Is the General Will Anonymous?: (Rousseau, Robespierre, Condorcet)

I would like to shift the focus on our understanding of "anonymity" from its normal meaning as a qualification of authors to another manifestation of anonymity or at least, something that functions in a way very like it in another context. In order to do so, let us look at three very different case studies that lead to a strong redefinition of anonymity: the antithetical theories of Rousseau, Robespierre and Condorcet concerning the structure and behavior of the general will.

To begin in the most reductionist mode, we need to ask, what are the semantic elements that define the conceptual matrix of what we call anonymity? There are many, but we usually think that anonymity implies at the very least 1) a person who is anonymous; 2) some activity with respect to which that person is anonymous, like the writing or publishing of a written work; and 3) some group—readers, listeners, or spectators—with respect to whom the author's activity is intended to remain anonymous. So anonymity is usually defined with respect to an author, a text, readers. The author is anonymous, the text and the reader are not thought of that way. There are many ways in which an author can be anonymous, and we generally assume that it is because the author is responsible for the content of his work.

Let us displace the question: what if the author is not anonymous, but readership is? This is not an impossible way to approach the concept of anonymity, at least for the modern world, as the "commercial" reader, so to speak, who has required us to theorize the notion of the "implied reader," is a modern invention linked to the industrial production of books, in which "just anyone" from a widely extended literate population can buy a copy of a work. At some level, we moderns assume that our reader is anonymous—although this is changing as we move from the industrial production of material books to the complex interlocking literate communities of the Internet. In the eighteenth century, this was not the case. Books were expensive, and only a small percentage of the population was literate. Many works were in effect written for small and relatively identifiable groups of readers. Networks of communication through which works were "published," i.e., made available to a public defined as members of an intellectual circle of one sort or another, were one of the more important modes of the circulation of texts. One example: Mme de Sévigné's careful construction of her readership, or another, the Correspondance littéraire, in which Grimm and his authors knew who was going to read everything they put out. Or the different if overlapping sets of natural historical, heretical or alchemical communities so typical of the European seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Newton, to mention just one significant figure, certainly knew whom he was addressing when he deigned to allow a paper to be circulated, and he attempted strenuously to contain its circulation out to several removes from his immediate circle of interlocutors. He systematically "excommunicated" people who forwarded his mathematical work to other savants without his authorization—especially to the general anonymous public. Even more adamant was he, that alchemical writings should not be available to a general public because for Newton alchemy was a procedure for becoming competent: as the reagents were transformed into a higher or lower form of matter, the practitioner became an initiate piecing together the relationship between the material and spiritual orders. Thus he learned how to intervene responsibly in the social world around him. Only from such training came valid political or economic power. Newton strongly recommended that his friend Boyle not communicate his alchemical findings to the world: [they were] "not to be communicated without immense damage to the world if there be any verity in the hermetic writers."¹ The danger referred to is quite simply that someone not properly refined by alchemical discipline might make gold and disrupt the fragile economic system of England. The point I would like to make is that the anonymous reader was, for these...