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General and Particular Will in the Political Thought of Pierre Bayle PATRICK RILEY No ONE HAS EVER DOUBTED that the notion of the "general will" (volont~ gknkrale) ~ 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"S--when one thinks of the common good and not of one's own "particular will" (volontk particulikre) as a "private person." Even virtue, he says, is nothing but a "conforming" of one's personal volont~ particulikre to the public volont~ gkng,rale--a conforming which "leads us out of ourselves, ''4 out of self-love, and toward "the public happiness. ''5 If this is well-known, it is perhaps only a slightly less well-known that, at roughly the same time as Rousseau, Diderot used the notions of volontk gknkrale and particuli~re in his The best studies of the historical development of "the general will" are Judith N. Shldar's "General Will," in Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. Philip P. Wiener (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973), vol. 2:275 ft., and Alberto Postigliola's "De Malebranche h Rousseau: Les Apories de la Volont6 Grnrrale et la Revanche du 'Raisonneur Violent'," in Annales de la Soci~t~Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Geneva: Chez A. Jullien, x98o), Vol. 39:134 ft. One should also consult the short but excellent history of volont~gOVeralein Bertrand de Jouveners "Essai sur la Politique de Rousseau," which introduces his edition of Du Contrat Social (Geneva, 1947). De Jouvenel brings out particularly the rapportsbetween Pascal and Rousseau. And there are brief but helpful comments in Robert Wokler's fine essay, "The Influence of Diderot on Rousseau," in Studies on Voltaire and the z8th Century (Banbury: Voltaire Foundation, a975), Vol. 132, 68 ft., and in Andr(~ Robinet's exhaustive Systkmeet l~xistencedans rOeuvre de Malebranche (Paris: Vrin, a965), 83 ft. ' Rousseau, Du Contrat Social, in Political Writings, ed. C. E. Vaughan (Oxford: Basil Blackwell , 1962), Vot. 2:5 o. (All translations from the French are the author's, unless otherwise indicated.) s Ibid, 354 Ibid, 35-36. 5 Rousseau, l~conomiePolitique, in Political Writings, ed. Vaughan, Vol. 1:255 ft.; Rousseau, "Le Bonheur Public," in Political Writings, Vol. x: 327-29. [1731 I74 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Encyclop~die article, "Droit Naturel" (1755),6 saying that the "general wiU" 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. ''7 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 volontk gOn~rale, which "never errs," is "the tie of all societies.''s Now the eminent Rousseau scholar and editor, C. E. Vaughan, traces the notion of volont~ gkn~rale only back as far as Rousseau and Diderot, without being able to decide which of them was "first" to use it.9But Montesquieu had already used the terms volontk gkn~rale and volont~ particulikre in the most famous book (XI) of De l'Esprit des Lois (1748), ~°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? The answer is that the term volont~ g~nkrale was well-established in the seventeenth century, though not primarily as a. political idea. In fact the notion of "general will" was originally a theological one, and refered to the kind of will that God (supposedly) had in deciding who would be granted grace sufficient for salvation and who would be consigned to hell, who would be "elected" and who predestined to damnation?' The question at issue was: if "God wills that all men be saved"--as St. Paul asserts in a letter...

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