On the general will and
the road to tyranny
Rousseau and the Rights of Man
Robert V. Andelson
SO CONFUSED and
self-contradictory seem
Rousseau’s ideas on human rights that it
may be seriously questioned whether they
contain any kind of unifying locus or can
be reduced to systematic form at all. Intellectual source of both the Jacobins and
Hegel, equally condemned by Burke and
Bentham, the works of this exasperating
thinker constitute a kind of grab-bag in
which can be found just about whatever
suits one’s fancy - together with its opposite! At present, however, the prevailing academic fashion is to discover order
in the midst of chaos, and numerous
scholars profess to find some sort of
underlying unity beneath his paradoxes.’
And it must not be forgotten that
Rousseau himself claimed consistency for
his writings, asserting, in both his major
autobiographical works, the fundamental
coherence of his ideas.2
In the last analysis, however, it is hard
not to concur with the judgment of Henri
Piiyre: “Rousseau is rife with contradictions, and the most ingenious men of
learning . . . have not succeeded in convincing us of the unity of his t h ~ u g h t . ” ~
For one thing, they are by no means
agreed as to wherein that unity lies. For
example, Rousseau is seen as a pioneer individualist by Rosenkranz4 and as the
Father of State Socialism by D u g ~ i t His
.~
Calvinist connections are stressed by Lanson6 and his affinities with Catholicism by
Masson.’ Irving Babbitt views him as a
romanticist,* and Ernst Cassirer, as a rationalist.9 According to Kingsley Martin,
Rousseau began as an anarchist and ended as a tota1itarian;lO according to C.E.
Vaughan, he began as a follower of Locke,
shifted to Plato, and ended under the ruling influence of Montesquieu.ll Lanson explains the varying emphases of Rousseau’s
different works by interpreting his early
Discourses as protests against all hitherto
existing societies; Emile and the Nouvelle
Hkloise as guides to the reform of the individual in the spheres of personal morality, family relations, and education; and
the later political writings as adumbrations
of the kind of society in which the good
man can properly live.’*Yet it is not merely between but within his works that baffling contradictions abound. In the Social
Contract, which Ritchie calls “the great
political treatise of his most mature and
soundest period,”I3 individualism and collectivism, prudentialism and heroism, rationalism and functionalism - all appear
to be negated by the affirmation of each,
dissolved into a raging ferment over
which broods the spirit of the general will,
amorphous, enigmatic, and ineffable.l4
It is in part precisely because of all his
inconsistencies and obscurities that
Rousseau is, par excellence, the characteristic representative of what may be
termed the “radical-humanist’’ view of
human rights - i.e., the view that deduces
rights from an uncritical veneration of
349
Modern Age
LICENSED TO UNZ.ORG
ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED
man qua man; its ground being a romantic
concept of man, its end, freedom, and its
regulating principle, equality. Radicalhumanism is an empty abstraction that
resolves itself into some other position
whenever a serious attempt is made to
give it content. It is always on the verge of
going in one of several directions, and
what make Rousseau especially significant is the fact that all of these directions
are strongly represented in his philosophy. There have, it is true, been “pure”
radical-humanists - men like Condorcet
- whose thought is fairly unambiguous
and free of contradiction. But these men
can scarcely be regarded as original
creative theorists of the first order; they
were able to maintain a degree of formal
consistency in their ideas because they
operated on a relatively superficial level.
An examination of Rousseau’s view of
man reveals affinities both with the hedonistic utilitarians and with the ancient
classical thinkers. In opposition to the ancients, he does not see man as a political
animal by nature. The mental compass of
the “natural man” is so restricted that in
this respect he is hardly to be distinguished from the brute. Yet he differs
from other animals in that he has two
unique potentialities: freedom and perfectibility. By freedom, Rousseau means the
consciousness of alternatives and the
liberty to really choose among them instead of being guided by mere impulse. By
perfectibility, he understands the capacity
for psychological and moral growth.’5 But
freedom, instead of being regarded as the
condition of such growth, is seen rather as
its object.16 “Man is by nature good” - to
the degree in which this nature is not absorbed in sensual instincts but lifts itself
“spontaneously and without outside help
to the idea of freedom.”I7 This is where
Rousseau stands farthest from the classical
tradition, which never views freedom as
an end in itself, but only as instrumental to
the cultivation of reason, i.e., to the
realization of humanity’s distinctive and
predeterminate goal. Cobban, Chapman,
Cassirer, Levine, and others18 have attempted, in varying degree, to make a
Kantian rationalist of Rousseau,lg and it is
perfectly true that he is far from the absolute irrationalist that popular imagination, on the strength of a few well-known
passages, pictures him as being. He does
not reject reason but only its perverted
use; he would enlist it in the service of virtue. Despite all this, however, the fact remains that Rousseau is less sanguine about
man’s intellectual endowment than about
his innate moral capacity, and certainly he
does not make reason either the essence
or the end of human existence.
Cobban tells us that virtue, in Rousseau’s
sense of the word, may be defined as “the
absence of moral conflict between the
desires of the individual, or what he needs
to render him happy, and the laws imposed on him by his envjronment.”*OThis
is brought out in the Emile, where the
system of moral education consists basically of teaching children “from the first to
confine their wishes within the limits of
their powers so that they will scarcely feel
the want of whatever is not in their
power.”21 Schinz, as a matter of fact, goes
so far as to interpret the “Profession of
Faith of a Savoyard Vicar” as an expression of pragmatic religiousness, an enunciation of a doctrine intended to promote
man’s temporal happinesszz;and although
Cassirer no doubt rightly criticizes this as a
misplaced emphasis, he admits that “this
interpretation undoubtedly characterizes
a certain element in Rousseau’s fundamental c o n c e p t i ~ n . ” ~ ~
Having conceded the existence of this
element, however, we must not lose sight
of the fact that Rousseau’s utilitarianism
was strongly qualified by classical influences, especially of Plato and Plutarch.
From them he derived the ideal of moral
education as the primary function of the
state and of political participation as a
necessary requisite for complete human
development. This is related to a concept
of man quite at variance with that of the
utilitarians. For according to Rousseau,
the nurture and exercise of moral potentialities constitute not only the highest
happiness for man, but also and more importantly, his proper good. And this can
350
Fall 1984
LICENSED TO UNZ.ORG
ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED
take place fully only in society. Over and
asainst the above-cited passage from the
Emile, another must be placed: “Speak the
truth and do the right; the only thing that
really matters is to do one’s duty in this
world.”z4Yet “one’s duty” consists simply
of moral autonomy - the recovery of that
natural goodness vitiated by the tyranny
of destructive habits engendered by adverse social influences. This is how Wright
interprets the “return to nature”:
We can give up pride. We can cease
from all comparison with other men
and simply go about our destiny. We
can renounce a host of imaginary
needs and hold fast to the true things
needful; cast away a world of illusion
and rediscover our own self. We can be
meek, and inherit our soul. In a word,
we can return to nature. That is all the
famous phrase m e a n ~ . ~ 5
Thus Rousseau’s idea of duty is not really a teleological concept, since it does not
essentially relate to any referent beyond
the self. This is not to say, of course, that
Rousseau rejects God; but however much
duty, for him, may accord with the will of
God, its criterion lies elsewhere, in the
fulfillment of the self. And this fulfillment
is seen as the achievement of a radical
autonomy, not as the pursuit of functional
goals in a cosmic setting. This is what
places Rousseau among the moderns, in
spite of his reversion to certain aspects of
the classical tradition. For in classical and
medieval thought, as D’Entrkes remarks,
“It is not from the individual that we are
asked to start, but from the Cosmos, from
the notion of a world well ordered and
graded, of which natural law is the expression.”26In this connection it is significant
that the first draft of the Social Contract
contained a chapter intended to refute the
theory of natural law.27
Two ruling themes characterize Rousseau’s thought: the state of nature and the
general will. Both these themes are
marked by ambiguity, and their relationship to one another, although of crucial
importance to an understanding of his
writings, is oftentimes so recondite as to
be virtually impenetrable. In his Discourse
on the Origin of Inequality Among Men,
the state of nature is represented as an
idyllic (even if hypothetical) epoch, in
which the savage “breathes only peace
and liberty,” living “within himself,” in
almost perfect equality with his fellows.
Yet the state of nature is lacking in both
moral and specifically human content.
The civil state “produces a very
remarkable change in man, by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct,
and giving his actions the morality they
formerly lacked.. . . Instead of a stupid
and unimaginable animal, it made him an
intelligent being and a man.”28 Nevertheless, Rousseau, while accepting the
unavoidable necessity of society, rejected,
as was stated earlier, the classical conception of man as an inherently social entity.
His answer to the question of the good life
“takes on this form: the good life consists
in the closest approximation to the state of
nature which is possible on the level of
h~manity.”~g
Perhaps the most striking paradox in
Rousseau’s thinking is the way he conceives of the relationship between the individual and society. On the one hand, the
natural man is innocent and good; on the
other, he is a stupid and limited animal.
On the one hand, society is the corrupting
influence; on the other, it is only in society
that his moral potentiality can develop. By
shifting “original sin” from the individual
to society, Rousseau doubtless felt that he
was preserving man’s free will. But actually, according to his theory of psychology,
the sinful proclivities are in the individual
all along- they merely cannot be
hatched apart from a conscious relation to
others. In spite of the baneful effects of
civilization upon the individual, Rousseau
disclaims any desire to regress to barbarism: “Human nature does not turn
back. Once man has left it, h e can never
return to the time of innocence and equaliSociety, being necessary to man in
his present stage, is in that sense
“natural,”31but it is natural only insofar as
it preserves man’s primal potentiality for
self-determination. The Social Contract
Modern Age
351
LICENSED TO UNZ.ORG
ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED
addresses itself to the problem of how this
is to be achieved, but its solution can hardly be viewed as an unqualified success.
If one were to compress into a single
sentence those passages of the Social Contract most pertinent to our topic, the result
would probably read somewhat as follows:
Christian man, who is at the same time the
“servant of all” and the “most free lord of
There is important truth in the idea
that real freedom involves disciplined submission to a goal outside oneself, but this
must occur in such a way that that goal is
personally appropriated and made the
voluntary object of one’s will. This is to
say, such submission to be moral must be,
as Rousseau rightly understood, “obedience to a law which we prescribe to
o u r s e l ~ e s . ”But
~ ~ this kind of obedience
cannot be forced. As Sabine aptly puts it,
“forcing a man to be free is a euphemism
for making him blindly obedient to the
mass or the strongest party.’I4*Rousseau’s
dangerous verbal jugglery was godfather
to a long and vicious semantic tradition
passing from Robespierre and Hegel
through Hitler and Stalin - a tradition in
which tyranny is baptized with the name
of liberty. To him, more than to any other,
belongs the dubious distinction of having
invented “Newspeak,” for Big Brother’s
sinister slogan, “Freedom is Slavery,”42is
nothing but an aphoristic echo from the
Social Contract.
If I may be permitted to repeat some
observations made by me in another context:
Man has the right to be compelled to
abdicate his inherent individual liberties, so as to acquire genuine freedom
in order that he might, through the exercise of moral will, fulfill his destiny as
a human being.
For we are told, to begin with, that “the
social order is a sacred right which is the
basis of all other rights.”32 We are then
given to understand that this order consists of “the total alienation of each
associate, together with all his rights, to
the whole ~ o m m u n i t y , ” ~and
~ that
“whoever refuses to obey the general will
shall be compelled to do so by the whole
body. This means nothing less than that
he will be forced to be free.”34Finally, this
order gives his actions “the morality they
had formerly lacked. . . .”35 Lest this
method of interpretation be dismissed as
arbitrary, we must protest that it is no
more so than any other. All interpretation
is necessarily selective, and a mode of
selection that records the original author’s
paradoxes is, in fact, more faithful to his
thought than is a mode that ignores his inconsistencies, or seeks to harmonize them
by means of some interpretative key not
inherent in the text itself. When Cassirer
reads Kantian categories into R o u ~ s e a u , ~ ~
when Hoffding says that it was the “opposition of the absolute and the relative
that Rousseau meant by the opposition
of nature and ci~ilization,”~~
when Chapman understands the moi commun to
refer to “the - reality of man’s moral
p~tentialities,”~~
they are indulging in an
intellectual game of speculation which,
however shrewdly and skillfully played,
remains, in the final analysis, speculation.
Rousseau’s social teaching is not merely
paradoxical; it is pragmatically absurd. It
is, in fact, a monstrous perversion of
Luther’s doctrine of the freedom of the
Kant understood that man is inwardly
free only as he submits to moral law.
The self-mastery whereby the will
fulfills itself through obedience to the
command of duty he denominated
“positive freedom.” But he apprehended that politics is fitly concerned only
with “negative freedom” - reciprocal
freedom from external constraint. In
this he displayed a perspicuity superior
alike to that of his direct philosophical
successors and to that of his progenitor,
Rousseau. The burden of Isaiah Berlin’s
great inaugural address at Oxford, as
also of Talmon’s monumental studies, is
very largely to remind us that the attempt to make “positive freedom” the
immediate responsibility of the state is
fraught with consequences which
reduce all freedom to a
There is but one sense in which
Fall 1984
352
LICENSED TO UNZ.ORG
ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED
Rousseau was right about “forcing people to be free.” Freedom is an unalienable trust. Nobody has the right to
opt for any form of servitude that is
likely to extend beyond the one who
does the opting.44
Napoleons, Mussolini, Hitler, PCron, and
Stalin - all made the same ominous claim
and were equally ruthless in enforcing it.
Yet the concept of the legislator by no
means exhausts the totalitarian implications of Rousseau’s social teaching.
“Each of us,” proclaims Rousseau, “puts
the person and all his power in common
under the supreme direction of the
general will, and, in our corporate capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole.”45 “Each man, in
giving himself to all, gives himself to
nobody; and as there is no associate over
which he does not acquire the same right
as he yields others over himself, he gains
an equivalent for everything he loses, and
an increase of force for the preservation of
what he
Sir Ernest Barker has admirably exposed the fallacy of such
reasoning:
Omit the legislator altogether: the result is still there. Imagine Rousseau a
perfect democrat: his perfect democracy is still a multiple autocrat. He
leaves no safeguard against the omnipotence of the souuerain. It is significant that the Social Contract ends
with the suggestion of religious persecution. . . . Rousseau was so far
from believing in les droits de l’homme
that he went to the other extreme. He
was so convinced that it was enough
for the individual to enjoy political
rights (as a fraction of the collectivity)
that he forgot the necessity of his enjoying the rights of “civil and religious
liberty.”51
The paradox conceals a paralogism. I
surrender all myself - and 1 surrender
it all to 999 others as well as myself; I
only receive a fraction of the sovereignty of the community; and ultimately 1
must reflect that if I am the thousandth
part of a tyrant, I am also the whole of a
slave. Leviathan is still Leviathan, even
when he is ~orporate.~’
The general will, according to Rousseau, is
the ultimate, absolute and final authority,
an oracle which cannot err.48 Yet
nowhere are we given a definite and
unambiguous statement as to how it can
be discerned.
Rousseau admits that the people may
not know its own will,49and he provides
for this contingency, at least to his own
satisfaction, by postulating a legislator - a sort of medium who is able to
intuit that which is hidden to the
But alas! Who is to intuit the identity of the legislator? This is the perennial
problem of authoritarian political theory,
and Rousseau can scarcely be said to have
solved it. When the Jacobin spokesman
flatly informed the Convention that “Our
will is the general will,” his words were
pregnant with the guillotine. The two
The subtle imagination of Leo Strauss
sees in the very emptiness of Rousseau’s
doctrine of the state of nature the clue to
the riddle of his political ethic. According
to this ingenious theory, Rousseau
represents the reductio ad absurdum of
the radical-humanist tradition, attributing
to man the natural right to a freedom
which has no object outside itself and no
validation apart from its connection with
the individual.
The notion that the good life consists in
the return on the level of humanity to
the state of nature, Le., to a state which
completely lacks all human traits,
necessarily leads to the consequence
that the individual claims such an
ultimate freedom from society as lacks
any definite human content. But this
fundamental defect of the state of
nature as a goal of human aspiration
made that state the ideal vehicle of
freedom. . . . The notion of a return to
the state of nature on the level of
humanity was the ideal basis for claiming a freedom from society which is not
a freedom for something. It was the
Modern Age
353
LICENSED TO UNZ.ORG
ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED
If morality or humanity were to be
understood adequately, they had to be
traced to a right or a freedom which is
radically and specifically human.
Hobbes had implicitly admitted the existence of such a freedom. For he had
implicitly admitted that if the traditional dualism of substances, of mind
and body, is abandoned, science cannot
be possible except if meaning, order or
truth originates solely in man’s creative
action, or if man has the freedom of a
creator. . . . What Hobbes had, in fact,
suggested in regard to science was applied by Rousseau to morality.54
These ideas are so suggestive that we
must be permitted to carry Strauss’s
theory a step beyond his own venture by
relating its implications to the concept of
the hegemony of the general will.
Remembering that Rousseau’s thought is
geared to the two antipodal foci of unconditional duties and nonmercenary virtue
on the one hand, and primacy of freedom
on the other, is not the general will that
element in his philosophy which satisfies
abstractly the demands of both? In its insistence upon unquestioning obedience it
calls forth sentiments of heroic loyalty,
while at the same time its very elusiveness
renders it the creation of its subject. The
totalitarianism of the general will is as
void of content as is the anarchy of the
state of nature, yet the creative freedom
elicited by its vacuity is informed by virtuous commitment to a non-prudential
goal, the vagueness of which permits the
individual to remain radically independent
by identifying himself absolutely with it.
If indeed (which is by no means certain)
Rousseau’s political ethic is to be regarded
as anything but an ill-assorted pof-pourri
of rhetorical extravagances, this interpretation may conceivably help us to get
at the underlying structure and meaning
of the whole - provided that we are willing to ignore the law of parsimony! Even
supposing that we have succeeded,
however, in absolving Rousseau to some
degree from the charge of reckless inconsistency, it needs to b e remarked that he is
only vindicated on a strictly formal and artificial level. In practice, historically, the
doctrine of the general will has ever been
an ignis fatuus leading men to tyranny.
‘Ernst Cassirer, The Question o f Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, trans. with introduction by Peter Cay
(New Y o r k , 1954); John W. Chapman,
Rousseau-Totalitarian or Liberal? (New York,
1956); Alfred Cobban, Rousseau and the Modern
State (London, 1934); Lester G. Crocker, Rousseau’s
“Social Contract, ” (Cleveland, 1968); Stephen Ellenburg, Rousseau’s Social Philosophy: An Interpretation from Within (Ithaca, N.Y., 1976); Charles
William Hendel, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Moralist
(London, 1929); Harold HBffding, Jean-Jacques
Rousseau and His Philosophy, trans. William
Richards and Leo E. Saidla (New Haven, 1930);
Gustave Lanson, Histoire de la littkrature franfaise,
22nd ed. (Paris, 1930); Roger D. Masters, The
Political Philosophy of Rousseau (Princeton, N.J.,
1968); and Ernest Hunter Wright, The Meaning o f
Rousseau (London, 1929). *Confessions, Livre IX.
Rousseau juge de Jeanilacques, Troisieme Dialogue.
3“The Influence of Eighteenth Century Ideas on the
ideal basis for an appeal from society to
something indefinite and indefinable, to
an ultimate sanctity of the individual as
individual, unredeemed and unjustified. . . . Every freedom which is freedom for something, every freedom
which is justified by reference to
something higher than the individual or
than man as mere man, necessarily
restricts freedom. . . .52
What Rousseau attempted was a logical
impossibility: to “graft the notion of unconditional duties and of nonmercenary
virtue onto the Hobbesian notion of the
primacy of freedom or of rights.”53 He
agreed with Hobbes that duties are
derivative from rights and that there is no
natural law .which antedates the human
will. But he departed from Hobbes in seeking the basic right in something more
distinctively human than self-preservation, an impulse that man shares with
brutes.
Fall 1984
354
LICENSED TO UNZ.ORG
ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED
French Revolution,” in Herman Ausubel, ed., The
Making ofModern Europe (New York, 1951). I, 482.
‘Karl Rosenkranz, Diderofs Leben und Werke (Leipzig, 1866), II, 75. 5Lbon Duguit, Rousseau, Kanf et
Hegel (1918),p. 6. Quoted by Cobban, p. 42. 6Lanson,
pp. 788 f. 7Pierre-Maurice Masson, La Riligion de
Rousseau (Paris, 1916). passim. 8Rousseau and
Romanficism (Boston, 1919). Tassirer, p. 82 and
passim. laFrench Liberal Thoughf in the Eighfeenfh
Cenfury (London, 1929), p. 196. ”The Polifical
Wrifings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Cambridge,
1915), I , 77-81. 1Z“L‘Unit6de la Pensbe de JeanJacques Rousseau,” reviewed by Peter Gay in his introduction to Cassirer, pp. 18-19. I3David G. Ritchie,
Nafural Rights (London, 1894), p. 51. I4For individualism, see The Social Contract, in Frederick
Watkins, trans. and ed., Rousseau-Polifical Writings
(Edinburgh, 1953), p. 31; Leo Strauss, Natural Righf
and Hisfory (Chicago, 1953), p. 298. For collectivism,
see Watkins, pp. 17-18; Strauss, p. 286; George H.
Sabine, History OfPolifical Theory (New York, 1950),
pp. 587, 588-91. For prudentialism, see Watkins, p.
31; Strauss, pp. 266-76, 282-84. For heroism, see
Watkins, p. 20; Strauss, pp. 277-98. For rationalism,
see Watkins, p. 3; Strauss, pp. 279-81, 293-94. For
functionalism, see Watkins, p. 20; and the editor’s introduction to The Social Contract, in lnfroducfionto
Contemporary Civilizafion in the West, 2 vols. (New
York, 1946), I, 954. l5See Rousseau, A Discourse on
the Origin of Inequality, in The Social Contracf and
Discourses, trans. G. D. H. Cole (Everyman’s Library;
London, 1947), pp. 157 f., 169 f. For a good summary
of Rousseau‘s theory of human nature, see Chapman, Part 1. %ee The Social Contract, in Cole’s
translation, p. 16. I7Cassirer, pp. 104 f. This involves
a partial misunderstanding of Rousseau. For him, the
pyrpose of the state is to provide just such help. See
Emile, p. 437. Iscobban, p. 223; Chapman, pp.
113-15; Cassirer, p. 82 and passim; Sir Ernest Barker,
lntroducfion lo Social Contracf: Essays by Locke,
’
Hume and Rousseau (New York, 1948), p. xxxii;
Wright, p. 32; Andrew Levine, The Politics of
Aufonomy: A Kantian Reading of Rousseau 5 “Social
Confract”(Amherst, Mass., 1976). IgRobert Dkrathb
criticizes Cassirer for overstating his case in this connection. See Le Rationalisme de J.-J. Rousseau (Paris,
1948). p. 188. z°Cobban, p. 135. 21Emile,trans., Barbara Foxley (New York, 1948), p. 35. zZA.Schinz, La
Pens& de J.-J. Rousseau (Paris, 1929), pp. 446, 506,
and elsewhere. Cited in Cassirer, p. 11;. 231bid.
24Emile,p. 257. Z5Wright,pp. 20 f. 26A. P. D’Entrirves,
Nafural Law (London, 1951), pp. 45-46. ZTBarker, pp.
xxix f . 28The Social Contract, Bk. I , chap. vii, in
Watkins, p. 20. 29Strauss,p. 282. 3aRousseaujuge de
Jean-Jacques, Troisiirme Dialogue. Cited in Cassirer,
p. 74. 31Hendel, I, 134. 32TheSocial Contract and
Discourses (Cole’s translation), p. 3. 33/bid., p. 12.
34/bid.,p. 15. 35/bid.Tassirer, pp. 56-59, 126. 37Hoffding, p. 103. T h a p m a n , p. 28. 39Martin Luther, A
Treafise on Christian Liberty (Philadelphia, 1947). p.
5. 4aThe Social Contract and Discourses (Cole’s
translation), p. 16. “Sabine, p. 591. 4ZGeorgeOrwell,
Ninefeen Eighty-four (New York, 1954), p. 23.
43Robert V. Andelson, lmputed Rights (Athens, Ga.,
1971). p. 81. The works alluded to are Isaiah Berlin,
Two Concepts of Liberty (London, 1958). and J.L.
Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy and
Political Messionism (New York, 1960). 44Andelson,
p. 114. 4STheSocial Confruct and Discourses (Cole’s
translation), p. 13. .461bid.,p. 12. The concept of the
general will was anticipated i? Marsilius of Padua’s
Defensor Pacis (1324). See D’Entrirves, p. 75. For a
contemporary interpretation of the concept, see the
philosophy of the Dutch juristic theorist, H. Krabbe,
reviewed in Charles Grove Haines, The Revival of
Nafural Law Concepts (Cambridge, Mass., 1930), pp.
274-77. 47Barker,pp. xxxiv-v. “The Social Confract,
Bk. I, chap. 6. 49TheSocial Confract and Discourses
(Cole’s translation), pp. 22-23, 30-3 1. 501bid., pp.
32-35. 51Barker, p. xxxviii. %Strauss, pp. 293 f.
53/bid.,p. 280. 541bid.,281.
Modern Age
355
LICENSED TO UNZ.ORG
ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED