Rarely, but occasionally, philosophers’ concept formation has practical consequences. Such consequences need not have any particular connection to the thoughts the philosophers have wished to convey: one may resort to analyses of different phenomena, and get inspired by them, quite independently of their content. In this way, especially in political contexts, various actors have set out to change the world, having even succeeded in their attempts at times. A case in point is the influence that the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) had on the French revolution and on the subsequent discourse on democracy.
Rousseau took it as a precondition for the legitimacy of a state that political decisions are guided by the ‘general will’ (la volonté générale) of its members. Decisions conforming to the general will would—by definition—be impartial, they would aim at being of general interest to the community, and they would promote the realization of the common good. By being members of a society based on interdependence, citizens would, at least implicitly, be committed to subjecting their private wills to the general will.
It is fully possible that the notion of general will was not clear even to Rousseau himself; he may have associated several mutually incompatible ideas with this term. Two interpretive options suggest themselves: a watered-down reading tested in practice, on the one hand, and a theoretical interpretation that views the discussion on the general will as aiming to clarify presuppositions of just collective decision-making, on the other hand. For reasons that will become clear below, these can be referred to as the statistical and the normative interpretation, respectively.
The latter option is conceptually interesting. When suitable initial assumptions have been fixed, it is possible to investigate the effect that the actions of individuals, and of groups formed out of individuals, may have on the society as a whole. In this connection, speaking of the general will is calculated to help calling attention to interest-group neutral principles that govern collective actions. The idea is to describe kinds of principles that individuals should adopt to guide their actions under the unrealistic hypothesis that they were rational and consciously committed to acting in an interest-neutral fashion in certain important respects—that is, acting justly in the sense that in these respects, the outcomes of their actions would not yield to anyone (for example, to themselves) a greater advantage, at the expense of the rest of the society, than to the society as a whole. Identifying such principles may be difficult, and cannot be accomplished by studying opinions of citizens. The task is, instead, to discover the kinds of outcomes to which the actions of citizens and their coalitions may lead.
However, in practical politics and in the discussion pertaining to democracy, the term ‘general will’ has been assimilated to such expressions as ‘will of the people’, ‘collective will’, and ‘public opinion’. The normative content of the concept has had to make room for statistical information about matters of fact (namely, about people’s voting behavior). Instead of thinking that the role of the general will is to impose conditions that the wills of individual people must comply with, one thinks that the private wills of individuals somehow determine such a ‘general will’. In the simplest case the general will, thus understood, is the opinion that the majority of the people have expressed on a specific issue by voting.
Whereas the majority of the people may be completely mistaken about the general will in the normative sense, the general will in the watered-down sense is precisely identified with the majority opinion, or in any event, it is taken to be somehow determined by the private opinions of individual citizens. It is a crucial and groundless simplification to think that a decision leading to the common good could somehow be produced as the ‘average’ of individual decisions, each of which aims at a single citizen’s individual good. Yet democracy—as one usually speaks of it and as it is in practice implemented—is based on exactly this simplification. What is more, the fact that democracy appears as unproblematically legitimate is partly based on the erroneous view that the general will construed statistically would guarantee that democratic decisions are ‘just’ in some substantial sense. This would follow only if the general will was interpreted normatively.
For his part, Rousseau could be blamed for rendering the described confusion possible. When considering conditions to which individuals must adjust their will in order for justice to prevail in a society, talking about these conditions as a will to which individuals must subject their private wills most certainly fails to help rendering the idea comprehensible. Surely Rousseau was neither the first nor the last philosopher who might have benefitted from a more critical attitude toward language-use.
[This is an English version of my post Kansan tahto ja yleinen hyvä. It appeared originally in Uusi Suomi in August 2017.]