The General Will

The general will versus the will of all

Rousseau distinguished between two things that look similar but are not. The will of all is the sum of what each person privately wants. It is the result you get when you add up individual preferences. It may favor the majority, but it is still just an aggregation of self-interest.

The general will is what citizens would collectively choose if each one asked not "what is good for me?" but "what is good for us?" It is not a compromise or an average. It is what any rational citizen would recognize as serving the common good when self-interest is genuinely set aside.

The difference is not theoretical. Majorities routinely vote for things that benefit themselves at the expense of others. That is the will of all in action. The general will, by contrast, would not oppress any member of the community, because each citizen, in willing the general will, is also willing something that applies to themselves equally.

Voting as if deciding for everyone

Rousseau's model for how to access the general will is specific. When citizens vote, each should ask themselves: "Is this measure consistent with the common good?" not "Does this serve me?" If each citizen reasons this way honestly, the resulting majority tells you something close to the general will.

This is not naive. Rousseau knew people lie to themselves and vote their interests while claiming to vote their principles. His model describes a regulative ideal: the standard a legitimate vote should aspire to, even if actual votes fall short.

The scenario he describes is structurally similar to what Rawls later called the original position. In both cases, the goal is to abstract away particular advantage and reason from a more impartial standpoint. Rawls made the mechanism explicit through the veil of ignorance: you literally don't know your position, so you can't favor it. Rousseau relied on civic virtue: you know your position but reason past it.

What Rousseau contributed to Rawls

Rawls acknowledged Rousseau as a predecessor. Both are asking the same question: what principles would rational people choose if they weren't reasoning from self-interest?

Rousseau's answer is the general will, located in political participation. Rawls's answer is the two principles of justice, derived from a hypothetical choice under ignorance. The veil of ignorance is, in one reading, a mechanism designed to force the kind of impartial reasoning Rousseau thought civic virtue should produce but couldn't reliably guarantee.

The deeper difference is about what grounds legitimacy. For Rousseau, legitimate law is law that expresses the general will, which citizens must actively produce through participation. For Rawls, just principles are those that rational agents would hypothetically choose, regardless of whether any actual political process produced them. One is a theory of democratic legitimacy. The other is a theory of justice. They overlap but do not coincide.