice all other goods, including all particular private wills.

The "good citizen" assigns to society's laws a goodness and wisdom exceeding his own goodness and wisdom. It is therefore quite possible to have a conflict between what a person thinks that he wills and that which he truly wills. The good citizen is able to identify his own will with the general will.

If the general will is supreme, then citizens are free only to obey in equal servitude. People who refuse to comply with the general will can be forced to comply. If people want to be good, the rulers can make them be good. Rousseau thus viewed the political community as the proper means for liberating men from their mistaken perceptions and from the conflicts and corruptions of society.

Rousseau's idea of the general will is related to the organic concept of the state as not merely real but more real than the individuals who live within its bounds. What matters is the whole of which the individual is a part. The individual person and his own ideas, values, and goals mean nothing. By regarding human beings as means to higher ends, rather than an end in themselves, Rousseau greatly contributed to the intellectual collectivization of man. It was a small step to Hegel's contention that the general will is the will of the state and that the state is the earthly manifestation of the Absolute. Furthermore, there was an easy transition from Hegel's political philosophy to the totalitarian systems of Marx and Hitler.

Rulers who followed Rousseau's philosophy were able to demonstrate a vibrant but deceptive humanitarianism. They expressed love for humanity while at the same time crushing those who disagreed with the general will. For example, during the French Revolution, individuals like Robespierre were given enormous power to express the general will. Of course, dictators like Robespierre turned the general will into an expression of their own wills. Likewise, today when politicians refer to the good or aim of society, they are almost always referring to the good or aim of an individual or collection of individuals who want to impose their own vision upon others.


This is a short interpretation of the general will, but it gives a decent picture overall.
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By Wellsy
#14946005
I'm trying to make sense what this more than the sum of it's individual parts the general will is meant to be.
Spoiler: show
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/ideal/ideal.htm
In Hegelian philosophy, however, the problem was stated in a fundamentally different way. The social organism (the “culture” of the given people) is by no means an abstraction expressing the “sameness” that may be discovered in the mentality of every individual, an “abstract” inherent in each individual, the “transcendentally psychological” pattern of individual life activity. The historically built up and developing forms of the “universal spirit” (“the spirit of the people”, the “objective spirit”), although still understood by Hegel as certain stable patterns within whose framework the mental activity of every individual proceeds, are none the less regarded by him not as formal abstractions, not as abstractly universal “attributes” inherent in every individual, taken separately. Hegel (following Rousseau with his distinction between the “general will” and the “universal will”) fully takes into account the obvious fact that in the diverse collisions of differently orientated “individual wills” certain results are born and crystallised which were never contained in any of them separately, and that because of this social consciousness as an “entity” is certainly not built up, as of bricks, from the “sameness” to be found in each of its “parts” (individual selves, individual consciousnesses). And this is where we are shown the path to an understanding of the fact that all the patterns which Kant defined as “transcendentally inborn” forms of operation of the individual mentality, as a priori “internal mechanisms” inherent in every mentality, are actually forms of the self-consciousness of social man assimilated from without by the individual (originally they opposed him as “external” patterns of the movement of culture independent of his will and consciousness), social man being understood as the historically developing “aggregate of all social relations”.

It is these forms of the organisation of social (collectively realised) human life activity that exist before, outside and completely independently of the individual mentality, in one way or another materially established in language, in ritually legitimised customs and rights and, further, as “the organisation of a state” with all its material attributes and organs for the protection of the traditional forms of life that stand in opposition to the individual (the physical body of the individual with his brain, liver, heart, hands and other organs) as an entity organised “in itself and for itself”, as something ideal within which all individual things acquire a different meaning and play a different role from that which they had played “as themselves”, that is, outside this entity. For this reason the “ideal” definition of any thing, or the definition of any thing as a “disappearing” moment in the movement of the “ideal world”, coincides in Hegel with the role and meaning of this thing in social human culture, in the context of socially organised human life activity, and not in the individual consciousness, which is here regarded as something derived from the “universal spirit”.
...
Hegel proceeds from the quite obvious fact that for the consciousness of the individual the “real” and even the “crudely material” – certainly not the “ideal” – is at first the whole grandiose materially established spiritual culture of the human race, within which and by the assimilation of which this individual awakens to “self-consciousness”. It is this that confronts the individual as the thought of preceding generations realised (“reified”, “objectified”, “alienated”) in sensuously perceptible “matter” – in language and visually perceptible images, in books and statues, in wood and bronze, in the form of places of worship and instruments of labour, in the designs of machines and state buildings, in the patterns of scientific and moral systems, and so on. All these objects are in their existence, in their “present being” substantial, “material”, but in their essence, in their origin they are “ideal”, because they “embody” the collective thinking of people, the “universal spirit” of mankind.
...
As a result of this process which takes place “behind the back of the individual consciousness”, the individual is confronted in the form of an “external thing” with people’s general (i.e., collectively acknowledged) representation, which has absolutely nothing in common with the sensuously perceived bodily form in which it is “represented”.

For example, the name “Peter” is in its sensuously perceived bodily form absolutely unlike the real Peter, the person it designates, or the sensuously represented image of Peter which other people have of him. The relationship is the same between the gold coin and the goods that can be bought with it, goods (commodities), whose universal representative is the coin or (later) the banknote. The coin represents not itself but “another” in the very sense in which a diplomat represents not his own person but his country, which has authorised him to do so. The same may be said of the word, the verbal symbol or sign, or any combination of such signs and the syntactical pattern of this combination.

This relationship of representation is a relationship in which one sensuously perceived thing performs the role or function of representative of quite another thing, and, to be even more precise, the universal nature of that other thing, that is, something “other” which in sensuous, bodily terms is quite unlike it, and it was this relationship that in the Hegelian terminological tradition acquired the title of “ideality”.
...
It is here that we find the answer to the riddle of “ideality”. Ideality, according to Marx, is nothing else but the form of social human activity represented in the thing. Or, conversely, the form of human activity represented as a thing, as an object.

“Ideality” is a kind of stamp impressed on the substance of nature by social human life activity, a form of the functioning of the physical thing in the process of this activity. So all the things involved in the social process acquire a new “form of existence” that is not included in their physical nature and differs from it completely – their ideal form.

So, there can be no talk of “ideality” where there are no people socially producing and reproducing their material life, that is to say, individuals working collectively and, therefore, necessarily possessing consciousness and will. But this does not mean that the “ideality of things” is a product of their conscious will, that it is “immanent in the consciousness” and exists only in the consciousness. Quite the reverse, the individual’s consciousness and will are functions of the ideality of things, their comprehended, conscious ideality.

Ideality, thus, has a purely social nature and origin. It is the form of a thing, but it is outside this thing, and in the activity of man, as a form of this activity. Or conversely, it is the form of a person’s activity but outside this person, as a form of the thing. Here, then, is the key to the whole mystery that has provided a real basis for all kinds of idealistic constructions and conceptions both of man and of a world beyond man, from Plato to Carnap and Popper. “Ideality” constantly escapes, slips away from the metaphysically single-valued theoretical fixation. As soon as it is fixed as the “form of the thing” it begins to tease the theoretician with its “immateriality”, its “functional” character and appears only as a form of “pure activity”. On the other hand, as soon as one attempts to fix it “as such”, as purified of all the traces of palpable corporeality, it turns out that this attempt is fundamentally doomed to failure, that after such a purification there will be nothing but phantasmal emptiness, an indefinable vacuum.

And indeed, as Hegel understood so well, it is absurd to speak of “activity” that is not realised in anything definite, is not “embodied” in something corporeal, if only in words, speech, language. If such “activity” exists, it cannot be in reality but only in possibility, only potentially, and, therefore, not as activity but as its opposite, as inactivity, as the absence of activity.

So, according to Hegel, the “spirit”, as something ideal, as something opposed to the world of corporeally established forms, cannot “reflect” at all (i.e., become aware of the forms of its own structure) unless it preliminarily opposes “itself to itself”, as an “object”, a thing that differs from itself.
..
Consciousness only arises where the individual is compelled to look at himself as if from the side – as if with the eyes of another person, the eyes of all other people – only where he is compelled to correlate his individual actions with the actions of another man, that is to say, only within the framework of collectively performed life activity. Strictly speaking, it is only here that there is any need for WILL, in the sense of the ability to forcibly subordinate one’s own inclinations and urges to a certain law, a certain demand dictated not by the individual organics of one’s own body, but by the organisation of the “collective body”, the collective, that has formed around a certain common task.


But there is apparently reason to make a distinction between the social and the collective, where collectivity is characterized by a correlation of what is the same in all individuals whilst ignoring their differences (abstract universal). But as expressed above in Ilyenkov's summary of Hegel on par with Rousseau's general will, it is not the sum of the same but something different.
Spoiler: show
[url]https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/1925/art1.htm[/ur;]
Bekhterev claims that “... obviously, the psychology of individuals is not suitable for explaining social movements. ...” The same view is held by other social psychologists (like McDougall, Le Bon, Freud, et al.), who regard the social psyche as secondary, originating from the psyche of the individual. They assume that there is a special individual psyche and that from the interaction of individual psyches or psychologies there arises a collective psyche or psychology common to all individuals Thus, social psychology is regarded as the psychology of a collective individual, in the same way that a crowd is made up of single individuals, even though it has a supra-individual psychology. We see that non-Marxist social psychology has a primitive empirical approach to the social entity, regarding it as a crowd, a collective entity, a relation between individuals or persons. Society is taken to be an association of people, and it is regarded as an accessory activity of one individual. These psychologists do not admit that somewhere, in a remote and intimate corner of his thought, his feelings, etc., the psyche of an individual is social and socially conditioned. It is easy to show that the subject of social psychology is precisely the psyche of the single individual. Chelpanov’s view, frequently quoted by others, according to which specifically Marxist psychology is a social psychology that studies the genesis of ideological forms according to a specifically Marxist method, involving the study of the origin of given forms based on the social economy, is incorrect. Equally incorrect is his view that empirical and experimental psychology cannot become Marxist, any more than mineralogy, physics, chemistry, etc., can. To corroborate his view, Chelpanov refers to Chapter VIII of Plekhanov’s Fundamental Problems of Marxism, in which the author expounds the origin of ideologies. The exact opposite is more likely to be true, namely that only the individual (i.e., the empirical and experimental) psychology can become Marxist.

Indeed, how can we distinguish social psychology from individual psychology if we deny the existence of a popular soul, a popular spirit, and so forth? Social psychology studies precisely the psyche of the single individual, and what he has in his mind. There is no other psyche to study. The rest is either metaphysics or ideology; hence, to assert that this psychology cannot become Marxist (i.e., social), just as mineralogy and chemistry cannot become Marxist, is tantamount to not understanding Marx’s fundamental statement which says that “man in the most literal sense is a zoon politicon (social animal – Aristotle), an animal to whom social intercourse is not only peculiar but necessary in order to stand out as a single individual.” To assume the psyche of the single individual (the object of experimental and empirical psychology) to be as extrasocial as the object of mineralogy, means to assume a position diametrically opposed to Marxism. Of course, physics, chemistry, mineralogy, and so on, can be either Marxist or anti-Marxist if we take science to be not only a bare listing of facts, a catalogue of relationships and functions but a systematized knowledge of the world in its entirety.
...
The difference becomes self evident if we consider the psyche of the single individual as the subject of social psychology. It is obvious that the subject of individual psychology coincides with that of differential psychology, the task of which is the study of individual differences in single individuals. The concept of general reflexology, as opposed to Bekhterev’s collective reflexology, also completely coincides with this. “In this respect there is a certain relation between the reflexology of the single individual and collective reflexology; the former aims at clarifying the peculiarities of the single individual, tries to find differences in the individual mentalities of persons, and show the reflexological basis of these differences, while collective reflexology, which studies mass or collective manifestations of correlative activity, is essentially aimed at clarifying how social products of a correlative activity are obtained by the correlation between single individuals in social groups and by smoothing away their individual differences.”

It is obvious that we are dealing here with differential psychology in the precise acceptance of that term. What, then, is the subject of collective psychology as such? There is a simple answer to this question: Everything within us is social, but this does not imply that all the properties of the psyche of an individual are inherent in all the other members of this group as well. Only a certain part of the individual psychology can be regarded as belonging to a given group, and this portion of individual psychology and its collective manifestations is studied by collective psychology when it looks into the psychology of the army, the church, and so on.

Thus, instead of distinguishing between social and individual psychology, we must distinguish between social and collective psychology. The difference between social and individual psychology in aesthetics appears to be the same as that between normative and descriptive aesthetic because, as shown quite correctly by Münsterberg, historical aesthetics was connected with social psychology, and normative aesthetics with individual psychology.

My impression is that in Ilyenkov's 'Concept of the Ideal' which expresses that Hegel takes a novel/different approach to the idealism vs materialism difference of that which exists only in consciousness and that which exists outside it also. I don't yet really comprehend Ilyenkov's work nor Hegel, but it excited me greatly when I read it and I can tell there is some rich content in it to be drawn out if we're to make a sensible conception of Rousseau's general will.
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