Excerpt:
No one has ever doubted that the notion of the “general will” (volonte generale) is central in Rousseau’s political and moral philosophy; Rousseau himself says that “the general will is always right,”- that it is “the will that one has as a citizen”-when one thinks of the common good and not of one’s own “particular will” (volonte particuliere) as a “private person.” Even virtue, he says, is nothing but a “conforming” of one’s personal volonte particuliere to the public volonte generale conforming which “leads us out of ourselves,”4 out of self-love, and toward “the public happiness.” If this is well- known, it is perhaps only slightly less well-known that, at roughly the same time as Rousseau, Diderot used the notions of volonte generale and particuliere in his Encyclopedie article, “Droit Naturel” (1755), saying that the “general will” is “the rule of conduct” which arises from a “pure act of the understanding”: an understanding which “reasons in the silence of the passions about what a man can demand of his fellow-man and what his fellow-man has a right to demand of him.” It is “to the general will that the individual must address himself,” Diderot adds, “in order to know how far he must be a man, a citizen, a subject, a father, a child”; and that volonte generale, which “never errs,” is “the tie of all societies.”
Now the eminent Rousseau scholar and editor, C. E. Vaughan, traces the notion of volonte generale only back as far as Rousseau and Diderot, without being able to decide which of them was “first” to use it.9 But Montesquieu had already used the terms volonte generale and volonte particuliere in the most famous chapter (XI) of De l’Esprit des Lois (1748), 10 so it cannot be the case that either Diderot or Rousseau was first to use those notions in political philosophy. But where, then, did Montesquieu find those ideas? And how could he count on their being understood, since he used them without explaining them?
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