General Will - The General Will Before Rousseau, Jean-jacques Rousseau, Rousseau's General Will, The General Will After Rousseau
revolution concept social
General will (volonté générale) is inextricably associated with the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). While Rousseau appropriated the general will from the theological debates of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, he made the concept his own with the political formulation he gave it in his Du contrat social (1762; On the social contract). Interpretations of the general will since Rousseau have largely been colored by views of the French Revolution (1789–1799) and of the role both thinker and concept played in the ideological justification of the Revolution and assessments of its inheritance.
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The term general will originated in the debates over divine grace and providence nearly a century before Rousseau. The French philosopher Nicolas de Malebranche (1638–1715) first used the term in these debates to explain the divine governance of the realms of nature and grace through general laws as opposed to the notion that God operates through a continuous series of "particular wi…
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), was born a "Citizen of Geneva," a title he used on many of his important works to suggest the challenge his thought posed to the regimes of his day. He ran away from his native city at sixteen, and led an unsettled life for the next dozen years, teaching himself a variety of subjects. He arrived in Paris in the early 1740s, hoping to make a n…
Rousseau's Du contrat social was epoch-making in its argument that law legitimately comes only from the sovereign people legislating for itself: from the general will. Rousseau followed in the social contract tradition of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), John Locke (1632–1704), and others, but sought to find a form of political association in which naturally free individuals can joi…
A quarter century after the publication of Rousseau's political treatise, the French Revolution began, and the fortunes of the general will and the philosopher who gave the concept currency have been forever tied to the epochal event. Revolutionaries such as Maximilien de Robespierre (1758–1794) and the Abbé Sièyes (1748–1836) pressed the general will into service to…
Constant, Benjamin. Principes de politique. In Écrits politiques. Paris: Gallimard, 1997. Diderot, Denis. "Droit Naturel." In Oeuvres complètes, vol. 7. Paris: Hermann, 1976. Originally published in vol. 5 of the Encyclopédie. Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de. De l'esprit des lois. In Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1. Paris: Gallimard, 1949–…
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