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The General Will
Although it originated in theological debates, the general will ultimately
became one of the most celebrated and denigrated concepts emerging
from early modern political thought. Jean-Jacques Rousseau made it the
central element of his political theory, and it took on a life of its own
during the French Revolution, before being subjected to generations of
embrace or opprobrium. James Farr and David Lay Williams have
collected for the first time a set of essays that track the evolving history
of the general will from its origins to recent times. The General Will: The
Evolution of a Concept discusses the general will’s theological, political,
formal, and substantive dimensions with a careful eye toward the con-
cept’s virtues and limitations as understood by its expositors and critics,
among them Arnauld, Pascal, Malebranche, Leibniz, Locke, Spinoza,
Montesquieu, Kant, Constant, Tocqueville, Adam Smith, and John
Rawls.
James Farr is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Chicago
Field Studies Program at Northwestern University. He is the author of
numerous essays on Locke and on the history of political thought. He is
also the editor of, among other volumes, Political Innovation and
Conceptual Change (Cambridge, 1989) and Political Science in
History (Cambridge, 1995).
David Lay Williams is Associate Professor of Political Science at DePaul
University and the author of several essays on the history of political
thought, as well as of Rousseau’s Platonic Enlightenment (2007) and
Rousseau’s Social Contract: An Introduction (Cambridge, 2014).
The General Will
The Evolution of a Concept
Edited by
JAMES FARR
Northwestern University
DAVID LAY WILLIAMS
DePaul University
32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, ny 10013-2473, usa
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First published 2015
Printed in the United States of America
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
The general will : the evolution of a concept / edited by James Farr,
David Lay Williams.
pages cm
isbn 978-1-107-05701-2
1. General will. 2. Legitimacy of governments. 3. Political science –
Philosophy – History. I. Farr, James, 1950– editor of compilation.
II. Williams, David Lay, 1969– editor of compilation.
jc328.2.g46 2014
320.0101–dc23 2014034127
isbn 978-1-107-05701-2 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
urls for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
Contents
List of Contributors page vii
Acknowledgments xi
Editors’ Introduction xv
part i: the general will before rousseau
1 The General Will before Rousseau: The Contributions of
Arnauld, Pascal, Malebranche, Bayle, and Bossuet 3
Patrick Riley
2 Malebranche’s Shadow: Divine Providence andGeneralWill in
the Leibniz-Arnauld Correspondence 72
Steven Nadler
3 Locke’s Ideas, Rousseau’s Principles, and the
General Will 88
James Farr
4 Spinoza and the General Will 115
David Lay Williams
5 Freedom, Sovereignty, and the General Will in Montesquieu 147
Sharon R. Krause
part ii: the prehistory of the general will
6 Rethinking Rousseau’s Tyranny of Orators: Cicero’sOn
Duties and the Beauty of True Glory 175
Daniel J. Kapust
7 AnAmerican GeneralWill? “The Bond of Brotherly Affection”
in New England 197
Andrew R. Murphy
v
part iii: the general will in rousseau
8 The Substantive Elements of Rousseau’s General Will 219
David Lay Williams
9 Justice, Beneficence, and Boundaries: Rousseau and the
Paradox of Generality 247
Richard Boyd
10 On the General Will of Humanity: Global Connections in
Rousseau’s Political Thought 270
Sankar Muthu
11 The General Will in Rousseau and after Rousseau 307
Tracy B. Strong
part iv: the general will after rousseau
12 Kant on the General Will 333
Patrick Riley
13 The General Will after Rousseau: Smith and Rousseau on
Sociability and Inequality 350
Shannon C. Stimson
14 Benjamin Constant’s Liberalism and the Political Theology of
the General Will 382
Bryan Garsten
15 The General Will after Rousseau: The Case of Tocqueville 402
Michael Locke McLendon
16 Rawls on Rousseau and the General Will 429
Christopher Brooke
Bibliography 447
Index 477
vi Contents
Contributors
Richard Boyd is Associate Professor of Government at Georgetown
University and has written numerous essays on early-modern and late-
modern political thought. He is also author of Uncivil Society: The Perils
of Pluralism and the Making of Modern Liberalism (2005) and co-editor
of Tocqueville and the Frontiers of Democracy (2013).
Christopher Brooke is Lecturer of Politics and International Studies at
Homerton College, University of Cambridge. He is the author of
Philosophic Pride: Stoicism and Political Thought from Lipsius to
Rousseau (2012), editor of Philosophical and Political Perspectives on
Education (2013), and has written widely on modern political thought.
James Farr is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Chicago
Field Studies Program at Northwestern University. He is the author of
numerous essays on Locke and the history of political thought. He is also
the editor of, among others, Political Innovation and Conceptual Change
(1989) and Political Science in History (1995).
Bryan Garsten is Professor of Political Science at Yale University. He is the
author of Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment (2006),
editor of Rousseau, the Age of Enlightenment, and Their Legacy (2012),
and author of many essays on Constant and early-modern political
thought.
Daniel J. Kapust is Associate Professor of Political Science at the
University of Wisconsin–Madison. He has written many essays on
Roman and early-modern political thought, as well as Republicanism,
Rhetoric, and Roman Political Thought: Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus (2011).
vii
Sharon R. Krause is Professor of Political Science at Brown University and
has written widely on Montesquieu and early-modern political thought.
She is the author of Liberalism with Honor (2002) and Civil Passions:
Moral Sentiment and Democratic Deliberation (2008), as well as editor of
The Arts of Rule (2009).
Michael Locke McLendon is Professor of Political Science at California
State University–Los Angeles. He is the author of several essays on early-
modern and late-modern political thought appearing in journals such as
the American Journal of Political Science, European Journal of Political
Theory, Journal of Politics, Review of Politics, and Polity.
AndrewR.Murphy is Associate Professor of Political Science andDirector
of the Walt Whitman Center for the Culture and Politics of Democracy,
Rutgers University. He has authored and edited multiple books, including
Conscience and Community: Revisiting Toleration and Religious Dissent
in Early Modern England and America (2001), Prodigal Nation: Moral
Decline and Divine Punishment from New England to 9/11 (2009), and A
Companion to Religion and Violence (2011).
Sankar Muthu is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University
of Chicago. He has written numerous essayson cosmopolitanism and
commerce in early-modern political thought. He is the author of
Enlightenment against Empire (2003) and editor of Empire and Modern
Political Thought (2012).
Steven Nadler is William H. Hay II Professor of Philosophy at the
University of Wisconsin–Madison and the author of numerous books
and articles on the history of early-modern philosophy, including
Malebranche and Ideas (1992); Spinoza: A Life (1999); and The Best of
All Possible Worlds: A Story of Philosophers, God, and Evil (2008).
Patrick Riley is Professor Emeritus of Political Science and former
Michael Oakeshott Professor in Political Philosophy at the
University of Wisconsin–Madison. He has published extensively on
early-modern political thought, including Will and Political
Legitimacy (1982), Kant’s Political Philosophy (1982), and The
General Will before Rousseau: The Transformation of the Divine
into the Civic (1986).
Shannon C. Stimson is Professor of Political Science and Chair of
Political Economy of Industrial Societies at the University of
California–Berkeley. She is the author or editor of several works,
viii List of Contributors
including Ricardian Politics (1991), Modern Political Science (2007),
and After Adam Smith: A Century of Transformation in Politics and
Political Economy (2009).
Tracy B. Strong is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the
University of California–San Diego. He is the author of numerous essays
and books, including, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Politics of the
Ordinary (1994) and, most recently, Politics without Vision: “Thinking
without a Banister” in Twentieth Century Political Thought (2012).
David Lay Williams is Associate Professor of Political Science at DePaul
University and the author of several essays on the history of political
thought, as well as Rousseau’s Platonic Enlightenment (2007) and
Rousseau’s “Social Contract”: An Introduction (2014).
List of Contributors ix
Acknowledgments
Early modernity is often understood as the age that gave rise to the concept
of the sovereign individual – inspired by Doctor Faustus in literature,
Newton in science, and homo economicus in politics and society. To be
sure, the sovereign individual has been a force for stunning change in all
these domains, not least in politics and society. These changes have, how-
ever, an ambiguous legacy. Although scientific and technological advance-
ments have exceeded the imagination and the global economy has
expanded exponentially, there has been a lingering sense among some
that these achievements come at a cost – that in blind pursuit of self-
interest, the broader communal interest has been threatened. This volume
is dedicated to tracing the development of an alternative concept that
evolved in large part as a response to such concerns – that of citizens
who understand their will as part of a larger communal whole: the general
will. Before Rousseau appropriated it for expressly civic purposes, this
concept emerged initially in theological debates over salvation and God’s
will. Contentious from the beginning and certainly in Rousseau’s wake, it
has had a vibrant life and remains part of political discourse to this day.
This volume seeks to reinforce or reinvigorate analysis of the general will
with attention to a broader spectrum of the concept’s history than has been
previously available.
Several essays in this volume emerged from a symposium on the general
will held at the University of Wisconsin–Madison on October 4, 2008, to
honor the pioneering work of Patrick Riley. This symposium benefited
xi
from the selfless general wills of several individuals, including Richard
Avramenko, Debbie Bakke, Michael Dubin, Robert Booth Fowler, Susan
Friedman, Ryan Patrick Hanley, Christopher Harwood, Alan J. Kellner,
Jimmy Casas Klausen, Simanti Lahiri, Katherine Loeber, Steven Nadler,
Sean Smalley, and John Zumbrunnen. It also required financial assistance
from multiple academic units, including several at the University of
Wisconsin–Madison: the Institute for Research in the Humanities, as
well as the departments of history, philosophy, and political science. The
political science department at the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point
especially deserves commendation for its foundational support.
The editors have subsequently acquired many other debts. At
Cambridge University Press, Robert Dreesen’s enthusiasm for this project
has been especially crucial, while his staff, particularly Liz Janetschek, has
been most helpful. Terence Ball and three anonymous reviewers read the
manuscript and offered many useful suggestions for improving the essays
and the volume as a whole. J. Rixey Ruffin also read a portion of the
manuscript, offering invaluable suggestions for its improvement. Jeni
Forestal did an excellent job rekeying the long first chapter. Closer to
home and for countless good reasons, Jim would like to thank Mary
G. Dietz, and David would like to thank Jennifer Weiser and Benjamin
Williams. Jim and David would also like to thank one another. We could
not have predicted at the outset that we would have become Evanston
neighbors, but this happy development has seen our relationship grow
from mutual professional respect to a warm friendship.
We would like to thank the contributors to this volume, who have
constructed thoughtful and engaging essays. They have patiently endured
this process with the good faith that their work would ultimately see the
light of day. One contributor, Patrick Riley, deserves special mention. His
work on the general will returned scholars to this crucial concept – and
reminded everyone that while Rousseau was certainly the central character
in its story, its life extends far beyond him. Most contributors to this
volume have been either Patrick’s students or his colleagues, and they
can all attest to his ready willingness to set aside his particular will for
the general will.
Some chapters have appeared in previously published works, and
the editors would like to acknowledge them here. Patrick Riley’s “The
General Will before Rousseau: The Contributions of Arnauld, Pascal,
Malebranche, Bayle, and Bossuet” was previously published in Studi
Filosofici (1982–83). Also, parts of his “Kant on the General Will”
appeared in The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau (Cambridge
xii Acknowledgments
University Press, 2001) and inATreatise of Legal Philosophy and General
Jurisprudence, volume 10: The Philosophers’ Philosophy of Law from the
Seventeenth Century to Our Days (Springer, 2009). Portions of Tracy B.
Strong’s “The General Will in Rousseau and after Rousseau” appeared in
his Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Politics of the Ordinary (Rowman &
Littlefield, 2002). David Lay Williams’s “Spinoza and the General Will”
appeared in the Journal of Politics (2010), and significant portions of “The
Substantive Elements of Rousseau’s General Will” appeared as Appendix
A in his Rousseau’s “Social Contract”: An Introduction (Cambridge
University Press, 2014).
Finally, the editors note here that the contributors have had the liberty
to employ their own preferred editions and translations of Rousseau and
other classic works. All of these editions can be found in the comprehensive
bibliography at the end of this book.
Acknowledgments xiii
Editors’ Introduction
The “general will” is a defining concept of modern political thought. For a
time – in matters theological, philosophical, and political – it ranked
alongside the concepts of liberty, sovereignty, and law, among others.
Though defining, all were contested; and all were associated with para-
mount thinkers whom we still remember and debate today. Who can
imagine discoursing about sovereignty or law in any sort of historical
register without raising Bodin, Hobbes, or Bentham? And while liberty
seems to be the legacy of alleged liberals such as Mill, there was libertybefore liberalism1 – as Machiavelli, Locke, and the Levelers remind us.
Even then, there were precursors and successors – some famous, some
obscure – indicating long lines of genealogy, evolution, and change in the
conceptual configurations of modern thought.
It would be impossible to imagine modern political thought without
Rousseau, who ranks with these other paramount thinkers. And it would
be impossible to imagine Rousseau without the general will. In Rousseau,
the general will intimates and animates so much of the range of modern
political conceptualization. Besides liberty, sovereignty, and law, it invokes
order, equality, virtue, citizenship, individuality, and the social contract.
“The general will is Rousseau’s most successful metaphor,” Judith Shklar
once judged. “It conveys everything he most wanted to say.”2 Alas, what
he most wanted to say was not entirely new or unprecedented. Neither was
it perfectly clear or invariably well received. But the concept of the general
will did succeed in becoming central to the contentious imagination of
modernity after – and largely because of – Rousseau.
By turns celebrated and condemned, the general will in its history after
Rousseau stirred passions as few ideas, concepts, words, or metaphors
xv
have. Some figures found great inspiration in the general will as they
imagined Rousseau envisioned it. The most immediate inspiration came
in the opening days of the French Revolution when the Abbé Sieyès
appropriated the term to elevate the Third Estate from “nothing” to
sovereign.3 The same year, the Tennis Court Oath depicted on the cover
of this volume would ultimately result in the Declaration of the Rights of
Man, which proclaimed, “The law is an expression of the general will.”4
Not only revolutionaries but the ill-fated Louis XVI gave testimony to the
power of Rousseau’s central concept when, at the National Assembly, he
promised to “defend and maintain constitutional liberty, whose
principles the general will, in accord with my own, has sanctioned.”5
Robespierre – who would have none of Louis’s will but thought
Rousseau “divine” – found the general will at work in the Committee of
Public Safety as it doled out the Terror.6 The most storied philosophers
following Rousseau fell sway to the general will, as well. Kant celebrated
Rousseau as the “Newton of the moral world” and appealed to the general
will throughout his long career.7 Fichte’s ambition for his philosophy of
right was “to find a will that cannot possibly be other than the common
will.”8 Hegel insisted that “the general will is supposed to supervise the
supreme power in general.”9 Admiration for Rousseau continued into the
twentieth century. The liberal contractarian John Rawls identified himself
as a Kantian insofar as Kant “sought to give a philosophical foundation to
Rousseau’s idea of the general will.”10
Others have recoiled at what they thought were the dangers and dark-
ness of the general will. In 1815, looking back on the results of the French
Revolution, Benjamin Constant wrote of “this despotism of the so-called
general will, in a word, this popular power without limits, dogmas which
are the pretext for all our upheavals.”11 In the aftermath of the FirstWorld
War, John Dewey came to a similar conclusion. Rousseau had created
“an overruling ‘general will’” which “under the influence of German
metaphysics was erected into a dogma of a mystic and transcendent
absolute will.”12 In a world again at war, Bertrand Russell warned in
1945 that the “doctrine of the general will [has] made possible the
mystic identification of a leader with his people, which has no need of
confirmation by so mundane an apparatus as the ballot-box.”13 Likewise,
Karl Popper complained that, having unleashed the concept of the general
will, Rousseau was “one of the most pernicious influences in the history of
social philosophy.”14 “In marrying [the general will] with the concept of
the principle of popular sovereignty, and popular self-expression,”
J. L. Talmon added shortly thereafter, “Rousseau gave rise to totalitarian
xvi Editors’ Introduction
democracy.”15 And, quite recently, Jeffrey Abramson has remarked that
Rousseau’s general will projects a “spooky character.”16
The range of these historical judgments on Rousseau and the general
will reflects, in part, the political, ideological, and philosophical options in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But it also reflects the “inherent
indeterminacy” of Rousseau’s principles, as well as widely divergent
conceptions of what, precisely, he meant by the volonté générale.17
Rousseau was himself aware of his ambiguity and notoriety. He warned:
“Attentive readers, do not, I pray, be in a hurry to charge me with
contradicting myself. The terminology made it unavoidable, considering
the poverty of the language; but wait and see.”18 To judge by the
subsequent history of the general will after Rousseau, it would be a long
wait indeed.
But there is even more to the invention, reception, and contention
of the general will in modernity than either Rousseau or the history
after him. Indeed, one must consider the history of the general will
before Rousseau, as well. Shklar brooked no doubts that “The phrase
‘general will’ is ineluctably the property of one man, Jean-Jacques
Rousseau.” She added, however: “He did not invent it, but he made
its history.”19 No, he did not invent it. Immediately before his first
discussion of the general will in an Encyclopédie contribution on
political economy, Denis Diderot proclaimed, “the general will is
always good” in his own 1755 contribution to the Encyclopédie on
natural right.20 Rousseau would also have been able to identify
Montesquieu preceding Diderot in using the general will politically,
given his close attention to Spirit of the Laws.21 However, he did not
do so, though Diderot himself did.22 Much later – and much after
Rousseau – so would scholars like Shklar, C. E. Vaughn, and Charles
Hendel. By that later time, it did rather appear that Montesquieu,
briefly, and Diderot, passingly, exhausted what could be said about
the history of the general will before Rousseau.
Our understanding of the provenance and intellectual dynamics of the
concept of the general will and its post-Rousseauian reception – and thus
Rousseau himself – advanced considerably with the publication in 1978 of
Patrick Riley’s essay, “The General Will before Rousseau.” Evolving into
his The General Will before Rousseau: The Transformation of the
Divine into the Civic (1986), Riley discovered many others beyond
Montesquieu and Diderot who, before Rousseau, had promoted their
views or criticized others explicitly using the terminology of “the general
Editors’ Introduction xvii
will.” There was Antoine Arnauld who coined the term in 1644 in reaction
to the theology of Nicolas Malebranche. There were also Pascal, Bayle,
Bossuet, and Fénelon as well as – to a lesser degree – their contemporaries,
Hobbes, Spinoza, Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Barbeyrac, Fontenelle,
Voltaire, and Hume, among others. In subtitling his book, The
Transformation of the Divine into the Civic, moreover, Riley offered a
sweeping sketch of conceptual change of the first order. The general will
had originated as a theological notion – about nature, grace, and the extent
of “God’s general will to save all men” – but was “politicized” or “civi-
cized” over the course of its history, culminating in Rousseau. In regard to
the prospects of “a more general theory of the genesis and metamorphosis
of ideas,” Riley summarized his own preference “to say simply that
between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there was a rising con-
sciousness that ideas once imputed or ascribed to God, such as justice,
goodness, wisdom, generality, and constancy, are merely moral ideas
made yet more attractive by being transplanted to heaven.” At the peak
of thisrising consciousness, Rousseau wrote in such a way as to make
possible Kant’s subsequent efforts to bring these moral ideas “back to
earth” as the demands of reason. For it was “Rousseau who completed
Montesquieu’s conversion of the general will of God into the general will
of the citizen.”23
As a result, Rousseau was to be understood in a distinctly French
discourse of political theology in which he inherited and transformed the
terminology of the “general will.” Given its centrality in Rousseau’s
political thought, this interpretation made greater sense than citing
Rousseau in an English contractarian discourse or a German critical dis-
course. He could obviously be cited in these latter discourses, as well,
indeed as he standardly had been. But Riley’s interpretation opened a
new scene, one glimpsed but undeveloped by Shklar and Hendel.
Moreover, Bayle, in particular, but the others, as well, became much
more civicized and of greater note in the history of political thought.
Moreover, the conceptual history of the general will – and genealogical
inquiry, more generally – proved an essential historiographical method for
understanding French, English, and German discourses, before and after
Rousseau.
This volume – The General Will: The Evolution of a Concept – furthers
the conceptual and interpretative work begun by Riley. An expanded
version of the initial 1978 article – “The General Will before
Rousseau: The Contributions of Arnauld, Pascal, Malebranche, Bayle
xviii Editors’ Introduction
and Bossuet” – serves as chapter 1 of this volume.24 The subsequent
chapters take up the general will, not always in agreement, as well as
endorsing, amending or criticizing Riley’s account. Not only Rousseau,
then, but Arnauld, Pascal, Malebranche, Bayle, Montesquieu, and Kant
appear at length in various chapters that follow. Somewhowere dealt with
en passant by Riley – like Leibniz, Spinoza, and Locke – are treated at
greater length, and new figures are represented here, too, like Benjamin
Constant, Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, and John Rawls, with
passing glances at Marx and Nietzsche, as well. Even Cicero and the
Puritans emerge in this volume as having conceptual equivalents to the
general will informing their religion and politics.
As broad as the coverage is here, however, the general will’s scope
extends well beyond what could be found even in a volume such as this.
While Andrew Murphy draws attention in this volume to a prototype of
the general will in John Winthrop’s promotion of fraternal bonds among
citizens, for example, this was merely the beginning of the general will in
the American tradition. Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 32
acknowledges a domain for a sovereign national “general will,” while
conceding to the Anti-Federalists that each state would retain a particular
will and the associated rights of sovereignty for elements not “exclusively
delegated to the United States.”25 Two years later, James Wilson would
offer his own formulation of the general will: “In order to constitute a
state, it is indispensably necessary, that the wills and the power of all
members be united in such a manner, that they shall never act nor desire
but one and the same thing in whatever relates to the end for which the
society is established.”26 Thomas Paine commented that the best way to
promote civic harmony in Britain is “that the general WILL should have
the full and free opportunity of being publicly ascertained and known.”27
In his fourth State of the Union address, President John Adams praised
the early years of the American experiment for operating “under the
protection of laws emanating only from the general will.”28 In the majority
opinion of Cohen v. Commonwealth of Virginia, Chief Justice John
Marshall insisted on the right of the federal government “to preserve itself
against a section of the nation acting in opposition to the general will.”29
Later in the same century Woodrow Wilson asserted in Rousseauean
fashion that “the will of majorities is not the same as the general will.”30
And in the twentieth century the general will lingered in American political
discourse by working its way into the 1970 edition Robert’s Rules of
Order, which insisted, “The application of parliamentary law is the best
method yet devised . . . to arrive at the general will.”31
Editors’ Introduction xix
Meanwhile, Prussian interest in the general will begins with Immanuel
Kant, who first acknowledges in 1766 the moral sway of a “general will”
in his Dreams of a Spirit-Seer32 and goes on to develop it in his mature
works. This tradition continues with Kant’s student, J. G. Fichte, who
makes the general will central to his political philosophy, describing the
fundamental problem of politics to “find a will that cannot be other than
the common will [gemeinsame Wille].”33 Along these lines, Fichte is
especially concerned to contain powerful particular wills. This requires
that “Each person must be convinced that the oppression and unrightful
treatment of one citizen will result with certainty in the same
oppression and treatment of himself.”34 In his Addresses to the German
Nation, he describes the severe limitations of particularism – “selfishness
has annihilated itself by its complete development”35 – where that partic-
ularism culminates in a thoroughly selfish and corrupt government that
cannot rule for the general will.36 Indeed, this selfishness extends
beyond governance and even infects individual citizens such that “the
individual no longer retain[s] any interest in the whole.”37 To solve this
problem, Fichte proposes replacing the “natural love” that is Hobbesian
egoism with “another kind of love, one that aims directly at the good,”38
largely through an ambitious educational program emphasizing love of
the fatherland.
Hegel would further develop the tradition of the general will by
explaining its development in the course of human history. While
Hegel occasionally employs Rousseau’s terminology of “general”
and “particular” wills, these terms evolve into “objective” and “sub-
jective” wills. He characterizes the “general” or “objective” will as
“the will of all individuals as such,” and he distinguishes it from
particular wills, “factions,” or “atomic point[s] of consciousness.”39
While the general will is morally superior to the subjective or partic-
ular will, it lacks the motivational force of particular, selfish wills. The
aim, then, for Hegel is to channel the energies of particular wills into
the cause of the objective will. As he writes in the Introduction to the
Philosophy of History, “a state is well constituted and internally
strong if the private interest of the citizens is united with the universal
goal of the state, so that each finds its fulfillment and realization in
the other.”40 This merger itself, however, is only attainable in its
fullest form at the end of history, where individual private wills are
not merely channeled into the cause of the objective or general will.
Rather citizens will the general will because it is the general will,
which for him represents highest manifestation of human freedom.
xx Editors’ Introduction
Hegel’s conception of the general will found sympathy among the late
nineteenth-century British Idealists, particularly Bernard Bosanquet. In the
context of an emerging triumph of liberalism and utilitarianism,
the Idealists sought to develop a political philosophy less reliant on the
individual rights and wills that they associated with Locke and more
oriented to teleology and the common good. Bosanquet, in particular,
refers to the theories of Bentham, Mill, and Spencer as “theories of the
first look,” which are guided by an assumption of “the natural separation
of the human unit.”41 Bosanquet rejects this approach as validating the
“actual will,”which is egoistic, and advocates replacing it with a “real” or
“generalwill,” which may not be manifested in every individual
articulation of interest, but is coherent and determined by its fidelity to
the “common good.”42
Although no idealist, another self-described “pupil” of Hegel who
inherited and deepened consciousness of the general will was Karl Marx.
He used the concept both as a detached theorist of history and as an
impassioned conduit of communist ideals. On the one hand, that is, he
could look down on the modern state and declare that “in civil law
the existing property relations are declared to be the general will” while
harboring “the illusion that private property is based solely on the
private will.”43 On the other hand, he could quote Rousseau admiringly
on the “volonté générale”44 and be read as connecting it to the ideals
of communal life.45 Later Marxists – like Louis Althusser – would
follow Rousseau’s and Marx’s lead, keeping the general will alive as
both explanation and ideal.46
The above-mentioned thinkers and byways of the conceptual history of
the general will – not otherwise covered in this volume – suggest that
more such thinkers and byways may yet be discovered or revived. And
they suggest where they might be found. Discoveries or revivals are
possible, for example, in the popular pamphlets in the wake of the
French Revolution or in the constitutional commentaries of late
eighteenth-century Americans or in the lesser writings of nineteenth-
century British Idealists or in the precincts of French Marxism or in the
neocolonial discourses of Francophone revolutionaries. They are also
possible nearer to the known beginning of the conceptual history, as
Patrick Riley dates it, that is, in seventeenth-century theological debates
about “God’s will to save all men.” Indeed, we think we have made a few
such discoveries in religious writings and sermons from that period. They
invite deeper inquiry than we can provide here, but they are very
Editors’ Introduction xxi
suggestive without detailed commentary. One or another might suggest
an older source, a different referent, or an alternative pathway in the
evolution of the general will.
These early uses were often merely acknowledgments of the adjecti-
vally “general” character of divine volition. A few brief examples suffice.
When dealing with the medical dimensions of “enthusiasm,” for exam-
ple, the classical scholar Meric Casaubon lectured in 1655: “When in
matters of diseases, we oppose natural causes to supernatural, whether
divine or diabolical; as we do not exclude the general will of God, with-
out which nothing can be.”47 Similarly, in The Divine Right of Church-
government and Excommunication (1646), the Presbyterian pastor
Samuel Rutherford gestured to “the general will and command of
God” when distinguishing between “essential” and “arbitrary” wor-
ship.48 And in a posthumous commentary on “the light of Christ” at
the earlier date of 1623, Nicholas Byfield deemed “the instrument of
receiving it, in respect of the general will of God, is the understanding.”49
These references did not introduce or occasion spirited debate about
what, precisely, was “general” about God’s will. His will could be any-
thing, of course, not least of all general. The references often vied for
place alongside other adjectives: God’s will was absolute, eternal, pure,
simple, rigorous, severe, commanding, forbidding, gentle, permissive,
adorable, and on and on. Hobbes thought these adjectives told us
about ourselves, not God. “The attributes we give him are not to tell
one another what he is, nor to signify our opinion of his nature, but our
desire to honour him with such names as we conceive most honourable
amongst ourselves.”50
Other references in this early period carried greater theological import
when divining the different ways in which God could will men’s salva-
tion. In The True Catholicks Tenure (1662), for example, Edward Hyde
the clergyman referred to instances of God’s judgments that “derogate
from his general will by his special will.”51 In 1635, when commenting
on Paul’s epistle to the Hebrews, William Jones proclaimed, “CHRIST
came not only to doe the general will of God: but to do his particular will
also as the Mediatour of mankinde.”52 The nephew and namesake of Sir
Walter Raleigh made the same distinction from the pulpit before the
outbreak of civil war in 1642.53 In these cases, “special” or “particular”
contrasted with “general” in ways that Riley found in the French
debates between Arnauld, Malebranche, and others. Indeed, one
English reference provides a striking and sustained parallel to the
French debates. In the first article, “Of God’s Predestination” in his
xxii Editors’ Introduction
“Via Media: The Way of Peace” – collected later in The Shaking of the
Olive Tree (1660) – Joseph Hall, the Calvinist-leaning Anglican bishop
of Norwich and Exeter, theologized about God’s volitions regarding
man’s salvation. Hall allowed both a “general” and a “special” will at
work in God’s predestination.
Besides the general will of God, he hath eternally willed, and decreed to give a
special, and effectuall grace to those, that are predestinate according to the good
pleasure of his will, whereby they do actually believe, obey, and persevere, that they
may be saved: so as the same God, that would have all Men to be saved, if they
believe, and be not wanting to his Spirit, hath decreed to work powerfully in some,
whom he hath particularly chosen, that they shall believe, and not be wanting to his
Spirit in whatsoever shall be necessary for their salvation.54
This passage was posthumous, Hall having died in 1656. Who read or
listened to the original? Could this be an independent development? Were
their discursive connections between the bishop and the French authors?
Are there perhaps yet earlier uses of the term – including those noted above
by Byfield, Raleigh, or Jones that precede Arnauld’s reference in 1644 –
that might throw new and different light on the origin and evolution of the
general will?
The referent of these early uses was invariably the general will of God,
as it had been in the French debates between Arnauld and Malebranche.
However, at least one striking and suggestive usage points not to God, but
to “our selves.” In A Spiritual Treasure containing our Obligations to
God, and the Vertues Necessary to a Perfect Christian, as translated into
English in 1660 and reissued in 1664, the Oratorian Jean-Hugues Quarré
(1580–1656) wrote that “it is good for the soul to present her self often
before God, exciting in her self an efficacious desire to do the pure will of
God.” Then he continued:
Moreover it is very profitable to offer our selves to God, and to form a generall will
to practice all sorts of good, though we have no light nor feeling, contenting our
selves with a resignation to God, and taking care to follow him, and to co-operate
faithfully with the graces and motions we receive from him.55
Well beforeMontesquieu, Diderot, and Rousseau, then, we seem to have a
“general will” or “volonté générale” that is the will of humans, individu-
ally or collectively. Furthermore, the French original by Quarré – Thrésor
spirituel contentant les obligations que nous avons d’estre à Dieu, et les
vertus qui nous sont necessaires pour vivre en chrestien parfait – was first
published in 1632, pushing back the known date of origin and inviting us
to speculate on the lively discussions at the Oratory under Cardinal Pierre
Editors’ Introduction xxiii
de Bérulle, even before Malebranche’s birth! This, too, raises further
questions about origins and underscores the complexity – covered in this
volume, otherwise known, or yet to-be-discovered – in the conceptual
history of the general will.
Four sections divide up the volume: the general will before Rousseau, the
general will in Rousseau, the general will after Rousseau, and pre-history
of the general willtradition. As noted, Riley’s sweeping chapter covers
much of what is now known of the general will before Rousseau. It
emphasizes the dramatic change that the concept underwent – from a
divine concept, as found in Arnauld, Leibniz, and Malebranche, to a
civic one in Montesquieu and especially Rousseau. Of special interest is
the central importance of Bayle in the unfolding of the general will. In
particular, Riley underscores how and the ways in which Bayle civicized
the general will. Before he was the editor of the monumental Dictionary,
Bayle took up the themes of the debate that preceded him. Whereas Pascal
had hinted at the general will of “bodies politic” like churches, Bayle
secularized and rendered more evidently civic the ways in which human
associations in their collective actions exhibit a “general will.” It remained
for Montesquieu to follow this train of thought in anticipation of
Rousseau.
Following this overview, Steven Nadler, then, returns to the early
salvos of the French debate. His “Malebranche’s Shadow: General Will
in the Leibniz-Arnauld Correspondence” explores theological dimen-
sions of the general will in the important works of the Oratorian
Nicolas Malebranche. Upon reading Malebranche’s Treatise on Nature
and Grace – which introduced an account of God acting according to
general laws that were expressions of His will and consistent with God’s
constancy and perfection – Arnaud offered the first known assessment of
the general will: he thought it completely undermined God’s capacity for
miracles, which he understood to be central to the very meaning of God
himself. That is, Godmust be allowed to exercise a particularwill. Armed
with a new dedication to God as an agent of particular wills, Arnauld
read Leibniz’s Discourse on Metaphysics as being in league with
Malebranche in its unacceptable insistence that God can only legislate
generally, even if this is supposedly consistent with the best of all possible
worlds. Nadler reveals how Leibniz, in turn, artfully responded to
Arnauld’s objections in order to pacify Arnauld while still publicly
maintaining a version of Malebranchian generality in divine will or
providence.
xxiv Editors’ Introduction
The gap between the theological and political accounts of the general
will was bridged indirectly by another figure of the greatest importance
to early-modern political thought and Rousseau in particular – John
Locke. Alas, this is not appreciated as much as it should be, so argues
James Farr. As Farr notes, Rousseau not only respected Locke on matters
of education and toleration, he credited him “in particular” as holding
“the same principles” of politics and law. Upon inspection, these
Lockean principles – which Rousseau glossed as matters of the “general
will” – proclaimed the law to be “the Will of society” and necessary for
liberty, for “where there is no Law, there is no Freedom.” These princi-
ples were adaptations of his theological views. So it is notable that Locke
had read extensively those thinkers most responsible for debating the
general will –Malebranche, Pascal, and Bayle – as well as speculating on
the Pauline doctrine that most concerned them, namely, that “God wills
all men to be saved.” Drawing yet closer to the “general will,” Locke
found it necessary to refute the theory of ideas he found in Malebranche
and his English followers. ByHis laws, God governed an orderly universe
that He willed into existence, to be sure, Farr argues, but there was no
coherent reason, Locke thought, to embrace Malebranche’s view that
it was God’s “general will” that human beings have the ideas they
do because they “see all things” in Him. For Locke, the (human) will –
whether general or particular – has no role in the formation of ideas,
which exist merely as a consequence of sense perception. At any rate,
these competing accounts of ideas were “hypotheses” to which believers
should submit humbly, not presupposing, as Malebranche, to “dictate”
what God can do or how. In confronting Malebranche, Locke was
among the first in English to quote (in translation) Malebranche’s use
of “general will.” In light of this fact – and Rousseau’s later invocation of
Locke as embracing “the same principles” – Locke deserves to be more
fully incorporated into the conceptual history of the general will than has
been the case hitherto.
The next two chapters take up the politicized general will implied in
Locke, Bayle, and other early modern thinkers. In doing so, each chal-
lenges Riley’s narrative, though in different ways, that the general will
takes this secular turn specifically with Montesquieu. David Lay Williams
argues that the general will had been secularized generations before
Montesquieu in the political writings of Benedict de Spinoza. Williams
identifies Spinoza’s “common mind” as possessing many of the same
qualities that later come to be associated with Rousseau’s secular general
will. What is unique in Spinoza, he reasons, is that he offers three different
Editors’ Introduction xxv
ways to achieve that union of wills: fear, love, and reason. Further, Spinoza
stands outside of the rest of the general will tradition insofar as he resists
the dominant tendency of general will theorists to appeal to Platonic
metaphysics, instead resting on a modern naturalism. The leaves Spinoza
with a compatabilistic conception of the will significantly different from
the autonomous will found in Rousseau and Kant.
In “Freedom, Sovereignty, and the General Will in Montesquieu,”
Sharon Krause asks whether or not Montesquieu actually embraces a
secular, politicized general will in his Spirit of the Laws, as Riley claims.
With careful attention to the text, she reveals that Montesquieu
infrequently employs the term; and, when he does, it is not as his own
normative principle. He rather speaks of a legislature, yes, legislating
for all – but not for the common interest, as has been frequently supposed.
In Montesquieu, Krause finds a liberal political theorist who is more
concerned to effectively channel particular wills than to privilege a general
will. As such, she describes a Montesquieu who is less a predecessor to
Rousseau’s general will than an alternative.
The essays in the second section of this volume explore how the concept of
the general will inaugurated in early modern French theology and political
thought might nonetheless be found to have analogues or conceptual
equivalents beyond and before its nascent roots. We think of this as the
prehistory of the general will. These essays, then, suggest ways we might
conceptualize an extension of the general will tradition. Daniel J. Kapust
explores how, centuries earlier, Cicero’s On Duties bears on matters that
became relevant to the general will. He notes the dangers that Rousseau
associated with rhetoric as a particularizing force, hence subversive to the
general will. By contrast, he finds that Cicero comes down on the opposite
side of this question, suggesting that rhetoric has the capacity for both
generalizing and effecting consent. That Cicero might have differed from
Rousseau on such matters may not be surprising, since Rousseau was
quick to say of Cicero in the Social Contract that he “loved his glory
more than his fatherland.”56 Yet Cicero’s defense of rhetoric suggests
alternative means by which to achieve the common good and hence the
general will.
Finally, Andrew R. Murphy explores the fraternal dimension of the
general will by examining the colonial Puritan, John Winthrop. For
Winthrop, fraternity was a religious and specifically Christian duty – but
with important political implications. Murphy observes Winthrop insist-
ing, “That every man might have need of others, and from hence they
xxvi Editors’ Introduction
might all be knit more nearly together in the bond of brotherly affec-
tion.”57 Murphy’s attention to Winthrop’s Calvinism provides an oppor-tunity to consider Rousseau’s own possible debts to Calvinism, as
suggested in a footnote to the Social Contract, where Rousseau notes of
his fellow Genevan,
Those who know Calvin only as a theologian much underestimate the extent of his
genius. The codification of our wise edicts, in which he played a large part, does him
no less honor than his Institutes. Whatever revolution time may bring in our
religion, so long as the spirit of patriotism and liberty still lives among us, the
memory of this great man will be forever blessed.
This offers a potentially fruitful source for reexamining the source material
for Rousseau’s unique formulation of the general will.
The third section turns its attention to the most famed proponent of the
general will: Jean-Jacques Rousseau. We offer four strikingly different
accounts of Rousseau’s general will. David Lay Williams grounds
Rousseau’s general will in Platonism, arguing that the general will involves
consent on the part of the people to a pre-existing eternal idea of justice. As
such, Rousseau represents a curious blend of an ancient commitment to
immaterial substance and a modern commitment to consent for assuring
legitimacy. In order to maintain this will, Williams emphasizes the impor-
tance of fraternal love in Rousseau’s republic. By contrast, Richard Boyd
finds a more ambiguous Rousseau with greater liberal sympathies than are
typically assumed. While there is an element in Rousseau emphasizing
benevolent feelings or sentiment, there is another casting aside those very
sentiments in favor of procedural justice. And even when Rousseau culti-
vates civic feeling, this is where he is potentially most dangerous – insofar
as sentiments of nationalism emanating from fraternity work against all
external communities. Implicit in this is a challenge to any sort of cosmo-
politanism. So Rousseau’s general will is a kind of particular will in the
end – the will of one particular society among many in the world.
Sankar Muthu acknowledges and develops the problem identified by
Boyd, namely, the problem that Rousseau’s general will presents for
cosmopolitanism of any sort. Despite some derisive remarks by
Rousseau about the “cosmopolites,” Muthu shows that Rousseau was
nonetheless open to the idea of a general society of humankind and thus
a “general will of humanity.” He did not believe, however, that it could
play any feasible role in the political affairs of the world of his day, or in the
future. In a complex investigation, Muthu reveals that the citizen of
Editors’ Introduction xxvii
Geneva expressed a longing for the fellowship that a universal society
could provide, endorsing the conceptual validity of a general will that
pertained to all humanity. Ultimately, though, what could be defended in
theory was tragically inapplicable in practice in a world dominated by
predatory states and commercial societies. Thus, a general society of all
peoples was impossible. This followed because of features of the human
condition itself; the curious mix of sovereign legal power and natural
liberty that characterized that condition; the pathologies endemic to com-
mercial relations; and the requirements necessary for the realization of the
general will of particular societies. Ultimately, as Muthu concludes,
Rousseau’s critical analysis of the general will of humanity illustrates –
from an all-encompassing, global perspective – the profoundly tragic
sensibility of his social and political thought.
Finally in this array of overlapping or competing readings, Tracy
B. Strong offers a reading of Rousseau’s general will that emphasizes
commonness. Even more cosmopolitanism than either Boyd or Muthu,
Strong’s Rousseau sketches out in his general will “what it means to live as
a human being . . . capable of living with other human beings as human
beings and as a human being.” In order to achieve this, Strong emphasizes
the role of law inRousseau’s political theory. For it “requires a people to be
able to see itself as a people, to stand outside itself and, as itself, constitute
itself.” This conception of humanity and law, however, must not be con-
fused with a simply moral concept. Rather, the general will embodies at
least as muchwhat is aswhat should be, if not more so. Rousseau’s general
will is adamantly a will of and in the present. Strong concludes by sugges-
tively tracing the evolution of the general will through the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries in the very different figures ofMarx, Nietzsche, Weber,
and Rawls.
The general will after Rousseau – our fourth and final section – includes
essays on Smith, Kant, Constant, Tocqueville, and Rawls. This set of
thinkers is hardly of one mind about the value of Rousseau’s general
will. Kant and Rawls view the general will as a valuable contribution,
needing some (rather important) refinement in order to achieve its
purposes, while Smith, Constant, and Tocqueville, by contrast, view the
general will as inadequate or even a genuine threat to the public good.
Rousseau’s philosophical influence was immediately felt in Königsberg
when Immanuel Kant turned his attention from the critiques of reason to
politics and political theory. At least Kant felt this way when, shortly after
the publication of the Social Contract, he spoke of “this compulsionwe feel
xxviii Editors’ Introduction
in us to harmonize our will with the General Will.”58 Yet the connection
between Kant and Rousseau – so strong in many ways – is less strong than
at first it might seem when it comes to the general will. So argues Patrick
Riley. While he is quick to acknowledge the influence of Rousseau and the
general will in Kant’s moral philosophy, he is less inclined to do so with
regard to his political philosophy. Riley’s Kant is crucially grounded in the
maxim that a good will is the only unqualified good. And while this good
will is the proper standard for moral judgment, it is entirely impractical for
establishing a republic, where “public legal justice” assumes the work that
a good will cannot fulfill. As such, Riley argues, the “will” of the “general
will” plays much less of a role in Kant’s political philosophy than it does
for Rousseau.59 Riley pushes further to argue that Rousseau’s “general” is
in its own way more “particular” than Kant’s “universal.” Specifically,
Rousseau denies that the aspiration to “universal” norms, such as found in
Kant – and Diderot – are unrealistic in their own respect. For this reason,
whereas Kant is eager to consider questions of international right,
Rousseau is pessimistic about the possibility. For Riley’s Rousseau, the
“general” represents the outer limits of justice and is always somewhat
provincial.
Other contemporaries of Rousseau – or those just after him – had
similarly guarded reactions to the general will, however much else they
shared with the “Citoyen de Genève.” Thus, Shannon C. Stimson notes
that Adam Smith was by no means unfriendly to Rousseau. For example,
Smith translated into English the Second Discourse and accepted as true
many of Rousseau’s critiques of commercial society. Further, Smith
embraced Rousseau’s demand for greater social unity. Yet he ultimately
found an “invisible hand” to be a more effective tool for the purposes of
social unification than the “general will.” For Smith, the problems of
poverty and inequality in sowing disunity, in particular, do not require
the radicalism of the general will so much as simply granting more space
to the particular will than Rousseau and his closest followers would
permit. Although the particular will has its warts, in Smith it has more
virtues than the general will tradition – and Rousseau, in particular –
allows.
Though influenced by and sympathetic to Smith, Bryan Garsten’s
essay reveals that Benjamin Constant went much further than Smith in
critiquing Rousseau’s general will, identifying what he considered its
fatal flaw: theseparation of government and sovereignty. Remember, it
was this that Rousseau shared with Locke as one “the same principles”
bonding them. For Constant – who was more forgiving of Locke as a
Editors’ Introduction xxix
forerunning liberal and associated, favorably, with the Glorious
Revolution – the complete submission of subjects to the general will
results not in equality, as Rousseau envisioned, but rather in an asym-
metrical distribution of power. The people surrender their private wills
to the government, which then holds all of the power. An all-powerful
government, consequently, wields its power arbitrarily and despotically.
Furthermore, its power is enhanced by the pretense of the general will’s
sovereignty. By laying claim to “seemingly disinterested principles,”
factious interests remove public opinion as an obstacle to their machi-
nations.60 Garsten concludes, at some distance from Constant’s partic-
ular critique of Rousseau, by exploring how a government might
genuinely arise from the sovereign general will.
Another major figure in the French liberal tradition, Alexis de
Tocqueville, is often cited as embracing Rousseau’s political philosophy.
Yet while Michael Locke McLendon demonstrates that Tocqueville had
genuine affection for elements of Rousseau’s thought, this cannot be said
of the general will. If anything, Tocqueville takes Rousseau’s dictum that
we must “take men as they are” far more seriously than Rousseau himself
did, which, in fact, renders him an entirely different thinker, more com-
fortable with giving free reign to the particular will than Rousseau possibly
could. Departing quite dramatically from Rousseau, Tocqueville accepts
selfishness as an accurate assessment of “men as they are” and builds a
nineteenth-century American doux commerce, where this selfishness ulti-
mately softens society and brings civic harmony. That is, Tocqueville finds
the public good in private wills rather than in the quixotic attempt to forge
a general one.
A later American liberal in our time, John Rawls, took a more sympa-
thetic view of Rousseau’s and, then, Kant’s use of the “general will” for
establishing social and political unity. As a historical matter and as a self-
identified Kantian, Rawls remarked in A Theory of Justice that “Kant
sought to give a philosophical foundation to Rousseau’s idea of the general
will.”61 Furthermore, Rawls himself is said to have confessed that his “two
principles of justice could be understood as an effort to spell out the
content of the general will.”62 Christopher Brooke in the final chapter
follows these clues to see just how Rousseau’s concept of the general will –
along with its substantive commitments to liberty and equality – animated
Rawls’s theory of justice. In examining Rawls’s Lectures on the History of
Political Philosophy, he notes that not only are the lectures on Rousseau
more polished than those on any other historical figure, but also that
Rousseau is also the only canonical figure in his History to escape serious
xxx Editors’ Introduction
criticism. Brooke paints a portrait of Rawls deeply inspired by what he
found in Rousseau, just as was the case in Kant. He also sketches the ways
in which Rawls departs from Rousseau – especially with regard to the
prospects for long-term success in politics. Whereas Rousseau laments in
his Social Contract that every republic is ultimately doomed to decay, one
finds a more optimistic – or, at least, less anxiety-ridden – assessment of
our contemporary prospects in Rawls. In making these informed observa-
tions, Brooke not only appeals to Rawls’ published texts, but to some
hand-written notes toward a future, unrealized project.
The “general will” has clearly had the most remarkable evolution. While
there is no reason to expect a theory of conceptual change to explain it or
any other conceptual evolution in political thought – as we might imagine
in natural science63 – there are some dynamics and features of conceptual
change evident in the general will’s evolution. Perhaps the most dramatic
development happened within its first half-century when the referent to
God’s will changed dramatically to be that of human will, either in indi-
viduals or a community or humankind, more generally.64The change from
Arnauld andMalebranche toMontesquieu andRousseau, as Riley argued,
was the change from “the divine to the civic.” Even when civic, the changes
were notable, for example, from Robespierre’s revolution to Napoleon’s
rule. For some witnesses, then and later, neither of these civic or political
transformations were good – as the general will had been for Diderot and
Rousseau – and so the general will earned its bad name, to date things at
least from Constant. All along the changes were driven by contradiction
within or contestation between different conceptions of the general will.65
Some changes were intentional, others unintentional or at least until
noticed amid debate. Perhaps the most dramatic change of all has been
the marked decline in the use of “general will” at all, at least among
politicians and publicists, unlike historians and scholars as evident in
this volume.
The most obvious reason for this decline has to do with the French
Revolution itself. Even as Hegel refashioned the general will, for exam-
ple, he condemned Rousseau’s formulation as the inspiration for “the
most terrible and drastic event,” namely, the Terror.66 This assessment
was, of course, widely shared, including by Benjamin Constant, who
read Rousseau’s general will as “inspir[ing] our Revolution and those
horrors for which liberty for all was at once the pretext and the victim.”67
The stain of this association of the general will with nightmarish political
violence subsequently proved difficult to wash out. Indeed, amid another
Editors’ Introduction xxxi
European crisis a century and a half later, Rousseau and the general will
returned for another round of opprobrium. As intellectuals struggled to
comprehend the rise and enormities of fascism, they found its inspiration
in Rousseau and the general will. Toward the end of the war, Russell
wrote, “At the present time, Hitler is an outcome of Rousseau; Roosevelt
and Churchill, of Locke.”68 Alexander Passerin d’Entrèves labeled
Rousseau’s general will “the prototype of the modern tyrant.”69 And
Isaiah Berlin found Rousseau and his general will to be “one of the most
formidable enemies of liberty in the whole history of political thought,”
specifically linking the general will to the Jacobins, Robespierre,
Hitler, Mussolini, and the Communists, all of whom “use this very
same method of argument.”70 Thus, it became increasingly difficult to
evoke its name in the service of more noble causes. Indeed, the
association of the general will with modern tyranny lingers even in
contemporary American legislative debate, such as when Senator
Chuck Grassley recently cited the application of Rousseau’s philosophy
resulting in “power centralized in a ruling elite that claims a unique
ability to interpret the ‘general will.’”71
Another reason for the decline of the general will (especially in the
circles of faith) stems from its very generality. In his account of William
Bentley, the early nineteenth-century American theologian, J. Rixey
Ruffin argues that generalist theologies “failed to provide what the
faithful seek from their faith.”72 Among other things, the faithful desired
that God take a special and personal interest in their wellbeing, and be
responsive to their specific prayers. In arguing that God’s providence was
general rather than particular, Bentley had placed his congregants in the
position of confronting “the prospect of a universe governed by a god
unable or unwilling to help them.”73 That Bentley’s theological views
were doomed to failure is apparent in the absence of such theological
views in the public sphere today. A general will, froma certain point of
view, is cold and abstract – these traits being especially unsuited for
dominant public philosophies.
Much the same logic applies to everyday (not just revolutionary)
politics. Just as appeals to a divine general will began to fall on deaf ears,
so too did appeals to a political or civil general will. The same subjects who
wanted to believe that God took a special interest in their personal affairs
wanted to believe that their own particular wills were worthy of some kind
of priority over a general will. Rousseau’s general will shares the same
failure to resonate with modern Western societies one finds in its theolog-
ical predecessor. Its abstraction offers few, if any, assurances of individual
xxxii Editors’ Introduction
salvation or preference. A new appeal to particularism in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries – whether through Smith, Constant, Tocqueville,
Mill, or others – offered a philosophical alternative to the general will. It
honored even celebrated personal preferences in contrast to Rousseau’s
republican calls for personal sacrifice to a greater good. Or put slightly
differently, whereas Rousseau regarded each individual or particular will
with deep suspicion, the new tradition took each individual to be special.
While it is difficult to measure the psychic consequences of such appeals, it
is not difficult to imagine the obstacles confronting the defenders of the
general will tradition – either theologically or politically.
As a consequence of this history, one rarely finds prominent contempo-
rary political thinkers, much less actors, couching their arguments in the
terms of the general will.74 Despite this, it would be mistaken to assume
that a bad name is all that remains of the general will. As some recent
scholars have suggested, the values associated with the general will retain a
vibrant life, though perhaps detached from express use of the term itself.
Jane Anna Gordon, for example, has sketched multiple links between
Rousseau’s general will and Franz Fanon’s conception of national con-
sciousness. For Gordon’s Fanon, the general will informs both critical and
constructive elements of his political philosophy. Critically, in the same
way that Rousseau warned against legislating in ignorance of local con-
ditions, Fanon appropriates the general will to scrutinize the “arrogant
ventures” of imperial powers into foreign territories with robust traditions
of their own. Constructively, just as Rousseau insists that the general will
must include all citizens for both derivation and substantive application,
Fanon demands “radically democratic participation.”75 Along similar
lines, Kevin Inston has recently argued for the Rousseauean foundations
of contemporary radical democratic theory, especially as found inMouffe,
Laclau, and Lefort. In this spirit, he emphasizes that Rousseau’s general
will demands far more from citizens than mere obedience of the laws.
It requires vigorous civic participation in “actively (re)producing” the
general will.76 Mouffe, Laclau, and Lefort, Inston argues, learn from
Rousseau’s conception of the general will that voting is perhaps the
least of a citizen’s duties, in comparison with contributing to a vigorous
democratic discourse.77As with Gordon’s Fanon, they all stress the impor-
tance of democratic inclusion emanating from Rousseau’s conception of
the general will.
The essays in this volume, taken collectively, paint a complex portrait of
Rousseau – as well as his forebears and descendants – who grappled with
Editors’ Introduction xxxiii
the very idea of a general will, whether of God, the citizen, a body politic,
or humanity at large. From the theological anxieties of Malebranche and
Arnauld to the political-theoretic complexities of John Rawls – entangling
Leibniz, Spinoza, Locke, Bayle, Montesquieu, Diderot, Kant, Smith,
Hume, Tocqueville, and Rousseau, not least – the general will has been a
conceptual instrument to answer or attempt to answer some of the most
pressing and timely questions of theology and politics. How doesGod will
that all men be saved? Are ideas divine or sensate? What makes whole the
members of a body? How much unity need a body politic have? What
commonality do citizens share? How can individuals be both free and obey
the law? What makes common the common interest or public the public
good? How do governments threaten states or the sovereignty of their
peoples? Can humanity be as one?
In the course of answering or attempting to answer questions like
these – our essays also show – the “general will” invited or had brought
down on it questions, in their turn, about the adequacy, coherence, or
dangers of this concept. Can God act by anything but a particular will, in
the end? Can a person, a citizen, a city, or a state? Are things as diverse as
ideas, actions, and practices matters of will, much less a general will? Can
particular volitions actually be aggregated into collective or universal
ones? Are humans so selfless as to embrace a good others deem common?
Are actual people capable of such public-minded deliberation? Doesn’t the
“general will” express an unattainable ideal, noble perhaps but unrealis-
tic? Isn’t it really propaganda for suppressing dissidents, a verbal prelude
to tyranny and terror?
These are questions not only about a concept but about the realities of
human politics or God’s universe which call forth or call out that which is
named by the term “general will.” Besides the intellectual depth and
diversity on display in the chapters to follow, they collectively remind us
of the political and theological issues that have been at stake – sometimes
persisting and sometimes changing – since the seventeenth century. They –
or others rather like them – are certainly at stake still, in one form or
another. It does not appear that human affairs or the prospects of
salvation will anytime soon be stable enough or sufficiently understand-
able to render final judgment on the value of thinking about politics or
religion – about citizens or God – in terms of a general will. The palpable
lack of unity or commonality in almost every quarter one looks – in a
person, a soul, a citizen, a congregation, a body politic –makes it virtually
inconceivable to think that there is a general will somewhere at work in the
world. At the same time – and for the very same reasons – it makes
xxxiv Editors’ Introduction
understandable the temptation to think or, rather, hope in such terms. We
could do much worse, then, than to reconsider, as we have tried, the
multifaceted debates over the general will that inform our history in
order to try better to understand our own problems and predicaments.
Notes
1. Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998).
2. Judith Shklar, Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau’s Political Theory
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 184.
3. Emanuel Joseph Sieyès, What is the Third Estate? in Political Writings, ed.
Michael Sonenscher (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, [1789] 2003),
p. 111.
4. National Assembly of France, Decree upon the National Assembly, in The
Communist Manifesto and Other Revolutionary Writings, ed. Bob Blaisdell
(Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, [1789] 2003), p. 76.
5. Louis XVI, quoted in Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French
Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), p. 323.
6. Maximilien Robespierre, “Dedication to Jean-Jacques Rousseau,” quoted in
Carol Blum,Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue: The Language of Politics in
the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 156.
7. Quoted in Ernst Cassirer, The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963), p. 43.
8. J. G. Fichte, The Foundations of Natural Right according to the Principles of
the Wissenschaftslehre, ed. Frederick Neuhouser(Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, [1795–1796] 2000), p. 134.
9. G.W. F. Hegel,On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law, on its Place
in Practical Philosophy, and its Relation to the Positive Sciences of Right, in
Hegel: Political Writings, eds. Laurence Dickey and H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, [1802–1803] 1999), p. 134.
10. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1971), pp. 252, 264.
11. Benjamin Constant, Principles of Politics Applicable to All Governments, ed.
Etienne Hofmann (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, [1815] 2003), p. 386.
12. John Dewey, The Public and its Problems, in The Later Works, vol. 2
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, [1927] 1988), p. 269.
Earlier, in “Austin’s Theory of Sovereignty,” Dewey declared: “The great
weakness in Rousseau’s theory that the general will is sovereign, is that he
makes its generality exclude all special modes of operation.” The Early
Works, vol. 4 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, [1894]
1971), p. 90.
13. Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and
Schuster, [1945] 1972), p. 700.
14. Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 1: The Spell of Plato
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, [1945] 1971), p. 257 n20.
Editors’ Introduction xxxv
15. J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (New York: W.
W. Norton, 1970), p. 43.
16. Jeffrey Abramson, Minerva’s Owl: The Tradition of Western Political
Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 256.
17. See FrederickNeuhouser,Rousseau’s Theodicy of Self-Love: Evil, Rationality,
and the Drive for Recognition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008),
p. 211.
18. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Social Contract, in The Social Contract and Other
Later Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, [1762] 1997), p. 61n.
19. Judith Shklar, “General Will,” in The Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed.
Philip Wiener (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973), p. 275.
20. Denis Diderot, “Droit Naturel,” in Diderot: Political Writings, eds. John
Hope Mason and Robert Wokler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
[1780] 1992), p. 19. Diderot does mention the general will cursorily in sub-
sequent essays, though without development of the concept. See his
“Observations on the Instruction of the Empress of Russia to the Deputies
for theMaking of the Laws” andHistoire des Deux Indes, inDiderot: Political
Writings, pp. 93, 208.
21. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, eds. Anne Cohler, Basia Miller, and
Harold Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1748] 1989),
2.11.4, p. 157. Maurice Cranston provides an accounting of Rousseau’s
study of Montesquieu’s texts in Jean-Jacques: The Early Life and Work of
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712–1754 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1982), pp. 213–215.
22. “Had it not been for Montesquieu’s previous adoption of this doctrine of the
general will . . . it might never have gained Diderot’s adherence.” See Charles
W. Hendel, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Moralist (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-
Merrill, 1934), vol. 1, p. 104.
23. Riley 1986, pp. 250, 259.
24. Patrick Riley, “The General Will before Rousseau: The Contributions of
Arnauld, Pascal, Malebranche, Bayle and Bossuet,” in Studi Filosofici
(1982–1983): 131–203.
25. Alexander Hamilton, “Federalist No. 32,” in The Federalist with Letters of
“Brutus,” ed. Terence Ball (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1788]
2003), pp. 145–146. According to Cecelia M. Kenyon, Hamilton’s term
“national interest” is the “Hamiltonian counterpart of the Rousseauean
general will.” See “Alexander Hamilton: Rousseau of the Right,” Political
Science Quarterly 73 (1958): 166.
26. James Wilson, Lectures on Law in Collected Works of James Wilson, vol. 1,
eds. Hermit L Hall and Mark David Hall (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund,
[1790] 2007), p. 635. For an argument outliningWilson’s interest in Rousseau
and fidelity to the general will as the proper foundation of public policy, see
Garry Wills, “James Wilson’s New Meaning for Sovereignty,” in Conceptual
Change and the Constitution, eds. Terence Ball and J.G.A. Pocock (Lawrence:
University Press of Kansas, 1988), pp. 99–106. It is worth noting that Paul
Merrill Spurlin once argued that Rousseau’s influence in American political
xxxvi Editors’ Introduction
thought has been negligible. See Rousseau in America, 1760–1809
(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1969).
27. Thomas Paine, Letter Addressed to the Addressers on the Late Proclamation,
in Rights of Man, Common Sense, and Other Political Writings, ed.
Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1792] 1995), p. 370; see also
p. 376. In the same spirit in his Rights of Man, Paine notes, “The Nation is the
paymaster of every thing, and every thing must conform to its general will”
(Rights of Man, in Paine 1995), p. 171.
28. John Adams, “Speech to Both Houses of Congress,” November 22, 1800, in
The Works of John Adams, vol. 9, ed. Charles Francis Adams (Boston: Little,
Brown, and Company, 1854), p. 146.
29. 19 U.S. 264 (1821).
30. Woodrow Wilson, “A Lecture on Democracy,” in The Papers of Woodrow
Wilson, vol. 7, ed. Arthur J. Link (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
[1891] 1969), p. 355.
31. Henry M. Robert, Robert’s Rules of Order, newly revised, ed. Sarah
Corbin Robert (Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman, and Company, 1970), p. xlii.
Oddly enough, the general will is absent in earlier editions, but since its
inclusion in 1970, it has expanded modestly. The most recent edition now
includes three references to the “general will” in its introductory passage,
“Principles Underlying Parliamentary Law” (Henry M. Robert, Daniel
H. Honemann, and Thomas J. Balch with the assistance of Daniel E. Sebold
and Shmuel Gerber, Robert’s Rules of Order, 11th ed. (Philadelphia: Da Capo
Press, 2011), pp. li–lii).
32. For an account of Kant’s early formulation of the general will in Dreams, see
T.K. Seung, Kant’s Platonic Revolution in Moral and Political Philosophy
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), pp. 19–27.
33. Fichte [1795–1796] 2000, p. 134.
34. Ibid., p. 138.
35. J. G. Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, ed. Gregory Moore
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1807] 2008), p. 9.
36. Fichte [1807] 2008, p. 14.
37. Ibid., p. 16.
38. Ibid., pp. 24–25.
39. For example, G.W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1807] 1977), p. 357; cf. p. 363. See also
Hegel’s On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law, on Its Place in
Practical Philosophy, and Its Relation to the Positive Sciences of Right, in
Hegel: Political Writings, eds. Laurence Dickey and H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, [1802–1803] 1999), pp. 132–135.
40. G.W. F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, trans. Leo Rauch
(Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing [1840] 1988), p. 27.
41. Bernard Bosanquet, The Philosophical Theory of the State (London:
MacMillan, 1923), p. 75.
42. Bosanquet 1923, p. 114. See Igor Primoratz, “The Word ‘Liberty’ on the
Chains of Galley-Slaves: Bosanquet’s Theory of the General Will,” History
of Political Thought 15 (1994): 249–267; also see Janusz Grygienc, General
Editors’ Introduction xxxvii
Will in Political Philosophy, trans. Dominika Gajewska (Exeter, UK: Imprint
Academic, 2013), pp. 77–80.
43. This is from a fragment in what became known as The German Ideology, in
Marx Engels Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, [1847]
1976) vol. 5, p. 91. Even more sardonic was Marx’s observation in the
Eighteenth Brumaire about Louis Bonaparte’s victory over parliament, “of
force without phrases over the force of phrases.” “In parliament the nation
made its general will the law; that is, it made the law of theruling class its
general will” (Marx Engels Collected Works [1852] 1979, vol. 11, p. 185).
44. Marx Engels Collected Works [1860] 1981, vol. 17, p. 400.
45. Andrew Levine. The General Will: Rousseau, Marx, Communism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
46. Louis Althusser, Politics and History: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx, trans.
Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 2007).
47. Meric Casaubon, A Treatise concerning Enthusiasm (London, 1655), p. 61.
48. Samuel Rutherford, The Divine Right of Church-Government and
Excommunication (London, 1646), p. 121; cf. pp. 118, 123, 126.
Rutherford also makes distinctions between “God’s general permissive will”
and his “general allowing [or approving] will,” pp. 123, 126.
49. Nicholas Byfield, A Commentary or Sermons upon the Second Chapter of the
First Epistle of St. Peter (London, 1623), p. 355.
50. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, [1651] 1996), p. 271.
51. Edward Hyde, The True Catholicks Tenure, or, a Good Christians Certainty
which He Ought to have of his Religion, and may have of his Salvation
(Cambridge, 1662), p. 270.
52. William Jones, A Commentary upon the Epistles of Saint Paul to Philemon,
and to the Hebrews (London, 1635), p. 392.
53. “Why, if he [God through Christ] died for every one in particular, how could
he chuse but die for all in general, and if he died not generally for all, with
what truth may every one believe it in particular?” Cognizant of the diffi-
culties here, Raleigh observed: “The end of the Chase, I am sure is an abrupt
and dangerous precipice, for how doth it evatuate and frustrate the general
Will and Testament of God, like a quirk or gull in Law, that all may fall to the
particular Heir? It cuts the very strings and Sinews of our general hope.”
Walter Raleigh, Reliquiae Raleighanae, being Discourses and Sermons on
Several Subjects, ed. Simon Patrick (London, [circa 1642] 1679),
pp. 202–203.
54. Joseph Hall, The Shaking of the Olive Tree, the Remaining Works of that
Incomparable Prelate Joseph Hall (London, 1660), p. 356.
55. Jean-HughesQuarré,A Spiritual Treasure containing ourObligations toGod,
and the Vertues Necessary to a Perfect Christian, trans. Sir Thomas Stanley
(London, [1632] 1664), p. 207.
56. Rousseau [1762] 1997, p. 140.
57. John Winthrop, “Model of Christian Charity,” in The American Intellectual
Tradition, vol. I: 1630–1865, 2nd ed., eds. David A. Hollinger and
Charles Capper (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 7.
xxxviii Editors’ Introduction
58. Immanuel Kant,Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, inKant on Swedenborg: Dreams of a
Spirit-Seer and Other Writings, ed. Gregory R. Johnson (West Chester, PA:
Swedenborg Foundation, [1766] 2002), p. 21.
59. For a different view that argues for a central role of the general will in Kant’s
politics, see David Lay Williams, “Ideas and Actuality in the Social Contract:
Kant and Rousseau,” History of Political Thought 28 (2007): 469–495; and
Katrin Flickschuh, “Elusive Unity: The General Will in Hobbes and Kant,”
Hobbes Studies 25 (2012): 21–42.
60. Constant [1815] 2003, p. 13.
61. Rawls 1971, p. 264.
62. Joshua Cohen, Rousseau: A Free Community of Equals (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2010), p. 2.
63. Stephen Toulmin, Human Understanding (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1972).
64. Further inquiry into Jean-Hugues Quarré, mentioned above, might change
this general picture.
65. See James Farr, “Understanding Conceptual Change Politically,” in
Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, eds. Terence Ball, James Farr,
and Russell L. Hanson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1989): 24–49.
66. G.W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen Wood
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press [1821] 1991), p. 277.
67. Constant [1815] 2003, p. 13.
68. Russell [1945] 1972, p. 685.
69. Alexander Passerin d’Entrèves, Natural Law: An Introduction to Legal
Philosophy (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, [1951] 1994),
p. 143.
70. Isaiah Berlin, Freedom and Its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, [1952] 2002), pp. 49, 47.
71. Chuck Grassley, “Unconstitutional Power Grabs,” prepared speech
from January 26, 2012, http://www.grassley.senate.gov/news/news-releases/
unconstitutional-power-grabs, accessed September 15, 2014.
72. J. Rixey Ruffin, A Paradise of Reason: William Bentley and Enlightenment
Christianity in the Early Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007),
p. 174.
73. Ruffin 2007, p. 179.
74. We have quoted Rawls’s embrace of the general will. Benjamin Barber is also
an exception here, in Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a
New Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), esp. ch. 8. It is
worth noting, however, that even as Barber appeals to Rousseau and the
general will as his inspiration, he was critiqued for doing so. Saguiv
A. Hadari characterized Barber’s approach as “disturbing,” insofar as he
“lets Rousseau do the talking: down to the very metaphors – social algebra
and public vision – the quest for the elusive general will, hence for ‘citizens’ to
feel and express it, is renewed.” See “Review of Strong Democracy,” Ethics
95 (1985): 940.
Editors’ Introduction xxxix
75. Jane Anna Gordon, “Revolutionary in Counter-Revolutionary Times:
Elaborating Fanonian National Consciousness into the Twenty-First
Century,” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 19 (2011): 41, 42.
76. Kevin Inston,Rousseau andRadical Democracy (London: Continuum, 2010),
p. 135.
77. Mary Jo Marso argues similarly in (Un)Manly Citizens: J. J. Rousseau’s and
Germaine de Staël’s SubversiveWomen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1999).
xl Editors’ Introduction
part i
THE GENERAL WILL BEFORE ROUSSEAU
1
The General Will before Rousseau:
The Contributions of Arnauld, Pascal,
Malebranche, Bayle, and Bossuet
Patrick Riley
i
“The phrase ‘general will,’” says the eminent Rousseau scholar Judith
Shklar, “is ineluctably the property of one man, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
He did not invent it, but he made its history.”1And hemade that history by
giving the notion of volonté générale a central place in his political and
moral philosophy: Rousseau himself insists that “the general will is always
right,”2 that it is “the will that one has as a citizen”3when one thinks of the
common good and not of one’s own “particular will” (volonté
particulière) as a “private person.”4 Even virtue, he says, is nothing but a
“conforming” of one’s personal volonté particulière to the public volonté
générale, a conforming that “leads us out of ourselves,” out of egoism and
self-love, and toward “the public happiness.”5 If this is well-known, it is
perhaps only slightly less well-known that, at roughly the same time as
Rousseau, Diderot used the notions of volonté générale and volonté
particulière in his Encyclopédie article, “Droit Naturel” (1755), saying
that the “general will” is “the rule of conduct” that arises from a “pure act
of the understanding”: an understanding that “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.”6 It is “to the general will that
the individual man 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 volonté générale, which “never errs,” is “the tie of all societies.”7
But if, as Shklar correctly insists, Rousseau “made the history” of the
general will without “inventing” it, who then should be credited with the
invention? Not Diderot: for, as Shklar shows, Montesquieu had already
3
used the terms volonté générale and volonté particulière in the most
famous chapter (XI) of De l’Esprit des Lois (1748).8 But then where did
Montesquieu find those ideas? Andhow could he count on their being
immediately understood, since he used them without explaining them?
The mystery is solved when one realizes that the term volonté générale
was well established in the seventeenth century, though not primarily as a
political idea. In fact the notion of “general will” was originally a theo-
logical one and referred 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. The question at issue was this: if “God wills
that all men be saved” – as St. Paul asserts in a letter to his disciple
Timothy9 – does he have a general will that produces universal salvation?
And if he does not, why does he will particularly that some men not be
saved? There was a further question as well, namely whether God can
justly save some and condemn others, particularly if (as St. Augustine
asserted) those whom God saves are rescued not through their own merit
but through unmerited grace conferred by the will of God.10 From the
beginning, then, the notions of divine volonté générale and volonté
particulière were parts of a larger question about the justice of God; they
were always “political” notions, in the largest possible sense of the world
“political” – in the sense that even theology is part of what Leibniz called
“universal jurisprudence.”11 The whole controversy over God’s “general
will” to save “all”men – and how this is to be reconciled with the (equally
scriptural) notion that “many are called but few are chosen”12 – was very
precisely summed up in a few words from the last work (Entretiens de
Maxime et de Thémiste, 1706) of Leibniz’ contemporary and correspond-
ent, Pierre Bayle: “The God of the Christians wills that all men be saved; he
had the power necessary to save them all; he lacks neither power [or] good
will, and nonetheless almost all men are damned.”13 The effort to justify
this state of affairs led directly to the original theory of volonté générale.
The controversy about the nature of divine justice is nearly as old as
Christian philosophy itself; it was fully aired in the struggles between St.
Augustine and the Pelagians, and resurfaced in seventeenth-century dis-
putes about grace between the Jansenists and the Jesuits.14 The actual
terms “general will” and “particular will,” however, are not to be found
in Augustine or Pelagius, or, for that matter, in Jansenius’Augustinus or in
the Jesuit Molina – though Jansenius once uses the phrase volonté
particulière, in passing, in his last extant letter to St. Cyran.15 Those
terms, in fact, are the modern successors to the Scholastic distinction
between the “antecedent” and the “consequent” will of God: according
4 Patrick Riley
to this doctrine, God willed “antecedently” (or generally) that all men be
saved, but after the Fall of Adam he willed “consequently” (or particu-
larly) that only some be saved.16 The distinction between “antecedent”
and “consequent” divine will is to be found in Scholastic philosophy as late
as Suarez;17 and even Leibniz used the terms “general” and “particular”
will interchangeably with the older words,18 as did writers such as Antoine
Arnauld, the great Port-Royal logician.19
So far as diligent inquiry will reveal, the first work of consequence to use
the actual term “general will” was Antoine Arnauld’s Première Apologie
pour M. Jansénius (1644), which was written to refute a series of anti-
Jansenist sermons that had been preached by the theologian Isaac Habert
in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame (1642–1643) at the express order of
Cardinal Richelieu.20 (Quite early on, then, volonté générale figured in
high politics: it didn’t have to wait for Robespierre’s transmogrified
Rousseaueanism, for the claim that the Committee of Public Safety con-
stituted the general will.)21Richelieu may well have ordered Habert’s anti-
Jansenist sermons for the “wrong reasons” – he thought that Jansenius had
definitely written a famous anti-French libel calledMars Gallicus, accusing
Richelieu of aiding German Protestants during the Thirty Years War, an
attribution that is by no means certain;22 but this uncertainty does not
make it any less true that Habert preached publicly against Jansenius at
Richelieu’s command and that Arnauld, in refuting Habert, developed
the notion of volonté générale. Even a mistake can give rise to
consequential doctrines: Richelieu may have aimed to strike Mars
Gallicus obliquely, by hitting Augustinus directly; but what he produced
mainly was an occasion for the idea of “general will” to be thrust forward
in a conspicuously public way.
(Before Arnauld’s Première Apologie, certainly, one does not find the
term “volonté générale” in the place or at the time that one might reason-
ably expect to find it. It does not appear, for example, in the protracted
exchange of letters between Descartes’ associate Père Mersenne and the
Calvinist theologian André Rivet, though the most interesting of these
letters date from 1640 [the year of Augustinus’ publication] and deal
precisely with the universality or non-universality of salvation – Père
Mersenne asserting that in order to avoid “horror” and “desperation,”
one must believe that “God does not will the damnation of anyone, but
[wills] that each be saved, if he wills to cooperate in his salvation,”23 Rivet
replying that, since many are damned, Mersenne’s alleged universal salva-
tion imputes to God “des désirs vains, et des volontés frustratoires” and
tries to re-establish “the paradise of Origen,” in which even the devils are
The General Will before Rousseau 5
included.24 But if the exchange of letters between Mersenne and Rivet
provided a perfect occasion to assert or deny a divine volonté générale to
save “all,” the term did not actually appear; and this omission is probably
an indication that before 1644 the expression was not current, even in the
writing of a man like Mersenne who corresponded with every great figure
of the age.)25
How “Jansenism” should (or indeed can) be defined is beyond the scope
of this work: whether it was an orthodox (though severe)
“Augustinianism,” or a kind of heterodox “semi-Calvinism,” need not
be settled here.26 What does matter for present purposes is that it was the
conflict between “Jansenism” and its critics – Jesuit and otherwise – that
served as the occasional cause of a revived dispute over the meaning of the
scriptural assertion that “God wills that all men be saved.”Whether justly
or not, Jansenius’ Augustinus was accused – first by Habert’s Richelieu-
inspired sermons, then by Nicolas Cornet, syndic of the Sorbonne,27 then
by a letter to the pope drafted by Habert using Cornet’s charges,28 finally
by several papal bulls including Cum Occasione and (much later)
Unigenitus29 – of having maintained “five propositions” judged “hereti-
cal” and “scandalous”; indeed, the last of the five propositions imputed to
Jansenius asserted that “it is a semi-Pelagian error to say that Jesus Christ
died or spilled his blood for all men without exception.”30Whether the five
propositions were, in fact or in effect, contained in the Augustinus (as the
Jesuits maintained) or were malicious fabrications of Cornet and Habert
designed to ruin the reputation of St. Augustine as the “doctor of grace” (as
the Jansenists insisted),31 it is indisputable that when Jansenists such as
Arnauld and Pascal tried to defend Jansenius, they had to show that the
bishop of Ypres had correctly (i.e., in the manner of St. Augustine) under-
stood the notion that Deus vult omnes homines salvos fieri: that a truly
general will to save “all” was fully reconcilable with the Jansenist notion
that only the “elect” (rather than “all”) actually enter the kingdom of
Heaven. In short, had Jansenius and his principal apologists not tried to
restrict, radically, the meaning of St. Paul’s letter to Timothy, the question
of just and justifiable “generalwill” might never have become one of the
great disputes of the seventeenth century. The whole tradition of volonté
générale thus began life as a mere gloss on a passing phrase in a letter of
St. Paul.32
Antoine Arnauld, then, invented, or at least first made visible, the notion
of “general will,” but he did this, ironically enough, as part of a Jansenist
effort to minimize (without annihilating) the notion that “all” are saved
and that salvation is “general.” In Antoine Arnauld, the “general”will is as
6 Patrick Riley
little general as possible. In the Première Apologie pour M. Jansénius,
Arnauld acknowledges the nominal existence of a “general will of God
to save all men,” but he immediately narrows this “generality” by insisting
(with Jansenius) that it is “semi-Pelagian” to construe St. Paul’s letter to
Timothy au pied de la lettre, to understand divine volonté générale as
requiring salvation “generally for all men in particular, without excepting
any of them.”33God’s saving will is “general,”Arnauld argues, only in the
sense that it applies “to all sorts of conditions, of ages, of sexes, of
countries”; but it does not rescue every last single man “en particulier.”34
Indeed he insists – and here Jansenist rigorism is at its clearest – that:
It is certain that the source of all the errors of the semi-Pelagians is [their]
not being able to endure the absolute and immutable doctrine of God,
who . . . chose, from all eternity, without any regard for merit, a certain
number of men, whom he destined for glory; leaving the others in the
common mass of perdition, from which he is not obliged to pull them.35
Since God is “not obliged” to pull all men from “perdition,” his “gen-
eral will” to save them “all” is attenuated, to put it mildly. And in slightly
later works, such as his Apologie pour les Saints Pères (1651) – Arnauld
carries this attenuation farther still. God’s “antecedent” will for “the
salvation of all men,” he insists, “is only a simple velléité and a simple
wish, which involves no preparation of means” to effect this wish; his
volonté générale “is based only on a consideration of human nature in
itself, whichwas created for salvation,” but which, since the Fall, has richly
deserved perdition.36 Actually, Arnauld goes on, one could even say that
God had a volonté générale to save “the devils,”whowere once angels; but
fallen angels, like fallen men, are now damned. All this is clearer, in
Arnauld’s view, if one sees that God’s judgments, which are “very just”
though “very secret,” are like decisions of an earthly judge, who condemns
a thief or a murderer to death, but who nonetheless “at the same time wills
and wishes, by an antecedent will,” that the life of this criminal, considered
simply “as a man and as a citizen,” be “saved.”37
Obviously Antoine Arnauld tries to weaken the force of the phrase
“God wills that all men be saved” in two main ways: sometimes by
diminishing the compass of “all,” sometimes by shrinking the meaning
of “will.” As Jean La Porte has shown in his brilliant pro-Jansenist La
Doctrine de Port-Royal, it is characteristic of St. Augustine and the
Augustinians (including, usually, the Jansenists) to attempt to pare down
the term “all,”while it is typical of St. Thomas and the Thomists to deflate
divine “will.”38 St. Augustine, in De Correctione et Gratia and in the
Enchiridion, glosses “all” to mean all kinds of persons (of all professions,
The General Will before Rousseau 7
ages, sexes, countries); and this equation of “all” with “some” (provided
they are distributed over “all” categories) is most often favored by
Arnauld. For the Augustinians, then, God wills to save not all men
but all sorts of men; in the magnificent Latin of the Enchiridion
(XXVII, 103) “omnes homines omne genus hominum intelligamus per
quascumeque differentias distributum, reges, privatos, nobiles, ignobiles,
sublimes, humiles, doctos, indoctos, integri corporis, debiles, ingeniosos,
tardicordes, fatuos, divites, pauperes, mediocres, mares, feminas, infantes,
pueros, adolescentes, juvenes, seniores, senes; in linguis omnibus, in
moribus omnibus, in artibus omnibus, in professionibus omnibus.”39
And on this point, at least, the claim that Jansenius was a perfectly
orthodox Augustinian seems warranted: for in the section of Augustinus
entitled “DeGratia Christi Salvatoris,” Jansenius urges that if one wants to
avoid Pelagian and semi-Pelagian heresy in interpreting the phrase “God
wills that all men be saved,” one must understand “all” to refer, not to a
divine salvific will “for each and every single man” (pro omnibus omnino
singularibus hominibus), but rather to a will for the salvation of every kind
of man (pro omni genere hominorum) – Jews and Gentiles, servants and
free men, public and private persons, wise and unwise.40 One should add,
however, that in his effort to reduce “all” men to the “elect,” Jansenius
also relies on other patristic writings, particularly on St. Prosper’s argu-
ment that Christ died for “all” men only in the sense that his sacrifice was
sufficient to redeem all, but that the actual effect of his death was to redeem
only a few – or as Jansenius paraphrases St. Prosper, “Christum omnes
redimisse sufficienter, non efficienter.”41 Nonetheless, Jansenius relies
mainly on St. Augustine, and on the notion that “all” reallymeans “some.”
Aquinas’ method – occasionally followed by Arnauld, as in the
Apologie pour les Saints Pères – is very different. He preserves what one
is tempted to call the natural meaning of “all” – La Porte calls it the
“unforced” meaning42 – and makes “will” the variable term, saying in
De Veritate that “God wills by an antecedent [or general] will that all men
be saved, by reason of human nature, which he has made for salvation;
but he wills by consequent will that some be damned, because of the sins
that are in them.”43
In view of Arnauld’s diminishing of “general will,” whether
by Augustinian or Thomistic means – a general will, which he calls
“inefficacious” and a mere “wish” and which he compares with earthly
death sentences for murder – it should come as no surprise that Arnauld
particularly admired St. Augustine’s De Correctione et Gratia, the anti-
Pelagian work that is hardest on the “general” salvation of “all” men.
8 Patrick Riley
So much did Arnauld relish this work, indeed, that he published a French
translation of it in 1644, to which he added a somber and powerful
“Introduction.” In this Introduction he warns Christians against falling
into the “criminal pride” of the “Pelagians” and of “the philosophers,”
who through “unhappy presumptions” treat man as independent;44 and
he once again minimizes the “generality” of salvation, this time nearly to
the vanishing point:
There are no mysteries which God hides so well from proud sages, as the mysteries
of grace; for there are no others so opposed to the wise folly of the world, and to
that spirit of pride which cannot suffer this sovereign Empire which God exercises
over his creatures through his different judgments of piety and of justice – which
can be secret, but which can only be very equitable, giving grace to some, because
he is good, and not giving it to others, because he is just; and not doing wrong to
anyone, because, all being guilty, he owes nothing to anyone, as St. Augustine says
so many times.45
Here, of course, any “general”will to save “all” has (all but) disappeared.
But even here what remains of volonté générale has political and moral
implications: after all, it is “just” and “equitable” that God not act on his
original general “wish” that all be saved, because all are “guilty” and hence
cannot rightly complain of not receiving the grace that would save them. In
Arnauld, God’s “equitable” operation, his “sovereign Empire,” begins with
a general will, even if it rightfully ends with something radically different –
though Arnauld wouldhave felt no need to defend God’s cause had he not
feared that giving grace to some (only)might be viewed as an inequitable and
arbitrary “acceptation of persons.”46 It is one of the great ironies of the
history of ideas that volonté générale should be thrust into prominence by a
thinker who thought that will very little “general” indeed; and a still greater
irony that the greatest partisan of “general will,” Rousseau, should in his
theological writings have denied flatly the “efficacious” grace and the pre-
destination, which, for Arnauld, are the very things that reduce volonté
générale to a mere “wish” that is “inefficacious.”47
ii
But if it was Antoine Arnauld who (apparently) invented the terms volonté
générale and volonté particulière, it was a far greater Jansenist, Blaise
Pascal, who was the first to use the notions of généralité and of
particularité in works (the Pensées and the Écrites sur la Grâce) which
are still read. (The works of Arnauld, in forty-five enormous volumes, are
today almost unknown.)48 And even in Pascal’s Écrites sur la Grâce
The General Will before Rousseau 9
(ca. 1656) the notion of volonté générale has political overtones, since he
uses it in considering whether God can justly dispense sufficient grace for
salvation only to those who merit it or whether by volonté absoluë he can
simply damn some and save others. The notion of an arbitrary volonté
absoluë he connects with Calvinism (which is, he says, “injurious to God
and insupportable to men”;49 while a notion of volonté générale he traces
to “the disciples of St. Augustine,”who, according to Pascal, believed that
before the Fall of Adam “God had a volonté générale et conditionnelle to
save all men” (whereas after the Fall he willed, by a volonté absoluë arising
from pity, that some men still be saved though none merited it).50 And
Pascal plainly favors this version of “Augustinianism”: the Calvinists, by
denying that God ever (even before the Fall) had a volonté générale to save
all men, fall into an “abominable opinion” that “injures” common
sense;51 the Pelagians, at the other extreme, by holding that “God had a
volonté générale, égale et conditionelle to save all men” and that this
volonté générale remained constant even after the Fall, so that God sent
Christ into the world to help all men merit salvation, fall into an opposite
excess by depriving God wholly of any volonté absoluë, even after the sin
of Adam.52Only Augustinianism, in combining a pre-Fall volonté générale
with a post-Fall volonté absoluë, Pascal says, strikes a proper balance
between the polar errors of granting too much to God (Calvinism) or too
much to men (Pelagianism).53
Pascal uses the notion of volonté générale only a handful of times, and
the corresponding notion of volonté particulière does not appear at all in
the Écrites sur la Grâce. But in the Pensées Pascal uses the idea of volonté
particulière in a striking way that reminds one of Rousseau. Beginning
with the observation that volonté “will never be satisfied, even if it should
be capable of everything it wills,” Pascal goes on to ask the reader to
“imagine a body full of thinking members”:
Imagine a body full of thinking members.. . . If the feet and the hands had a volonté
particulière, they would never be in order except by submitting this volonté
particulière to the volonté première which governs the whole body. Outside of it,
they are in disorder and unhappiness; but in willing the good of the body, they will
their own good. . . . If the foot was always ignorant of the fact that it belonged to the
body and that there was a body on which it depended, if it had had only the
knowledge and love of itself, and if it came to know that it belonged to a body on
which it depended, what regret, what confusion about its past life, to have been
useless to the body which influenced its life.54
To make it clear that he is thinking of “bodies” in general (including
“bodies politic”), and not just natural bodies, Pascal goes on to say that
10 Patrick Riley
“one must incline to what is general: and leaning toward oneself is
the beginning of all disorder, in war, in economy, in the particular
body of man. Thus the will is depraved.”55 But that depravity can be
overcome if we remember that “the members of [both] natural and civil
communities incline toward the good of the body,” that the members can
rise above the “injustice” of self-absorption.56 To be sure, an inclination
toward a ruling of volonté première is achieved in Pascal through
unmerited grace, and in Rousseau through “education”; nonetheless
the parallel is very striking. Thus almost a century before Rousseau, the
reader of Pascal could have learned that volonté particulière involves
disorder and self-love, and that not to “incline” toward le général is
“unjust” and “depraved.”57
One should be quite clear about what Pascal is doing – for it turns out
to be absolutely decisive for the next century of French political and
moral thought: for Malebranche, for Diderot, for Rousseau. In Pascal’s
Écrites sur la Grâce, the notion of généralité begins with God’s
pre-lapsarian “will” (recounted in 1 Timothy) that “all” men be saved;
then this “general will,” viewed as something divine, is transferred to
another strand of Pauline doctrine: namely the notion of a body and
its members in 1 Corinthians 12. In Pascal’s reworking (or rather
fusing) of Paul’s letters, the “members” of the “body” should avoid
particularité and amour-propre, and should incline toward le général
(the good of the body).58 Just what Pascal has done becomes clear only if
one looks at St. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians; then compares Pascal’s
“reading” of it with a more “orthodox” and cautious one – such as John
Locke’s in his Paraphrase and Notes on I Corinthians; and then (finally)
looks at a representative “reflection” or echo of Pascal’s operation in the
century that comes after him.
Saint Paul’s letter, in the standard seventeenth-century English version,
argued that:
the body is not one member, but many.
If the foot shall say, “Because I am not the hand, I am not of the body”: is it
therefore not of the body? . . .
But now are they many members, yet but one body.
And the eye cannot say unto the hand, “I have no need of thee”: nor again, the
head to the feet, “I have no need of you. . . .”
[T]here should be no schism in the body; but that the members should have the
same care one for another.
And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it: or one member
be honoured, all the members rejoice with it.
Now, ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular.59
The General Will before Rousseau 11
Locke, with characteristic sobriety and caution, takes care to read St.
Paul’s letter as applying only to the church, and never extends the Pauline
distinction between a “body” and its “members” to “bodies politic” (à la
Pascal). “God – Locke carefully argues – hath fitted several persons, as it
were so many distinct members, to several offices and functions in the
Church . . . if any one have not that function, or dignity, in the Church,
which he desires . . . he does not thereby cease to be a member of the
Church.”60 The almost obsessive repetition of “Church,” together with
the phrase “as it were” – which makes being a “member” metaphorical –
clearly restricts St. Paul. Pascal, by contrast, brilliantly expands and polit-
icizes St. Paul’s letter with the superb imagination (“imagine a body full of
thinking members”) that Locke soberly and designedly avoids. (But, after
all, given the doctrine of the Second Treatise, one would not expect Locke
to view a body politic in the way that Pascal does: in that Treatise,
members stand in a contractual, not an “organic” relationship.)61
For all those French moralistes who come after Pascal, and who are
struck by his reading of 1 Corinthians 12 – in the light, one mightsay, of 1
Timothy 2 –men would do well to will as God first willed: generally. Here,
to be sure, there is a large irony: men after the Fall must try to will
generally, though their inability to will generally (à la Dieu) is what led
to their Fall. They failed to imitate God when they were pure, and must
now strive to do so while corrupt. Nowonder Pascal hopes for (unmerited)
grace.62
That 1Corinthians 12, read in a more or less Pascalian way, continued
to have great weight in the works of Pascal’s successors is evident:
Rousseau, for example, insists on the importance of this passage in his
Letter to Archbishop Beaumont.63 But sometimes, even in Pascal
himself, Rousseau’s secularization of généralité and body-membership
is anticipated; in the Penseé numbered 480 in the Brunschvicg edition,
Pascal had reworked 1 Corinthians 12 into the claim that “to make the
members happy, they must have one will, and submit it to the body.”64
And in his fragment called “Le Bonheur Public,” Rousseau further trans-
mutes and secularizes language originally traceable to St. Paul and then
socialized by Pascal: “Make man one, and you will make him as happy as
he can be. . . . For being nothing except by [the body politic], he will be
nothing without it. To the force of constraint you have added that of
will.”65
To be sure, in Penseé 480 Pascal is thinking of any “body full of
thinking members,” while in “Le Bonheur Public” Rousseau is thinking
(more particularly) of the city. Nonetheless the lineal descent of
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Rousseau from St. Paul, read à la Pascal, is plain enough. (This strand of
Pascal’s thought was certainly available to Rousseau: though the
so-called Port-Royal edition of the Penseés offered a truncated and
rewritten version of Pascal’s manuscripts, the 1678 enlarged edition
contained Pascal’s insistence that “tous les hommes sont membres de ce
corps [de membres pensants]” and that “pour être heureux il faut qu’ils
conforment leur volonté particulière à la volonté universelle qui gouverne
le corps entier.”)66
Despite the importance of Pascal’s linking up of généralité with the
good of le corps entier – a collective good to which members must
subordinate their volonté particulière – it remains true that the fullest
and best-known seventeenth-century exposition of the notions of “gen-
eral will” and “particular will” was certainly Malebranche’s Traité de
la Nature et de la Grâce (1680). This work, which Leibniz called
“admirable,”67 was one of the most celebrated (and controversial)
writings of its day: it was popularized and defended by Bayle in his
journal, Nouvelles de la République des Lettres;68 it was attacked by
the long-lived and boundlessly productive Arnauld in his Réflexions
Philosophiques et Théologiques sur le Nouveau Système de la Nature
et de la Grâce (1685 – forty years after the Première Apologie pour
M. Jansénius);69 it was criticized by Fontenelle in his Doutes sur le
Système Physique des Causes Occasionnelles (1686)70 and (above all)
by Bossuet in his Oraison Funèbre de Marie-Therèse d’Autriche
(1683).71 And if Fénelon’s highly critical Réfutation du Système du
Père Malebranche sur la Nature et la Grâce (ca. 1687–1688) remained
unpublished until 1829, his opinion of Malebranchian volonté générale
was tolerably clear in the fourth (1709) of his Lettres sur la Grâce et la
Prédestination, written for François Lami.72 Malebranche, for his part,
defended his work in an endless running polemic with Arnauld (termi-
nated only by the latter’s death in 1694);73 and as late as 1710 Leibniz
devoted several large sections of his Theodicée to a spirited defense of
Malebranche’s “general will.”74
If, then, the notions of volonté générale and volonté particulière were
elaborately treated in published writings of figures as eminent as Pascal,
Malebranche, Arnauld, Bayle, Fénelon, Bossuet, Fontenelle, and Leibniz,
over a seventy-year period (ca. 1644–1715), they can scarcely said to
arise – at least as terms – only with Diderot and Rousseau; the only
question is whether the original (mainly Malebranchian) formulation
of the notions has any political content or, at least, any political
implications.
The General Will before Rousseau 13
iii
In the “Premier éclaircissement” of the Traité de la nature et de la grâce,
one sees at once that Malebranche is not going to treat divine volonté
générale as something confined (particularly) to theology, to questions of
grace and merit; one sees that he intends to treat “general will” as some-
thing which is manifested in all of God’s operations – as much in the realm
of “nature” as in the realm of “grace.”75 Malebranche argues that “God
acts by volontés générales when he acts as a consequence of general laws
which he has established”;76 and nature, he adds “is nothing but the
general laws whichGod has established in order to construct or to preserve
his work by the simplest means, by an action [which is] always uniform,
constant, perfectly worthy of an infinite wisdom and of a universal
cause.”77 God, on this view, “does not act at all” by volontés
particulières, by lawless ad hoc volitions, as do “limited intelligences”
whose thought is not “infinite”:78 thus for Malebranche “to establish
general laws, and to choose the simplest ones which are at the same time
the most fruitful, is a way of acting worthy of him whose wisdom has no
limits.”79 On the other hand, he insists “to act by volontés particulières
shows a limited intelligence which cannot judge the consequences or the
effects of less fruitful causes.”80
Now even at this point Malebranche’s argument, though mainly a
theological one, contains some points that could be read “politically”:
the “general will” manifests itself in general laws that are “fruitful” and
“worthy” of infinite wisdom, whereas “particular will” is “limited,” com-
paratively unintelligent, and lawless; but these terms are not very different
from Rousseau’s characterizations of volonté générale and particulière in
Du Contrat Social (above all when Rousseau argues that volonté générale,
in the form of general laws, never deals with particular cases).81 One need
not jump to any premature conclusions, however, since Malebranche
himself occasionally “politicizes” his argument – particularly in his effort
to justifyGod’s acting (exclusively) through volontés générales. If, he says,
“rain falls on certain lands, and if the sun roasts others . . . if a child comes
into the world with a malformed and useless hand . . . this is not at all
because God wanted to produce those effects by volontés particulières; it is
because he has established [general] laws for the communication of
motion, whose effects are necessary consequences.”82 Thus, according to
Malebranche, “one cannot say that God acts through caprice or
ignorance” in permitting malformed children to be born or unripe fruit
to fall: “he has not established the laws of the communication of motion
14 Patrick Riley
for the purpose of producing monsters, or of making fruits fall before their
maturity”; he has willed these laws “because of their fruitfulness, and not
because of their sterility.”83Those who claim (saysMalebranche) that God
ought, through special, ad hoc volontés particulières, to suspend natural
laws if their operation will harm the virtuous (or the innocent) – or that he
ought to confer grace only on those whowill actually be saved by it – fail to
understand that it is not worthy of an infinitely wise being to abandon
general rules in order to find a suppositious perfect “fit” between the
particular case of each finite being and a volonté particulière suited to
the case alone.84
By this point, evidently, the theological notion of volonté générale is
becoming “politicized”: volonté générale originally manifested itself in
general laws that were wise and fruitful; now that will, expressed in
those laws, is just as well, and itis quite wrong to say that God ought to
contrive a volonté particulière suited to each “case” (even though
the “generality” of his will and of his laws will mean that grace will
occasionally fall on a “hardened” heart incapable of receiving it).85 God,
Malebranche urges, loves his wisdom more than he loves mankind (“c’est
que Dieu aime davantage sa sagesse que son ouvrage”):86 and his wisdom
is expressed in general laws whose operation may have consequences
(monstrous children, unripened fruit), which are not themselves willed
and which cannot therefore give rise to charges of divine “caprice” or
“ignorance.”
If Malebranche, in pleading the “cause” of God (to use Leibniz’
phrase),87 views divine volonté générale as issuing in wise and just laws,
the Traité de la nature et de la grâce is further (and quite explicitly)
“politicized” by an analogy that Malebranche himself draws between a
well-governed earthly kingdom and a well-governed Creation. He begins
with an argument about enlightened and unenlightened “will”: “The more
enlightened an agent is, the more extensive his volontés. A very limited
mind undertakes new schemes at every moment; and when he wants to
execute one of them, he uses several means, of which some are always
useless.” But a “broad and penetrating mind,” he goes on, “compares
and weighs all things: he never forms plans except with the knowledge
that he has the means to execute them.”88 Malebranche then moves to his
political “analogy”: “A number of laws in a state” – presumably a mere
concatenation of many volontés particulières – “often shows little
penetration and breadth of mind in those who have established them:
it is often the mere experience of need, rather than wise foresight, which
has ordained them.” God qua legislator has none of these defects,
The General Will before Rousseau 15
Malebranche claims: “he need not multiply his volontés, which are exec-
utive laws of his plans, any further than necessity obliges.” He must,
Malebranche repeats, act through volontés générales “and thus establish
a constant and regulated order” by “the simplest means”: those who want
God to act, not through “les loix ou les volontés générales” but through
volontés particulières, simply “imagine that God at every moment is
performing miracles in their favor.”89 This partisanship for the particular,
he says – in an astonishingly Rousseauean vein – ”flatters the self-love
which relates everything to itself,” and “accommodates itself quite well to
ignorance.”90
Malebranche certainly believed that those who imagine a God thick
with volontés particulières will use that alleged divine particularism to
rationalize their own failure to embrace general principles. Indeed, he
appeals to the notion of particularisme in attempting to explain the
(lamentable) diversity of the world’s moral opinions and practices. In the
Traité de Morale (1684), Malebranche argues that although “universal
reason is always the same” and “order is immutable,” nonetheless
“morality changes according to countries and according to the times.”
Germans think it “virtuous” to drink to excess; European nobles think it
“generous” to fight duels in defense of their honor.91 Such people “even
imagine that God approves their conduct”; that, in the case of an
aristocratic duel, he “presides at the judgment and . . . awards the palm
to him who is right.” To be sure, according to Malebranche, one can only
“imagine” this if one thinks that “God acts by volontés particulières.”And
if even he is thought to operate particularly, why should not men as well?
The man who imputes particular wills to God by “letting himself be led by
imagination, his enemy” will also have his own “morale particulière, his
own devotion, his favorite virtue.”92 What is essential is that one
abandon particularisme, whether as something ascribed to God or as
something merely derived from human “inclinations” and “humors.” It
is “immutable order” that must serve as our “inviolable and natural law”
and “imagination” that must be suppressed. For order is general, while
imagination is all too particular.93
iv
For Malebranche’s orthodox and conservative critics – most notably
Bossuet, whose anti-Malebranchism will be treated shortly – perhaps the
most distressing aspect of Malebranche’s theory of divine volonté générale
was the much-diminished weight and value given to (literally read)
16 Patrick Riley
Scripture. In Nature et Grâce Malebranche urges that “those who claim
that God has particular plans and wills for all the particular effects that are
produced in consequence of general laws” ordinarily rely (not on philos-
ophy but) on “the authority of Scripture” to “shore up” their “feeling.”94
(The verb and noun are sufficiently revealing.) But, Malebranche argues
that “since Scripture was made for everybody, for the simple as well as for
the learned, it is full of anthropologies.” (The italicizing is Malebranche’s
own.) Thus Scripture, he goes on, endows God with “a body, a throne, a
chariot, a retinue, the passions of joy, of sadness, of anger, of remorse, and
other movements of the soul”; it even goes beyond this and attributes to
him “ordinary human ways of acting, in order to speak to the simple in a
more sensible way.” St. Paul, Malebranche continues, in order to
“accommodate himself to everyone,” speaks of “sanctification and
predestination “as if God acted ceaselessly” through volontés
particulières to produce those particular effects; and even Christ himself,
he adds, “speaks of his Father as if he applied himself, through comparable
volontés, to clothe the lilies of the field and to preserve the least hair on
his disciples’ heads.”95 Despite all these “anthropologies” and “as ifs,”
introduced solely to make God “lovable” to “even the coarsest minds,”
Malebranche concludes, one must use the “idea” of God (qua perfect
being), coupled with those nonanthropological scriptural passages that
are in “conformity” to this “idea,” in order to “correct” the sense of
some other passages, which attribute “parts” to God or “passions like
our own.”96 (To make his own nonreliance on Scripture quite plain,
Malebranche omitted any reference at all to the Bible in the original
[1680] edition of Nature et Grâce. And when, later, out of prudence, he
interpolated a number of scriptural passages in the Traité, he took care to
set them off from the 1680 text by labeling the new parts “additions,” and
by having them set in a different typeface. Even in the Scripture-laden
version of 1684, then, the “authority of Scripture” is separated – physically
separated – from the idea of an être infiniment parfait.)97
The notion that Scripture “represents” God” as a “man” who has
“passions of the soul” and volontés particulières – merely to “accommo-
date” the “weakness” of “even the coarsest minds” – leads to a difficulty
that an Augustinian (or at least a Jansenist) would find distressing. Pascal
had argued that, in “Augustinianism,” God’s prelapsarian volonté
générale to save all men is replaced, after the Fall, by the election of a
few for salvation through miséricorde or “pity” (though it is not
merited);98 Arnauld, in the preface to his translation of De Correctione
et Gratia, had equally stressed an undeserved divine miséricorde, which
The General Will before Rousseau 17
God might with perfect justice have withheld.99Now “pity,” of course, on
a Malebranchian view, is a “passion of the soul”; but it is only through
“weakness” and “anthropomorphism” that we imagine these passions as
animating God. If, for Malebranche, an être parfait does not “really” have
these passions, it cannot be the case that – as in Pascal – a volonté générale
to save all is “replaced” by a pitiful volonté absoluë to save a few. Indeed,
while in Pascal volonté générale comes “first” and gets replaced (by
miséricorde), in Malebranche “general will” governs the realms of natureand grace from the outset, once the world has been created by a volonté
particulière.100 (Even Malebranche treats the Creation as the product of a
volonté particulière, arguing – in part II of Nature et Grâce – that until
there are created things that can serve as the “occasional” or “second”
causes of general laws, those general laws cannot operate.)101
Far from abandoning his position when he was accused of “ruining”
Providence – in a work such as Jurieu’s Esprit de M. Arnauld102 –
Malebranche maintained it stoutly in the Dernier éclaircissement of
Nature et Grâce, which he added to the fourth edition in 1684, and which
was provocatively entitled, “The frequent miracles of the Old Testament do
not show at all that God acts often by particular wills.” The “proofs”which
he has drawn “from the idea of an infinitely perfect being,” Malebranche
insists,make it clear that “God executes his designs by general laws.”On the
other hand, it is “not easy” to demonstrate that god operates ordinarily
through volontés particulières, “though Holy Scripture, which accommo-
dates itself to our weakness, sometimes represents God as a man, and often
has him act as men act.”103Here, as in the main text ofNature et Grâce, the
key notion is weakness: and any notion of divine volonté particulière simply
accommodates that faiblesse. This is why Malebranche can maintain – this
time in theTroisième éclaircissement of 1683 – that“there areways of acting
[that are] simple, fruitful, general, uniform and constant” and that manifest
“wisdom, goodness, steadiness [and] immutability in those who use them”;
whereas there are ways that are “complex, sterile, particular, lawless and
inconstant,” and that reveal “lack of intelligence, malignity, unsteadiness
[and] levity in those who use them.”104 Thus a very effective heap of
execrations is mounded around any volonté particulière that turns out to
be complex, sterile, lawless, inconstant, unintelligent, malignant, and
frivolous.
Indeed, for Malebranche, it is precisely volonté particulière, and not at
all volonté générale, which “ruins” Providence. In his Réponse à une
Dissertation de M. Arnauld contre un éclaircissement de la Nature et de
la Grâce (1685), he argues that if Arnauld’s insistence on miracles and
18 Patrick Riley
constant divine volonté particulière does not “overturn” Providence, it at
least “degrades it, humanizes it, and makes it either blind, or perverse”:105
Is there wisdom in creating monsters by volonté particulière? Inmaking crops grow
by rainfall, in order to ravage them by hail? In giving men a thousand impulses of
grace which misfortunes render useless? In making rain fall equally on sand and on
cultivated ground? But all this is nothing. Is there wisdom and goodness in making
impious princes reign, in suffering so great a number of heresies, in letting so many
nations perish? Let M. Arnauld raise his head and discover all the evils which
happen in the world, and let him justify Providence, on the supposition that God
acts and must act through volonté particulière.106
It is Malebranche’s view, in fact, that the classical “theodicy prob-
lems” – in reconciling a morally and physically imperfect world with
God’s “power,” “goodness,” and “wisdom” – can only be solved by
insisting that God wills generally. These problems Malebranche states
starkly in Nature et Grâce:
Holy Scripture teaches us on one hand that God wills that all men be saved, and
that they come to a knowledge of the truth; and on the other, that he does every-
thing that hewills: and nonetheless faith is not given to everyone; and the number of
those that perish is much greater than that of the predestined. How can one
reconcile this with his power? God foresaw from all eternity [both] original sin,
and the infinite number of persons that this sin would sweep into Hell. Nonetheless
he created the first man in a condition from which he knew he would fall; he even
established between this man and his posterity relations which would communicate
his sin to them, and render them all worthy of his aversion and his wrath. How can
one reconcile this with his goodness.. . . God frequently diffuses graces, without
having the effect for which his goodness obliges us to believe that he gives them. He
increases piety in persons almost to the end of their life; and sin dominates them at
death, and throws them into Hell. He makes the rain of grace fall on hardened
hearts, as well as on prepared grounds: men resist it, and make it useless for their
salvation. In a word, God undoes and re-does without cease: it seems that he wills,
and no longer wills. How can one reconcile this with his wisdom.107
“Generality” and “simplicity” of divine will, according to
Malebranche, clears up these “great difficulties,” and explains how a
being who loves order can permit disorder. “God loves men, he wills to
save them all,” Malebranche begins by saying, “for order is his law.”
Nonetheless, Malebranche insists, God “does not will to do what is
necessary in order that all [men] know him and love him infallibly.” And
this is simply because “order does not permit that he have practical
volontés proper to the execution of this design. . . . He must not disturb
the simplicity of his ways.”108Or, asMalebranche puts it in hisRéponse to
Arnauld’s Réflexions on Nature et Grâce:
The General Will before Rousseau 19
The greater number of men are damned, and [yet] God wills to save them all. . . .
Whence comes it, then, that sinners die in their sin? Is it better to maintain that God
does notwill to save them all, simply because it pleases him to act in that way, than
to seek the general reason for it in what he owes to himself, to his wisdom, and to
his other attributes? Is it not clear, or at least is it not a feeling in conformity with
piety, that onemust throw these unhappy effects back onto simplicity – in oneword
onto the divinity of his ways?109
(As Ginette Dreyfus has correctly said in her helpful La Volonté selon
Malebranche, “God wills to save all men, but wisdom forbids him to act in
such a way that they would actually be saved.”110 Generality, then,
“saves” God, though it fails to save all men.)
The theodicy problems that “generality” and “simplicity” are meant to
solve must have a resolution, according to Malebranche, because the
radical imperfection and evil in the universe are all too real, not at all
merely “apparent.” If they were merely apparent, one could perhaps
appeal to the notion of a mysterious dieu caché whose inscrutable ways
discover real good in seeming evil. But this is not Malebranche’s view. “A
monster” he declares, “is an imperfect work, whatever may have been
God’s purpose in creating it”:
Some philosophers, perverted by an extravagant metaphysics, come and tell me
that God wills evil as positively and directly as the good; that he truly only wills the
beauty of the universe . . . [and] . . . that the world is a harmony in which monsters
are a necessary dissonance; that God wants sinners as well as the just; and that, just
as shadows in a paintingmake its subjects stand out, and give them relief, so too the
impious are absolutely necessary in the work of God, tomake virtue shine inmen of
good will.111
Those who reason along these lines, in Malebranche’s view, are trying
to resolve moral dilemmas by appealing to aesthetic similes; but the
method will not serve. “Shadows are necessary in a painting and disso-
nances in music. Thus it is necessary that women abort and produce an
infinity of monsters. What a conclusion.” And he ends by insisting that “I
do not agree that there is evil only in appearance.”112 Hence volonté
générale alone, which wills (positively) the good and only permits evil (as
the unavoidable consequence of general and simple laws), is the sole
avenue of escape from theodicy problems if one calls evil real. For
Malebranche, as for Rousseau in the followingcentury, only généralité is
positively good, truly justifiable.113
Another of the aspects of volonté générale that Malebranche’s critics
found distressing was the possibility that it had been “derived” or extracted
from a Cartesian notion of general laws of uniformmotion (in physics), and
20 Patrick Riley
simply grafted onto, or inflicted on, the realm of grace.114And this suspicion
was borne out by a careful reading of some passages fromNature et Grâce.
In the Premier Discours of the Traité, Malebranche finds a “parallel”
between “generality” in nature and in grace: but he begins with nature,
and finds in grace no more than a kind of analogue to nature. “Just as one
has no right to be annoyed by the fact that rain falls in the sea, where it is
useless,” Malebranche argues, so “also” one has no right “to complain of
the apparent irregularity according to which grace is given to men.” Useless
rain and useless grace both derive from “the regularitywithwhichGod acts”
from “the simplicity of the laws that he follows.” And Malebranche rein-
forces the nature-grace parallel, in which nature seems to be the “model” for
grace, by calling grace a “heavenly rain that sometimes falls on hardened
hearts, as well as on prepared souls.”115 This horticultural language, of
course, which Malebranche himself said he used to persuade (mainly)
Cartesians, not scholastic theologians116 – did nothing to dispel the suspi-
cion of traditionalists like Bossuet that Cartesian “generality” and “uni-
formity” might be used in radical ways, to the detriment of traditional
teachings about grace based on Scripture and patristic writings. This kind
of suspicion – best expressed by Bossuet himself when he says, in a letter
dealingwithMalbranchism, that he sees“a great struggle against theChurch
being prepared in the name of Cartesian philosophy”117 –was certainly not
relieved byMalebranche’s insistence that “what Moses tells us inGenesis is
so obscure” that the beginning of the world can be explained à la Descartes
better than any other way.118 “Obscurity,” of course, is no more welcome
than “anthropology” or “as if.”
The fear of orthodox Christian moralists that Malebranche had
permitted a Cartesian “physics” to invade and infect the sphere of
metaphysics (including ethics) was, of course, not wholly groundless:
after all, in the Recherche de la Vérité Malebranche Cartesianises
everything, not least human volition and action:
Just as the author of nature is the universal cause of all the movements which are in
matter, it is also him who is the general cause [cause générale] of all the natural
inclinations which are inminds. And just as all movements proceed in a straight line
[en ligne droite], if there are no foreign and particular causes which determine them,
and which change them into curved lines through their opposing forces; so too the
inclinations which we receive from God are right [droites], and they could not have
any other end than the possession of the good and of truth if there were not any
foreign cause, which determined the impression of nature towards bad ends.119
Here, of course, like Kant a century later, Malebranche is playing with
the different senses of droit (meaning both “straight” and “right”) and of
The General Will before Rousseau 21
courbe (which can mean “crooked” in a moral sense).120 And this same
kind of playing can be found in Rousseau’s most famous single assertion
about “general will”: “La volonté générale est toujours droite, mais le
jugement qui la guide n’est pas toujours éclairé.”121 But the key point in
connection withMalebranche is that the language of Cartesian physics has
been imposed on morality and psychology: that (however briefly)
Malebranche resembles Hobbes in accounting for everything in terms of
“general”motion.122 And that généralité, in Malebranche as in Rousseau,
always has supreme weight: if the God of Pascal and Arnauld permanently
abandons a primitive volonté générale to save “all” in favor of (very
particular) “pity” for the elect, Malebranche’s God moves as quickly as
possible away from an embarrassingly particularistic Creation and toward
the generality and simplicity that later shape Du Contrat Social.
v
In selecting representative contemporary criticisms of Malebranche’s
theory of “general will,” one cannot do better than to choose the works
of Bossuet and of Bayle. Both offer striking criticisms of Malebranchism,
but from radically different perspectives: Bossuet was a pillar of the
Catholic Church and a close ally of the French monarchy, while Bayle
was a Calvinist émigré to Holland who was tolerated by neither French
Church nor state. Bossuet represented an inspired and eloquent perfect
orthodoxy, while Bayle was an independent intellectual frequently accused
of undercutting all orthodoxy.123 Despite these enormous differences,
both developed influential critiques of Malebranchism during roughly
the same period – from the early 1680s to their nearly-coinciding deaths
(Bossuet in 1704, Bayle in 1706). To be sure, Bayle began as a strong
Malebranchist, then moved slowly but steadily away; while Bossuet began
with violent antipathy, and ended with slight and partial sympathy.
Nonetheless Bossuet and Bayle almost certainly count as the most
important antagonists of Malbranchian volonté générale at the end of
the seventeenth century (together with Antoine Arnauld).
The most powerful and harmful opponents of Malebranche’s theory
of “general will” – in his own day – were certainly Arnauld and Bossuet.
And if Arnauld was influential enough that some of his partisans suc-
ceeded in having the Traité de la Nature et de la Grâce placed on the
Index at Rome in 1690, the still more formidable opponent was Bossuet:
bishop of Meaux, preacher to the Court at Versailles, tutor to the
dauphin. Bossuet showed an unabating hostility to Malebranchian
22 Patrick Riley
volonté générale: first in his Oraison Funèbre de Marie-Thérèse
d’Autriche (1683), then in his correspondence with Malebranche’s dis-
ciple the marquis d’Allemans, finally in his commissioning of Fénelon’s
Réfutation du Système du Père Malebranche sur la Nature et la Grâce
(which Bossuet corrected and annotated in his own hand, but finally did
not publish).124 And, of course, Bossuet’s great Discours sur l’Histoire
Universelle (1681) is built on the notion of a Providence particulière,
which Malebranche had tried so hard to overturn, just as his
Politique tirée des Propres Paroles de l’Écriture Sainte relied on the
very “anthropologies” that Malebranche had scorned. It was only in
1697, when Malebranche published his Traité de l’Amour de Dieu,
which argued against Fenelonian “quietism” and “disinterested” love,
that Bossuet – now locked in combat with Fénelon – finally began to
countenance a part of Malebranchism, and even to make some slight use
of the term volonté générale in his magistral Défense de la Tradition et
des Pères, which was left unfinished (with a massive fragment on grace in
St. Augustine) at his death in 1704.125
If Bossuet ended his career with a partial countenancing of “general
will” – though within very narrow, nonpolitical limits – he also began that
career with a view of the “general” and the “particular” that is not wholly
unrelated to Malebranchism. In a sermon on “Providence,” preached at
the Louvre in 1662, Bossuet argues that the “remarkable difference”
between les causes particulières and la cause universelle (God) is that
“particular causes” – such as heat and cold, human desires and
counter-desires – oppose and cancel each other, while the “universal”
cause “encloses both the whole and the parts within the same order.”126
And he pursues the distinction between the “particulière” and the
“universelle” in a moral tone rather like that of Malebranche’s Nature et
Grâce:
Whoever attaches himself to particular causes – or, let us say it more plainly,whoever wants to obtain a benefit from a Prince; whoever wants to make his
fortune in a circuitous way, finds other claimants who counter him, finds
unforeseen collisions which cross him: a scheme fails to work in time, and the
machine breaks down; intrigue fails to have its effect; hopes go up in smoke. But
whoever attaches himself immutably to the whole and not to the parts; not to
proximate causes – to the powerful, to favor, to intrigue – but to the cause première
et fondamentelle, to God, to his will, to his providence, finds nothing which
opposes him, nothing which troubles his plans.127
While this is not exactly Malebranchism, the merely “particular” is
cast in an unflattering light by being linked with “circuitousness,”
The General Will before Rousseau 23
“collision,” “breaking down,” “intrigue,” and “smoke,” while the
universal is “providential.” And one cannot help noticing that
the wish to be “benefited” by a “Prince” is lumped with smoke and
intrigue.
By 1680, however, when Bossuet first read Nature et Grâce (still in
manuscript), his thought had changed: he is said to have written pulchra,
nova, falsa on his (published) copy; and by June 1683 he was expressing
his “horror” of Malebranchian volonté générale in a letter to a
fellow-bishop.128 But the decisive (and very public) turn came in
September 1638, with the rhetorically superb Oraison Funèbre de
Marie-Thérèse d’Autriche, pronounced by Bossuet during the funeral of
the queen of France at Saint Denis, in the presence of the dauphin and
of the Court.129 The central passage of this remarkable funeral oration
(which was quickly published) is aimed clearly and obviously at
Malebranche’s “general will”:
What contempt I have for those philosophers who, measuring the counsels of God
by their own thoughts, make him the author of nothing more than a certain general
order, out of which the rest develops as it may! As if he had, after our fashion, only
general and confused views, and as if the sovereign intelligence could not include in
his plans particular things, which alone truly exist.130
Bossuet – who has begun by equating the “general” with the
“confused,” and by adroitly re-aiming the charge of anthropomor-
phism at Malebranche himself – loses no time in drawing a purely
political moral from this particularism: God has “ordained,” he
argues, in all nations, “les familles particulières” who ought to govern
those nations; and, still more “en particulier,” he has ordained the
precise persons within those families who will help a ruling house “to
rise, to sustain itself, or to fall.” Since, Bossuet goes on “it is God
who gives [the world] great births, great marriages, children and
posterity,” it is certainly God who particularly gave Queen Marie-
Thérèse to France. (This he supports with numerous Old Testament
citations, most particularly Genesis 17:6, where God tells Abraham
that “kings will issue from you.”)131
Nor does Bossuet hesitate at all to use the language of grace to
reinforce this political particularism: God, he argues, has “predestined”
from all “eternity: the world’s political “alliances and divisions”; by
giving France a Hapsburg queen through “une grace particulière” he
has drawn together Austrian “counsel” and French “courage” (which
are the “caractères particuliers” of those nations), much as he earlier gave
24 Patrick Riley
the virtue of “clemency” to the kings of Israel.132 But the theological
notions are piled up to particularly striking effect in a passage that begins
by lamenting the “rarity” of “purity” in men, but more especially in “the
great”:
And nonetheless it is true, Messieurs, that God, through a miracle of his grace, has
been pleased to choose, among kings, some pure souls. Such was St. Louis [IX],
always pure and holy since childhood; and Marie-Therese, his daughter, [who]
received this fine inheritance from him. Let us enter, Messieurs, into the plans of
Providence, and let us admire the goodness of God . . . in the predestination of this
Princess.133
Here, of course, grace is “a miracle,” and therefore precisely not
something “general”; the queen is particularly “predestined” to rule by
God’s “choice.” Not, to be sure, that such “rule” was the queen’s chief
attribute; what really mattered was her piety. “She tells you,” Bossuet
insists, “through my mouth . . . that greatness is a dream, that joy is an
error, that youth is a flower that withers, and that health is a deceiving
name.”134 Nonetheless he ends by admonishing the dauphin to “ask”
God – “as Solomon did” – for the “wisdom” that will make him “worthy
of the throne” of his “ancestors.”135And “asking,” of course, supposes a
Providence particulière that can intervene in human affairs to give what
is asked for.
(Bossuet’s notion that Malebranchian “generality” cannot account for
anything as particular as “great births” re-appears, incidentally, but
transmogrified, in the work of the French Spinozist Pierre-Valentine
Faydit, who in his Remarques sur Virgile et Homère et sur le Style
Poétique de l’Écriture Sainte [1705] offers a grotesque “dramatization”
ofMalebranche’s alleged contempt for everything “particular.” Imagining
Malebranche attending a Te Deum for the birth of Louis XIV’s
great-grandson, the duc de Brétagne, Faydit asks Malebranche: “What
are you doing here, Father? You laugh in your soul and up your sleeve at
our devotion, and you say to yourself that we are quite simple and
great idiots to believe that it is God who, by a volonté particulière, has
accorded health to the king, and has given a son to his grandson.”136
Bossuet himself, of course, with his marmoreal splendor of style, would
never have stooped to anything so outré; but the outré was Faydit’s
specialty, whether in a nasty ad hominem attack on Fénelon
(Télémacomanie),137 or in the famous anti-Malebranchian couplet:
Lui qui voit tout en Dieu
N’y voit pas qu’il est fou.138
The General Will before Rousseau 25
The present point is simply that Bossuet’sOraison Funèbre – published in
October 1683 – was widely known, and sometimes recast in base
material.)
Bossuet actually sent a copy of this published version to
Malebranche, who felt constrained to thank the bishop for his
thoughtful gift.139 But Bossuet’s criticism of volonté générale was
not always quite so public; and, indeed, the lengthiest of his refuta-
tions of “general will” is to be found in a 1687 letter to the
Malebranchian marquis d’Allemans, who had tried to represent (or
re-present) Malebranche’s Nature et Grâce in a way that Bossuet
could accept. Bossuet begins this very long letter by complaining
that d’Allemans has not in the slightest succeeded in making Nature
et Grâce more palatable; and he refers to Malebranche, with with-
ering sarcasm, as “your infallible doctor” and “your master.”140 “I
notice in you,” Bossuet tells the Marquis, “nothing but an attach-
ment, which grows every day more blind, to your patriarch,” though
his “ridiculous” theory of nature and grace is “a perfect
galimatias.”141
To be more exact, in Bossuet’s view, Malebranche does not really offer
nature and grace at all: he offers just nature, and grace vanishes.
(The “naturalization” of grace, which was later to delight Voltaire, only
horrified Bossuet.)142 It is bad enough, Bossuet complains, that
Malebranche “prides himself” on having “explained Noah’s Flood through
the operation of natural causes”; but if d’Allemans continues to follow
Malebranche, “he will lead you to find, those same causes,” the Israelites’
“passage through the Red Sea,” as well as all other scriptural “marvels of
this kind.” If, Bossuet goes on, one means by “natural” causality the “effects
which happen through the force of the first laws of movement,” then
Malebranchian “generality” will finally “render everything natural, even
to the resurrection of the dead and the healing of those born blind.”143
(Bossuet turnedout to be as prescient as he was conservative, for only eighty
years later Rousseauwas to argue in theMalebranche-coloredLettres écrites
de la montagne that the “raising” of Lazarus was no “supernatural oper-
ation” but a misreported “live interment,” and that one should doubt
“particular” changes in “the order of nature.”)144
Much of this “heresy” (as Bossuet does not hesitate to call it) arises from
“misunderstood” Cartesianism:
For on the pretext that one should admit only what one clearly understands –
which, within certain limits, is quite true – each person gives himself freedom to say:
26 Patrick Riley
I understand this, I do not understand that; and on this sole foundation, one
approves or rejects whatever one likes. . . . Thus is introduced, under this pretext,
a liberty of judging which involves advancing with temerity whatever one thinks,
without regard for tradition.145
This, fairly clearly, refers to Malebranche’s notion that one must
conceive God through the “idea” of an être parfait, and not through
(allegedly historical) “anthropologies.” But this preference for “ideas,”
this contempt for “tradition,” leaves Bossuet “terrified” and fearful of
“great scandal”: heretics, he says, always “begin with novelty,” move on
to “stubbornness,” and end with “open revolt.”146
Bossuet concludes his letter – spoken, he says, “as one does to a friend” –
with a final chilling remark about thinking that one can “do” theology
because one “knows physics and algebra”; and he reminds Malebranche’s
disciple that one cannot “favor” bothMalebranchian volonté générale and
Bossuet’s own Histoire Universelle (which d’Allemans had praised):
It is easy for me to show you that the principles on which I reason are directly
opposed to those of your system. . . . There is a great difference in saying, as I do,
that God leads each thing to the endwhich he proposes for it by the means which he
[actually] follows, and in saying that he contents himself with giving some general
laws, from which result many things which enter only indirectly into his plans. . . . I
turn away from your ideas of general laws.147
Bossuet was perfectly right, of course, in characterizing his ownHistoire
Universelle as a work built on Providence particulière, not on “general
laws.” “Remember, Monseigneur,” Bossuet admonishes the dauphin at
the end of the History, “that this long chain of particular causes, which
make and unmake empires, depends on the secret degrees of Divine
Providence.” It is God who “holds the reins of every kingdom and holds
every heart in his hands.”148 His action, moreover, in shaping universal
history, is completely particular: “should he wish to see a conqueror, he
will spread terror before him . . . should he wish to see legislators, he will
send them his spirit of wisdom and foresight.”149 And Bossuet – after
virtually anticipating Hegel’s “cunning of history” by urging that, thanks
to secret Providence, rules “achieve either more or less than they plan,”
and that “their intentions have always led to unforeseen consequences” –
concludes with an apotheosis of Providence particulière which (plainly)
Montesquieu must have had in mind when he wroteConsiderations on the
Greatness and Decline of the Romans fifty years later:
Thus God reigns over every nation. Let us no longer speak of coincidence or
fortune; or let us use those words only to cover our ignorance. What is coincidence
The General Will before Rousseau 27
to our uncertain foresight is concerted design to a higher foresight, that is, to the
eternal foresight which encompasses all causes and all effects in a single plan. Thus
all things concur to the same end; and it is only because we fail to understand the
whole design that we see coincidence or strangeness in particular events.150
It is precisely theHistoire Universelle that is cited at a crucial juncture in
the work that Bossuet commissioned from the abbé Fénelon (as he then
was) in 1686–1687; and this Réfutation du Système du Père Malebranche
sur la Nature et la Grâce, corrected and (in some parts) rewritten or
amplified by Bossuet himself, is perhaps the most important philosophical
contribution that Bossuet made to anti-Malebranchism – even if Bossuet
was only the occasional cause, and Fénelon the true cause, of the
Réfutation.151 In this work, apparently commissioned after Bossuet
became dissatisfied with his own attempted refutation of volonté
générale, Fénelon begins with a reasonably fair resumé of Nature et
Grâce, but thinks that he has found a fatal flaw in Malebranche’s admis-
sion that God acts only usually, but not invariably, through “general wills”
and general laws; that he sometimes – though “rarely” – acts through
volontés particulières:
But in what consists that which the author [Malebranche] calls “rarely”? These
words signify nothing, unless they mean that there is a certain small number of
volontés particulières which order permits to God outside the general laws, after
which he can will nothing particularly. If order permits god this small number of
volontés particulières – order never permitting anything but the most perfect – it
follows not only that these volontés particulières do not diminish in the slightest the
simplicity of God’s ways, but even that it is more perfect of God to mix some
volontés particulières in his general plan, than to limit himself absolutely to his
volontés générales.152
(In his corrections, Bossuet complains at this point that Fénelon should
not confuse God’s “simplicity” with his “perfection”: “multiplicity [of
divine wills] may well not be contrary to perfection,” Bossuet urges, “but
it is always [contrary] to simplicity.” This is logically unimpeachable: the
“simple” is necessarily nonmultiple; the “perfect” may or may not
involve multiplicity.)153
Fénelon, still stressing “simplicity” rather than “perfection,” goes on to
imagine a hypothetical case in which “order” has permitted God to have
a hundred volontés particulières; and he then asks himself a rhetorical
question: “What, then, is this ‘simplicity’ which is able to accommodate a
hundred [particular] wills, which even requires them, but which invincibly
rejects the hundred and first?” And Fénelon adds, in a passage that is
extremely effective, though not perhaps wholly fair, that:
28 Patrick Riley
If God did not have these hundred volontés particulières, he would cease to be
God; for he would violate the order which requires them, and would not act with
the greatest perfection. If he had the hundred and first volonté, he would also cease
to be God; for he would destroy the simplicity of his ways.154
It is certainly not the case, Fénelon goes on, that the hundred and first
volonté particulière is “of another nature” from the first one hundred; all
are equally “exceptions to the general rule.” And he ends with the striking
question: “Is there a fatal number of exceptions which God is obliged to
use up, after which he can will nothing except according to general laws?
Would one dare to say this?”155 Even if, as Bossuet’s annotations argue, a
multiplicity of volontés particulières would contradict only “simplicity,”
but not (necessarily) “perfection,” this is an effective passage.
The political moral of all this is drawn by Fénelon several chapters later,
in a section called “That which the author [Malebranche] says about
volontés particulières destroys, through its consequences, all divine
Providence.” Sometimes, Fénelon argues, Providence “acts against general
rules, through miracles” (as in the parting of the Red Sea); and this
particularism is obviously morally and politically important, since the
Jews deserved to escape from the Egyptians. But sometimes – and this
seems to matter more – Providence creates a parallel between general laws
and “particular plans”: it “uses the wills of men, in which she inspires
whatever pleases her, to cause even inmatter itself movements that seem
fortuitous, but that are related to events that God wills to draw from
them.”156 It was exactly in this way, Fénelon insists, that Alexander the
Great “conceived the ambitious plan of conquering Asia: in that way he
was able to fulfill the prophecy of Daniel.” If one examines “all the
revolutions of great empires” – which are, Fénelon adds, “the greatest
spectacle that can sustain our faith” – one sees that “Providence has
raised or leveled them to prepare the way for the Messiah, and to
establish his endless reign.” And in a footnote he indicates that, on this
point, it is Bossuet’s Histoire Universelle that ought to be consulted.157
(In this chapter, significantly, Bossuet found nothing at all to fault.)158
By the 1690s Bossuet had lost his one-time disciple Fénelon to Mme.
Guyon, “quietism,” and the “disinterested love of God,” and there was
something of a rapprochementwithMalebranche.159Hence in hisDéfense
de la Tradition et des Pères, which he began in 1693 as a refutation of
Richard Simon’s Histoire Critique des Principaux Commentateurs du
Noveau Testament,160 he allowed himself to use the concept of “general
will” – though mainly, it is true, in the thirteenth book, which he added to
the manuscript in 1702. And even here Bossuet does not permit himself to
The General Will before Rousseau 29
use volonté générale in Malebranche’s expanded sense – as something
coextensive with wisdom, constancy, even justice; he is careful to restrict
“general will” to a narrowly circumscribed realm of grace. Indeed, he talks
simply about St. Augustine’s interpretation of the Pauline assertion that
“God wills that all men be saved” – the very claim that started the whole
controversy over “general will.”
St. Augustine’s “difficulty,” Bossuet argues, was that of knowing why
“the will to believe”was not given equally to all men, if God truly wills that
“all men be saved.”And St. Augustine had two related “problems” as well:
first, how one can say that God “wills” something that “does not happen”
(since some are damned, not saved); and second, how one can reconcile
God’s “general will” with human “free will.” But St. Augustine, in
Bossuet’s view, overcomes all these difficulties quite admirably, by “saying
that God truly wills to save all men, but that, since he wants to do this
without depriving them of their natural liberty, it is also through the latter
that they perish.”161 St. Augustine “supposes,” Bossuet argues, that if all
men are not saved, the obstacle comes not at all from “the volonté of God,
which is générale,” but from “the will of man” which “opposes” God.
(This “opposition” firmly gets punished, to be sure: precisely through
some men’s being damned.)162
Bossuet grants that St. Augustine does not invariably maintain that God
has a “general will” to save all men; indeed in De Correctione et Gratia,
Bossuet concedes, Augustine seems to say that “all” men in St. Paul’s
assertion refers simply to “the predestined.” But one must recall, Bossuet
insists, that in late writings such as Correction and Grace St. Augustine
was combating the Pelagians, who “amused the world by calling nature
‘grace,’” and who maintained that grace was given to all equally and
indifferently. It was the aim of St. Augustine, Bossuet continues “to preach
the grace by which we are Christians”; and he finally concludes that while
God as “creator” willed generally that all men be saved, God as
“redeemer” reduced this “all” to Christians particularly.163 And this, of
course, is fairly close to what Pascal says about a volonté générale to
save “all” being replaced, after the Fall, by a will to save a smaller
number – though Bossuet, no Jansenist, is careful not to speak of the
“elect.”
Even when he is willing to employ volonté générale, then, Bossuet is
careful to restrict it radically: he doesn’t extend it to cover “bodies politic,”
as does Pascal, nor does it become coextensive with legality, as in
Malebranche. Hence one can concluded that, with the exception of the
purely theologicalDéfense de la Tradition et des Pères, Bossuet adhered in
30 Patrick Riley
the main to his providentialist particularism –which inter alia, saved Louis
XIV from being a mere “consequence” of a “general law.” Of all those
who use the term “general will” in the late seventeenth century, Bossuet
uses it in the least general way.164
vi
If Bossuet said a great deal – most of it negative – about volonté générale,
he did little to secularize it: to “prepare” it (as it were) for Montesquieu’s
extensive secularization and politicization in De l’Espirit des Lois. Indeed
at first sight it looks as if there is some sort of missing link or term in the
“translation” of general will from a (mainly) theological notion into a
(mainly) political one – though one should recall that Pascal had used the
notions of généralité and particularité with respect to bodies-politic. But
that (apparent) missing link is supplied by an important writer who was
completely familiar with the theological use of the notions volonté générale
and volonté particulière, and who frequently used those notions in a purely
political sense: Pierre Bayle, philosophe de Rotterdam.165 It was Bayle,
especially, who undertook this secular conversion, paving the way for
Montesquieu’s further transformations, and then for Rousseau’s “making
the history” of the general will.
(To be sure, one can find other “links” between the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries: if Bayle is the most important, one can still admit that
Cardinal Polignac’s Anti-Lucrèce, written in the 1720s, stresses the notion
that “if rain falls in the sea or in a wilderness,” that is because these natural
facts are “particular effects of loix générales established for the governance
of the universe.”166 That purely Malebranchian thought is slightly politi-
cized by being linked to the notion of “governance”; and it is interesting
that Polignac read theAnti-Lucrèce toMontesquieu when the latter visited
Rome in 1729.167 But Bayle’s secularization of volonté générale is far more
radical and thoroughgoing.)
Bayle, though a Calvinist, was briefly (ca. 1680–1685) a Malebranchist
as well;168 and indeed nothing did more to spread the European fame of
Malebranche’s Nature et Grâce than Bayle’s glowing review of it (May
1684) in his universally diffused journal, Nouvelles de la république
des lettres. The “hypothesis” that “God acts through a general will that
prescribes only a small number of simple and uniform laws,” Bayle argues,
is quite suitable for justifying “several things which cause pain to minds of
the second rank.”169 (Is this slightly left-handed compliment an intimation
of hostility to come?) When these “minds” ask why “nature produces so
The General Will before Rousseau 31
many monstrous things,” or why “in the order of grace there are so many
things which shock our reason,” a Malebranchian can reply that they are
“consequences of the general laws which God has chosen,” and that God
loves his own wisdom “infinitely more than all his works.” Though one
may not agree with everything in Malebranche’s Nature et Grâce, Bayle
insists, one is still “forced to admit that no one has ever, perhaps, formed so
well-linked a system in so little time” – a system that manifests the “vast”
and “penetrating” “genius” of its author.170
But Bayle’s decisive work in this vein is the thoroughly Malebranchian
Pensées Diverses sur la Comète (1682), whose general aim is to overturn
“superstition” by demonstrating that the comet that alarmed Europe in
December 1680 was produced by Malebranchian “general laws,” that it
was not a “sign” of Providence particulière or a portent of doom. If God
wants to instruct the world through something “miraculous,” Bayle
argues, he sends “persons” (Christ, for example) who shine “with the
brilliance of excellent virtues” that only the “voluntarilyblind” can ignore;
he does not merely send a flying rock, which signifies “at most the anger of
heaven.” If all the martyrs and prophets have not overcome “idolatry,”
Bayle observes tartly, why should one expect much from “a mute flame,
which naturally inspires only a feeling of apprehension?”171
Those who have read Malebranche’s Nature et Grâce, Bayle goes on,
will have understood that “the events which are born of the execution of
general laws of nature, are not the object of a volonté particulière of
God.” And this Malebranchian “generality,” in Bayle’s view, is usable in
“resolving a thousand difficulties that are raised against divine
Providence”:
If we are permitted to judge actions of God, we can say that he does not will all
particular events because of the perfection they contain, but simply because they are
linked to general laws which he has chosen to be the rule of his operations. . . . One
can even imagine that they simplicity and uniformity of this way of acting, joined
with an infinite fecundicity, seemed preferable to him, to another way of acting
[which was] more complicated but more regular, even though some superfluous
events had to result from this.172
So closely does Bayle adhere to Malebranche, at this point in his career,
that he even copies Malebranche’s treatment of morality as a kind of
analogue to law-governed nature: just as it would be “ridiculous” to
claim that God ought to depart from laws of nature “when a rock falls
on a fragile vase which is a delight of its owner,” Bayle argues, so “also: it is
“ridiculous to claim” that God should abandon generality “to stop an evil
32 Patrick Riley
man from enriching himself by despoiling an homme de bien.” Indeed
Bayle outstrips Malebranche in the purity of his Malebranchism by urging
that it is as “unjust” to wish that “an evil man become sick” through a
divine volonté particulière as it is unreasonable to hope that “a rock
which falls on a vase will not break it.”173 And in the same chapter of
the Pensées Diverses Bayle extracts a political moral from his tale of the
fragile vase and the evil man by urging that if “a mere governor of a city
will be laughed at, if he changes his rules and his orders as many times
as it pleases anyone to murmur against him,” this is even more true of
God, “whose laws concern so universal a good.”Can God “derogate from
his laws, because today they fail to please someone, tomorrow someone
else?” Can one, Bayle asks, “form falser ideas of a Providence
générale?”174
This hyper-Malebranchism Bayle carries over into a still more extended
political analogy – located, appropriately enough, in a chapter of the
Pensées Diverses called “That There Is Nothing Worthier of the
Greatness of God than to Maintain General Laws.” Some people say,
Bayle begins, that God ought to intervene particularly in nature to stop
the birth of “monsters” that might later be worshipped by “idolators”; but
these people do not reflect that “there could be nothing more unworthy of
a cause générale, which sets all others in motion by a simple and uniform
law, than to violate that law at every moment, in order to prevent murmur-
ings and superstitions.” In just the sameway, Bayle insists “there is nothing
which gives us a higher idea of a monarch, than to see that he, having
wisely established a law, maintains it in vigor for all and against all,”
without “suffering” the “prejudice” of an individual (un particuler) or the
“interested recommendations of a favorite” to “restrict” the law’s general-
ity.175 And he adds, as much à la Rousseau as à la Malebranche, that “of
all the things which are capable of throwing the state into monstrous
confusion,” the worst is “to derogate from the laws, to change them, to
mutilate them, to stretch them, to abridge them” in proportion as
des particuliers” have “domestic views” that “accommodate” these
“alterations.”176 It is true enough, Bayle grants, that human “limitation”
seems to necessitate that les politiques correct their laws through “decla-
rations” and “interpretations”; but it remains true that “the more a law is
maintained without alteration, the more also it shows the great sense and
the great vision of him who made it.”177 In this assertion, Malebranche is
recalled, and Rousseau is foreshadowed: it is a “monstrously confused”
state in which des particuliers deprive law of its generality; statesmen
should strive to imitate the constancy of the divine volonté générale.
The General Will before Rousseau 33
In the Pensées Diverses the politically rightful and the general are exactly
equivalent.
(In the second edition of the Pensées Diverses, Bayle added a
section arguing that even the Reformation had been brought about by
the particularisme. Shortly before the Council of Trent, Bayle points out, a
group of cardinals and bishops told Pope Paul III that the “readiness” of
his predecessors to “derogate from the canon laws” and to “listen to
counsels of flattery” constituted the “Trojan horse” that led to “all the
abuses that have inundated the Church.” Centuries earlier, Bayle adds,
Innocent IV had been told that papal particularism had “derogated from
the laws,” leading to a “deluge of inconstancy, a lack of faith, and
an obstacle to the tranquility of Christianity.”178 Here, very effectively,
particularity is linked with “flattery,” “abuse,” and “inconstancy,” while
generality is associated with lawfulness, faith, and tranquility.)
To be sure, in theNouvelles lettres critiques sur l’histoire du Calvinisme,
written only slightly later (1684) than the Pensées diverses, Bayle shows as
much affinity with aHobbesian politics based on passion and fear as with a
Rousseauean politics grounded in généralité; but this, for Bayle, arises
simply from the fact that there is a regrettable (and very large) gap
between what politics might be and what it actually is. He begins the
political part of the Nouvelles lettres, indeed, in the familiar
Malebranchian-Rousseauean tone of the Pensées diverses: “it is more
glorious to be led by universal reasons, which relates all things to the
general good of the universe, than by une raison particulière.”179 Shortly
afterward, however, Bayle reflects that la raison universelle has little
efficacy, given the depressing facts of human psychology; and this
leads him to a more careful (and quasi-Hobbesian) passage in which a
general-particular distinction is still present, but has lost some of the color
ofNature et Grâce and has assumed some of the hues of Leviathan. And in
this passage Bayle argues that while pure reason (alone) is not the motive
of human actions, a (purely instrumental) reason can help to achieve
ends dictated by passion (above all avoiding death and gaining security).
“It is necessary” Bayle begins “to distinguish the reason that precedes
the passions” from the reason “that follows in their train.” The reason
that precedes the passions is “a certain faculty of the soul that judges
things by general principles, and by universal ideas of honor, of justice,
of perfection.” But the purely instrumental reason that is preceded by
“feelings and instincts” judges everything only by “relation” to “the
particular condition [l’état particulier] in which one finds himself.”180 In
that (more or less Hobbesian) “condition,” Bayle argues, reason has
34 Patrick Riley
“willed” that men “confederate” in order to be delivered from “perpetual
disquiet”; but this reason is one that “accommodates itself to fear,” and
that “consults” only what “is useful in our present condition” (rather than
“the general ideas of the good, the beautiful, the great, and the
honorable.”)181
Of course it would be better, Bayle grants, if men had “formed societies
through considerations worthy of a reasonable creature” – if they had been
willing to “perfect” themselves, and not live like “beasts.” But it has
proven necessary in human politics, he adds,“to use a more efficacious
means, namely fear, the love of repose, and some other similar
passions.”182 Despite these concessions to Hobbism, nonetheless, Bayle’s
groupings of terms show plainly what would be better: “universal” reason
is “glorious” and points out “the general good,” while la raison
particulière is forced by necessity to accommodate itself to “passion,”
above all fear. Thus in Bayle there is a tension between a Malebranchian-
Rousseauean ideal of généralité, and an awareness that Hobbes may have
been more nearly right than either Malebranche or Rousseau would ever
admit.183
After the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, followed by the
death of his brother (a Calvinist pastor) in a French prison,184 Bayle
published an uncharacteristically violent anti-Catholic polemic entitled
Ce que c’est la France toute Catholique sous le Règne de Louis le Grand;
and, as a commentator has noted, one of the most interesting features ofLa
France toute Catholique is “the bitter use Bayle makes of Malebranche’s
theology,” particularly his generalism.185 (Perhaps Bayle had begun to feel
that some “particular” evils – including his own personal disasters of
1685 – could not be explained away as “consequences” of “uniform”
laws.) The revocation of the Edict, followed by fresh persecution of
non-Catholics, Bayle argues, is
the best lesson in Malebranchism that could be given; for if it were worthy of God
to act often though volontés particulières and through miracles, would he have
suffered that a Church as corrupted as yours should grow to the point that it has – a
Church which, through the enormity of its maxims and the baseness of some of its
dogmas has merited the horror and contempt of all the world?186
“Let us say, then” Bayle concludes savagely “with this Oratorian
Father, that God, loving his wisdom better than anything else, prefers
that his conduct bear the character of a wise agent . . . than that it
remedy . . . the evils that happen in the world.”187 Bayle does not yet,
despite his ferocious sarcasm, callMalebranchism a “pious fraud” – one of
The General Will before Rousseau 35
the favorite epithets of his Dictionnaire Historique et Critique; but he is
clearly moving toward his later view that “general will” does not really
explain the evils of the world.188
Even so, that later view is not yet wholly realized in La France toute
Catholique; for in other parts of the work there are remnants of
Malebranchian “generality” that Bayle gives a plainly political turn. To
be sure, Bayle begins in a sarcastic vein, saying that if Louis XIV really
always intended to revoke the Edict of Nantes (“as he assures us in the
preface to the Edict”), then he ought to have revoked it by “the shortest
way, which is always that of an able worker,” and not by “act after act,
some of which destroyed each other.”189 Here, of course, the
Malebranchian idea of an “able” God working “simply” has been
ironically grafted onto the vacillations of Louis XIV. But slightly later
one cannot be sure that the tone is still ironic, for Bayle complains that,
just before the revocation, Louis’s council first permitted Huguenot
ministers to baptize the children, then (afterwards) permitted them to
celebrate marriages (“it is as if the judges who had condemned a criminal
to be hanged in three days ordained that he change prisons ever two
months”),190 and finally avows that:
I have always had some antipathy to the hypotheses of Père Malebranche, but
I grant, sir, that your [the Catholics’] way of acting givesme a taste for what he says.
I find something unworthy in a wise mind when it makes so many arrêtes
particuliers, when it advances, steps back, goes to the right, goes to the left, when
it retracts, re-explains itself – in one word when it lives from day to day, that is to
say, making new rules at each session of the council. This, I say, seems to me so far
from the idea of perfection . . . that I begin to believe, with this new philosopher,
that God acts only through a small number of general laws.191
After this – and one cannot be quite sure just how far Malebranchism is
being used, how far abused – Bayle concludes that Louis’s inconsistencies
are “unworthy of a good and wise politics.” Given his view in the Pensées
Diverses that good politics should be as “general” as possible, one can’t be
certain whether Bayle is attacking Louis XIV for his inconsistency or
for the sheer wrongness of his Huguenot policy. In any case, Louis’
particularism proves that a really perfect rule must operate very differently.
Whatever may have been Bayle’s doubts about the adequacy of
Malebranchism by the time he wrote La France toute Catholique, he
continued to use Malebranche’s distinction between le particulier (as
something bad) and le général (as something good) in an important work
from around 1686, the Commentaire philosophique sur ces paroles de
l’Évangile selon S. Luc, Chap. XIV, Vers 23, ‘Et le Maître dit au serviteur:
36 Patrick Riley
“Va par les chemins et par les hayes, et contrains-les d’entrer, afin que ma
maison soit remplie.”‘ The central point of the Commentaire was to show
that Scripture should be interpreted, not through “literal sense” but
through “natural light”; that if a literal reading seemed to make
Scripture advocate crimes (such as “constraining” French Protestants to
“enter” the Catholic Church), then the literal interpretation must be
rejected in favor of an “equitable” reading.192
Now it is precisely in connection with “equity” and lumière naturelle
that Bayle takes up the familiar general-particular distinction. “Without
exception” he begins, “one must submit all moral laws to this natural idea
of equity” which “enlightens every man coming into the world.” But,
Bayle goes on, in the language of Recherche de la Vérité, “since passion
and prejudices only too often obscure the ideas of natural equity,” he could
wish that a man who wants to know those ideas well “consider them en
général, and leaving his interêt particulier out of account, as well as the
customs of his country.” For it may happen that “a sharp passion” will
persuade a man that something “very useful” and “very pleasant” to
himself is “in conformity to reason,” or that he may be swayed by “the
force of custom.” To avoid this, Bayle argues, he could wish that a man
“who wants to know natural light distinctly” in its “relation” to morality
be able to “raise himself above his personal interest, and the custom of his
country, and ask himself en général, ‘Is such-and-such a thing just? And, if
it is a question of introducing it into a country where it is not in use . . .
would one see, if one examined it coldly, that it is just enough to merit
being adopted?’ ”193 This last part, which anticipates Rousseau’s Du
Contrat Social, Book IV, Chapter 2 (“when a law is proposed in the
assembly of the people, what the voters are being asked is . . . whether or
not it is in conformity with the general will”),194 ends by praising “that
universal and original light that emanates from God in order to show all
men the general principles of equity” – general principles that are the
“touchstone” of all loix particulières (“not even excepting those that
God has revealed to us in an extraordinary way”).195
If, then, Bayle insists, a “casuist” tells us that Scripture has particularly
revealed to him that “it is good and holy to curse one’s enemies” or to
persecute the faithful, we must shun him and turn our eyes toward
“natural religion fortified and perfected by the Gospel.” Then we shall
hear “the interior truth that speaks to our spirit without saying a word,
but that speaks quite intelligibly to those who pay attention,” while the
“pretended” Scripture of the casuist will be unmasked as a “bilious vapor
of temperament.” Even a “particular fact” produced by God through
The General Will before Rousseau 37
“special Providence”is not “the light that leads us,” and does not derogate
from “the positive law that is universally promulgated for all men in the
Gospel,” which requires all men to be meek and forgiving; still less, Bayle
continues, does “particular” Providence derogate from “the natural and
eternal law that supplies all men with the idea of honorability.” And Bayle
ends the opening part of the Commentaire philosophique with the wholly
Malebranchian thought that “universal reason, which illuminates all
minds,” will never be denied to those who are “attentive” and who do
not permit “corporeal objects to fill up the capacity of their soul” nor
“passions” to “excite” their hearts.196
By the 1690s Bayle’s doubts about Malebranchism had begun to
overcome his vestigial respect for the doctrine; and in the Réponse aux
Questions d’un Provincial he indicates exactly why his views have
changed, and who did the changing. At the time of his review of Nature
et Grâce and of the Pensées Diverses sur la Comète, Bayle relates, he had
been “among those who believed” that Malebranche had resolved
many difficulties through “general will” and “general law.” Without
now denying that “the system of Père Malebranche is the work of a
superior genius, and one of the greatest efforts of the human spirit,”
Bayle avows that he can no longer embrace Malebranchian generality,
“after having read the books of M. Arnauld against this system, and after
having considered well the vast and immense idea of the sovereignly
perfect being.”197 The “idea” of an être parfait no longer conveys to
Bayle what it seemed to convey to Malebranche: the true “idea” of God
“teaches,” Bayle argues, that “there is nothing easier for God than
to follow a simple, fecund and regular plan, which is, at the same time,
suitable for all creatures.” It is only “a limited intelligence” –
Malebranche’s own phrase, now turned against him – which takes more
pride in its own “ability” than in its “love for the public good.”198 All of
this Bayle quickly turns in a purely political direction:
A prince who causes a city to be built may, through a false taste for grandeur, prefer
that it have an air of magnificence, and an architecture of bold and singular
character, though at the same time very inconvenient for its inhabitants, than
that, with less magnificence, it allow them to enjoy all sorts of conveniences. But
if this prince has a true greatness of soul, that is, a strong disposition to make his
subjects happy, he will prefer convenient but less magnificent architecture, to
magnificent but less convenient architecture.199
From this architectural fable –which is not sufficientlywell-designed to be
fatal to Malebranche – Bayle concludes that however “well-intentioned”
38 Patrick Riley
may be “our legislators” on earth, they can still never “invent rules which
are convenient for all individuals [particuliers]”; the “limitation” of these
legislators’ “enlightenment” forces them to fall back on general laws that,
“everything considered,” are “more useful than damaging.”200 Here gen-
erality is something settled for, but which (as in Aristotle) is not invariably
“equitable.”201 But God does not suffer from this problem, since he is
“infinite in power and in intelligence.”202 Why he does not “suffer,” why
the theodicy-problems that driveMalebranche to the “general will” vanish
simply by noticing divine power and intelligence, is not made clear, at least
in this work; the probable answer is that, for Bayle, philosophy finally
cannot solve the theodicy-problems satisfactorily, so that in the end one
must rely on faith, not reason, in explaining (or rather believing in) the
justice of God’s operation. As Bayle himself says in the Dictionnaire
Historique et Critique, a man is “happily disposed toward faith when he
knows how defective reason is. This is why Pascal and others have said
that in order to convert the libertines they should make them realize the
weakness of reason and teach them to distrust it.”203 This fideism, Bayle’s
final (and apparently sincere) position, is radically at variance with
Malebranche’s insistence in the Traité de Morale that “faith passes away,
but intelligence exists eternally.”204 In the end, a fideism like Bayle’s
cannot co-exist with a rationalism like Malebranche’s. Nor can it
hope to find in divine volonté générale a model of justice that can be
approximately realized on earth.
Despite the fideism of the Dictionnaire, and Bayle’s increasing doubts
about a link between “generality” and justice, there is one important
passage in this work – the article dealing with Sarah, wife of the prophet
Abraham – in which that Malebranchian link is precisely maintained. In
“Sarah,” Bayle considers the ways in which various Christian theologians
have tried either to excuse or to condemn Sarah’s conduct (recounted in
Genesis) in countenancing Abraham’s impregnation of her servant Agar
after Sarah’s sterility led to the impossibility of her bearing a child for
Abraham. Bayle argues that St. Augustine’s effort to justify Abraham’s
adultery (and Sarah’s connivance) in The City of God is not “une bonne
apologie,” and that the attempts of St. Ambrose are no better. All of the
efforts of the early fathers of the church to excuse Abraham and Sarah,
Bayle goes on, are implausible and even unworthy: “The liberty that
Calvin took in strongly censuring this action of Sarah and of her husband,
is incomparably more useful to Christian morality, than the care which the
fathers took to justify Abraham and his wife.”205 Bayle then, using a
The General Will before Rousseau 39
Malebranchian general-particular distinction, indicates just what is
unjustifiable, not only in the conduct of Abraham and Sarah, but still
more in the efforts of Augustine and Ambrose. Those fathers, through
their apologies, sacrificed “les interêts généraux de la moralité” to “the
reputation of a particular person [un particulier].”206 And to show more
plainly that morality is a “general interest,”while an individual reputation
is only particular, Bayle goes on to remark that even the patriarch
Abraham, yielding to lust, was as susceptible to “the snares of Satan” as
are “manifestly criminal persons” and that Augustine’s justificatory
efforts involve a morality “more lax” than that of the Jesuits Banui and
Escobar – those accommodating latitudinarians so ferociously attacked by
Pascal in the Lettres Provinciales.207 (It was surely no accident that Bayle
pitched upon the very figures that Pascal – whether justly or not – had
saddled with permanently horrible reputations.)208 In Bayle’s “Sarah,”
then, the interêt général de la moralité is pitted against Satanic snares,
manifest criminality, and Jesuitical laxity; and these should not be
admitted, according to Bayle, just to justify un particulier, even one who
happened to be a prophet.
The article “Sarah” is exceptional, in Bayle’s late work, for its vestigial
Malebranchism; more characteristic of his doubts about the worth of
généralité is the piece on which he was working at the time of his death
(1706), the Entretiens de Maxime et de Thémiste. The Entretiens are
nominally a refutation of Isaac Jaquelot’s Examen de la Théologie de
Mr. Bayle (1705); but Jaquelot’s Examen is itself a doctrinaire restatement
of Malebranche, gratuitously coupled with some non-Malebranchian
ideas. Bayle’s final work, then, is an oblique commentary, not on
Malebranche en soi, but on comparatively unintelligent, second-hand
Malebranchisme. Even so, Jaquelot’s Examen serves as the occasional
cause of a more general inquiry into the worth of generality.209
If in early works such as the Pensées Diverses Bayle had linked
generality with justice and wisdom, in the Entretiens he was concerned
to show that always operating generally might (wrongly) keep wise agents
from departing from general laws and volontés générales even when
goodness itself dictated such a departure.Jaquelot imagines, Bayle argues,
that “God could not have prevented the Fall of Adam without performing
a miracle unworthy of his wisdom,” without “derogating” from general
laws. But here, Bayle complains, “the least philosopher” will properly
point out that according to Scripture “God performed a great number of
miracles [which were] incomparably less useful and less necessary” than
impeding the Fall of Adam – though it remains true that generality is worth
40 Patrick Riley
something and that God therefore will not “derogate from general laws
unless it is a question of stopping a dreadful corruption of morals,” and
unless “an infinity of miseries is going to inundate the human race.”210 If
this “corruption” and “inundation” will take place, however, without a
particular divine intervention, Bayle is clear that généralité must yield:
The salvation of the people is the supreme law, salus populi suprema lex esto. It
would be sinning against the laws of government not to be willing to derogate from
the old laws, when the people’s safety is at stake. Thus one shocks the natural
enlightenment if one supposes that, when it is a question of the safety of the human
race, God would not have willed to derogate from general laws.211
And one “wills” to derogate from “general” laws, obviously, by a volonté
particulière.
In later sections of the Entretiens, Bayle goes on to say that an insistence
on the constant operation of general laws places (merely) aesthetic standards
above moral ones. If a “pagan philosopher” were to examine Jaquelot’s
notion of généralité, Bayle argues, he would be told that God “only created
the world in order to show his power and his infinite knowledge of archi-
tecture and ofmechanics,” that his attribute of being “good” and “the friend
of virtue” had “no part in the construction of his great work.” Bayle then
imagines what the “pagan philosopher” might have said:
What aGod isM. Jaquelot’s God:He prides himself only on knowledge; he prefers to
let the whole human race perish than to suffer that some atomsmove faster or slower
than general laws demand. Hewould not disorder the slightest thing in the symmetry
of his work in order to stop vice from ruling men, and would [instead] expose the
whole of humankind to disorders and to countless and appalling miseries.212
Bayle goes on to argue that lumière naturelle supplies men with a very
different notion of God: “goodness” is his chief attribute, and if he had to
choose “between a physical irregularity and a moral irregularity, he would
choose the former.” If the “architecture of the universe” has some
“defect,” Bayle says, that harms no creature; but “if moral evil is
introduced among men,” that is an “injury” which spreads over “an
infinity of subjects.” If Jaquelot places the uniform operation of general
laws above human “safety” – if he gives greater weight to the aesthetic than
to the moral – Bayle insists, then he makes God’s rule “resemble extremely
the project of an enemy.”213
To drive home this last point Bayle compares Jaquelot’s God (who “ne
se pique que de science”) to Alexander the Great and Caesar, and contrasts
this God with a better one who more nearly resembles Titus and Marcus
Aurelius:
The General Will before Rousseau 41
Natural enlightenment shows us manifestly that nothing is more suitable to true
greatness . . . than to use one’s power and knowledge for the happiness of others. We
aremore stupefied by the glory of Alexander and of Caesar, than by that of Titus and
of Marcus Aurelius; but this is only a tumult of the imagination. Let the tempest be
calmed: consult pure reason, and she will tell you the Alexanders and the Caesars
deserve to be detested, because they only used their valor, their military knowledge,
their minds, in order to ruin people, and for spilling human blood; and that the
beneficent temper of Titus and of Marcus Aurelius is a title of honor infinitely more
glorious than the trophies and the victories of the most famous conquerors.214
Jaquelot’s God, to be sure, “prides himself” on science générale, not on
science militaire; but, like Caesar, he would be the people’s “enemy” if he
loved his own knowledge more than “the public good.” But this, for Bayle,
is just what Jaquelot’s God actually does: his refusal to depart from
généralité, even to save the human race, means:
that God’s power must have had the first place; that his infinite knowledge of
architecture and of mechanics must have had the second; and that his goodness
must have had the third.215
To bemore exact, Bayle argues, “goodness” could not even have occupied
the third rank, since God’s preferring of constancy and uniformity to moral
good “bears all the characters of hatred or of indifference to the human
race.”216 Bayle’s suggestion that one can learn this by letting the “tumult”
of “imagination” subside and by consulting “reason” is perfectly
Malebranchian;217 but his attack on generality is perfectly anti-
Malebranchian. And so Bayle finally sets Jaquelot, his Malebranche surro-
gate, to one side, and confronts theOratorian himself one last time. Even Père
Malebranche himself, “the inventor of the system of general laws,” Bayle
says, allows that God sometimes departs from generality and acts “through
volontés particulières”; thus it is absurd for eitherMalebranche or Jaquelot to
assert that God could not have saved all men without harming his own
attributes. Here Bayle puts a final speech into the mouth of his imagined
“pagan philosopher”:
what! . . .God did nothing but derogate from general laws during the six days of the
Creation, in order to form rocks, plants and animals. Could he not have derogated
from them a little later in order to spare the human race the moral evil and the
physical evil which reign over men, and which will reign eternally in hell? He
derogated from these same laws on a thousand less important occasions; could
he not derogate from themwhen it was a question of the salvation or the ruin of the
human race, the most noble creature that he had produced in our world?218
And near the end of that portion of the Entretiens which bears on
Malebranchism and généralité, Bayle concludes that a Malebranchian
42 Patrick Riley
Godwould, through love of his own “wisdom,” have “subjected himself to
the slavery of letting vice rule”: general laws would have “prevailed over
goodness and over the love of moral good.” The Malebranchian God has
found his own loix générales to be “so fine, so admirable, so worthy of
him” that even though they generate “all the crimes, all the heresies, in a
word all the disorders of the human race,” he nonetheless “has undertaken
the continual and perpetual execution of these laws.”219 And Bayle adds,
with characteristic bravery, that a “superior” – even a divine one – can
become “criminal” not just by ordaining evil, but also through mere
permission, through what he calls “connivance”: just as (to use his own
analogy), a parent who foresees that his virgin daughters will be
seduced at a ball, and who nonetheless lets them go, is as guilty as the
seducer.220
What matters in Bayle – despite his vacillation between Malebranchian
generality and particularism – is that he did more to politicize volonté
générale (and general law) than anyone between Malebranche and
Montesquieu. By always insisting on the rightness (or the wrongness) of
“general will,” and by talking about généralité in connection with (say) the
religious policies of Louis XIV – the very policies that drove Bayle
himself into permanent Dutch exile – Bayle began to shift the emphasis
from theodicy to human justice. This he achieved by always relating
“generality” and “particularity” to some example of human conduct: the
irresponsible negligence of parents who fail to take the particular steps that
will save their children from seduction; the cowardice of the governor of a
city who abandonsgeneral laws whenever anyone “murmurs” against
him; the wisdom of a monarch who refuses to let general laws be abridged
by the interests “des particuliers.” The obvious vacillation between
generality and particularity matters less than the fact that Bayle is consis-
tent in one thing: namely always operating with political and moral
examples. And for this reason his is the most important step between
Malebranche andMontesquieu in the gradual secularization of a “general
will” whose history was finally “made” by Rousseau. In a series of tiny
incremental changes, Bayle is a leap.221
vii
Did Rousseau, then – who tells us in the Confessions of his reading of
the great seventeenth-century theologians of “general will”222 – use the
notions of volonté générale and volonté particulière simply out of histor-
ical piety, simply because the notions were “there” (as he is sometimes said
The General Will before Rousseau 43
to use social contract theory simply because it was a “venerable fiction” in
his time)?223 Is it simply a question of the “influence” of Pascal,
Malebranche, Bayle, and Montesquieu “on” Rousseau? By no means.
Judith Shklar has argued persuasively that the notion of “general will”
“conveys everything he most wanted to say,” that it is “a transposition
of the most essential individual moral faculty to the realm of public
experience.”224 What this means is that Rousseau’s reasons for using
volonté générale were essentially philosophical – however “ready-made”
for his purposes the old theological notion may have been. After all, the
two “terms” of volonté générale – “will” and “generality” – represent two
of the main strands in Rousseau’s thought. “Generality” stands, inter alia,
for the rule of law, for “civic” education that draws us “out of ourselves”
and toward the general (or common good), for the nonparticularist
citizen-virtues of Sparta and republican Rome.225 And the notion of
“will” stands for his conviction that “civil association is the most
voluntary act in the world,” that “to deprive your will of all freedom is
to deprive your actions of all morality.”226 And if one could “generalize”
the will, so that it “elects” only law, citizenship, and the common good,
and avoids “willful” self-love, then one would have a general will in
Rousseau’s special sense. Now it happened that the volonté générale and
volonté particulière of Pascal, Malebranche, and Leibniz corresponded
substantially to these moral aims: hence why not employ terms already
rendered politically usable by writers as important as Bayle and
Montesquieu?
One could see plainly, even without considering the Confessions,
that Rousseau had read the most important seventeenth-century French
theologians of “general will” – above all Malebranche and Fénelon –
simply by looking at the “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar”
(from Émile), at the Letter to Voltaire on Providence, at the third and
fifth of the Lettres écrites de la montagne (1764), and (above all) at Book
VI of La nouvelle Héloïse. All of these are replete with Malebranchian
reminiscences.
Here the most important evidence is to be found in letters 6 and 7 from
Book VI of Rousseau’s novel. In the sixth letter Julie de Wolmar, advising
her former lover St. Preux on religious matters, warns him to “take care”
that “human pride” not “mix” any “low ideas” of God with “the sublime
ideas of the great being which you formulate for yourself.” Stressing
human dependence on a divine father – “slaves by our weakness, we are
free through prayer” – she makes it clear that the “low ideas” which she
fears are preciselyMalebranchian, and cautions St. Preux against believing
44 Patrick Riley
that the simple “means which help our weakness” are also “suitable to the
divine power,” and that God “has need of art, like us, to generalize things
in order to treat them more easily.”227 It seems to St. Preux, Julie goes on,
that “it would be an embarrassment” for God to have to “look after” each
particular person; perhaps St. Preux fears that a “divided and continual
attention” would “fatigue” God, and that this is the reason for his believ-
ing it “finer” that God “do everything by general laws,” doubtless because
these would “cost” him less “care.” “O great philosophers!” Julie ends
mockingly, “how obliged God is to you for having furnished him with
these convenient methods and to have saved him so much work!”228
To this “raillery” (as Émile Bréhier has called it), St. Preux responds “en
bonMalebranchiste”229: all “analogies” he tells Julie “are in favor of these
general laws that you seem to reject.” Reason itself, he continues, together
with “the soundest ideas” we can form of the “supreme being,” are “very
favorable” to (Malebranchian) generality: for while God’s omnipotence,
indeed, “has no need of method to abridge work,” nonetheless it is
“worthy of his wisdom” to prefer “the simplest means.”230
Following an eloquent anti-Spinozist excursus on freedom – “a reasoner
proves tome in vain that I am not free, because an inner feeling, stronger than
all his arguments, refutes them ceaselessly”231 – St. Preux returns to
Malebranchian themes in connection with a discussion of grace. And on
this subject, his generalism is more rigorous than Malebranche’s own: pre-
cisely onMalebranchian grounds, for St. Preux, one must deny the reality of
any particular, special grace. “I do not believe,” St. Preux insists “that God
gives to one [person] sooner than to another” any “extraordinary help” at all.
Grace conferred particularly and unequally would constitute “acceptation of
persons,” and would be “injurious to divine justice.”232 (Here, as is evident,
the principles of Du Contrat Social are divinized: what is not permissible in
earthly law cannot be right in God’s governance either. That this was
Rousseau’s view as early as 1756 is clear in the “Letter to Voltaire on
Providence,” in which he urges that just as “a wise king” who wills that
“everyone live happily within his estates” need not concern himself to dis-
cover “whether the taverns are good,” so too “particular events are nothing
in the eyes of themaster of the universe,”whose providence is universelle.)233
Even if the “hard and discouraging doctrine” of particularly-conferred
grace were “deduced from Scripture itself,” St. Preux goes on to say, “is it
not my first duty to honor God.”234 (On this point, exactly as in
Malebranche, the idea of what God would do takes precedence over
“Scripture”: justice matters more than anthropology.)Whatever “respect”
one owes to the “sacred text,” St. Preux insists, one owes still more to its
The General Will before Rousseau 45
“author”: “I would rather believe the Bible falsified or unintelligible, than
God unjust or evil-doing.” If the notion of “grace” means anything, for
St. Preux, it refers simply to the nonsupernatural gifts that God has given
equally to all: “He has given us reason to know the good, conscience to
love it, and liberty to choose it. It is in these sublime gifts that divine grace
consists.” And he adds, pointedly, that “we have all received them.”235
At this point Rousseau may well be arguing against Fénelon – whom,
generally, he greatly admired.236 In one of his 1708 letters on grace and
predestination to the Benedictine Father François Lami – published in
1718, and therefore fully available to Rousseau – Fénelon had begun his
treatment of divine justice by saying that:
God could limit himself to giving to all men, without predestining any of them, the
same grace, fully sufficient for all. He could say to himself: I shall give my heavenly
reward to all those who by their free will answer to this [divine] help, and I shall
deprive of this reward all those who, being in a position to merit it, do not will to
make themselves worthy of it. On this supposition, could you accuse God of
injustice? Not the slightest inequality would appear; notthe slightest favoritism
[predilection]; not the slightest preference; everything would be general [tout serait
general], effective, proportional to [human] need, and abundant on God’s part.
There would be no inequality except on the part of men: all inequality would come
from their [wrongly used] free will.237
This language would certainly have interested Rousseau: for it virtually
equates justice with generality, equality, and the absence of “favoritism” –
the very things that shape the meaning of “justice” in Du Contrat Social.
But Rousseau could never have countenanced Fénelon’s next move: for
while the archbishop of Cambrai begins by equating justice and généralité,
he wants to be able to justify special divine grace given to the predestined or
elect; and therefore a little later in his letter to Father Lami he says that:
the special goodness of [divine] favoritism for the few, in noway diminishes the general
goodness for all the others. The superabundance of aid for the elect, diminishes not at
all the quite sufficient aid that all the other[s] receive. . . . Does the superabundance of
[God’s] goodness for another destroy the exact justice, the gratuitous and liberal
goodness that he has for you, and the quite sufficient aid that he gives you?238
To deny this super-added, extra goodness that God gratuitously heaps
on the elect, selon Fénelon, is to deny Augustinian predestination alto-
gether; and that is a heresy:
Now it is obvious that the totality of men cannot be included in this special decree,
and that this favoring cannot embrace the whole human race. Favor would no
longer be favor, but a general love, if it were extended generally to all men. The
46 Patrick Riley
special will [of God] would be confused with the volonté générale. Election would
be no more particular [n’aurait rien de plus particulier] than simple vocation.239
From a Rousseauean perspective, Fénelon begins well by imagining a
God who links up justice, generality, and equality; but then, to save the
dogma of predestination, he severs the tie between généralité and justice,
and tries to justify God’s particularistic favoritism by appealing to
Scripture (“many are called, but few are chosen”).240 But at least
Fénelon starts at the right point; indeed he (at first) relates généralité and
égalité to each other more strongly than any figure before Rousseau
himself.241 In Fénelon’s initial account of a nonpredestining god, in fact,
one might almost be readingDu Contrat Social: “not the slightest inequal-
ity would appear; not the slightest favoritism; not the slightest preference;
everything would be general, effective, proportioned to need.” Might
Rousseau’s city not be an imitation of what God could have done had he
wished to dispense with all particular grace? For then vox populiwould be
(almost) vox dei.242
Rousseau’s hostility to any Fénelonian notion of nonuniversal grace, of
divine favoritism, carries over into the Lettres écrites de la montagne – and
in a way that shows that Rousseau knew perfectly that arguments over
“particular” grace had had (mainly unfortunate) political effects in the
seventeenth century. In the Cinquième Lettre, Rousseau argues that his
Émile and Contrat Social have been illegally condemned by the Genevan
authorities, and appeals to the authority of the neo-Pascalian moralist
Vauvenargues (“whoever is more severe than the laws is a tyrant”).243
He knows, Rousseau says, of only one comparable instance of legal
oppression in Genevan history: “this was in the great quarrel of 1669
over particular grace.”244 Following the inability of les Professeurs to
decide the truth about divine grace, Rousseau urges, the Council of Two
Hundred rendered a judgment: “the important question at issue was to
knowwhether Jesus had died only for the salvation of the elect, or whether
he had also died for the salvation of the damned.” After “many sessions”
and “ripe deliberations,” Rousseau adds sarcastically, the “magnificent”
Council of Two Hundred “declared that Jesus had died only for the
salvation of the elect.” But this, for Rousseau, was a merely political
decision, in the worst sense of “political”: “Jesus would have died for the
damned, if Professor Tronchin had had more credit than his adversary.”
Rousseau brands the whole affair as “fort ridicule,” and adds that
civil authorities should “appease quarrels without pronouncing on
doctrine.”245 (In the [unpublished] original manuscript of Montagne,
The General Will before Rousseau 47
Rousseau at this point offers an analogy that only makes clearer his
knowledge of seventeenth-century theological disputes: “What ridicule
would the Parlement of Paris not have drawn on itself if it had wanted to
decide, on its own authority [de son chef], whether the five propositions
were or were not in the book [Augustinus] of Jansenius!” He adds that
since the Jansenists “disputed” even Rome’s right to judge the Augustinus
“how could they have recognized [this right] in a secular tribunal?”246
The published version of the Cinquième Lettre, together with the
unpublished passage on Jansenism, makes it plain that Rousseau knew
perfectly the provenance of the controversy over volonté générale: if he
knew “the five propositions,” he knew that the last of them dealt with
the scriptural assertion that “God wills that all men be saved.”)
Rousseau’s reference to the “great quarrel of 1669 over particular
grace”merits a slightly fuller examination: for since he did a great deal of
research into Genevan history before writing the Lettres écrites de la
Montagne, he knew perfectly well what the “great quarrel” had
involved.247 In 1669 the Council of Two Hundred – moved to act by
Calvinist conservatives who had been alarmed by the theological inno-
vations of a newly-arrived Cartesian philosopher – required that all
Genevans deny the “universality of grace” (as something given generally
to all men): and this 1669 decree was simply a brief re-affirmation of a
1659 policy. But that earlier policy in its turn was nothing but a watered-
down version of a 1649 “profession of faith” drawn up by the Genevan
Church; and it is some of the articles of that profession of faith that seem
to color Rousseau’s sarcastic pronouncements about Jesus’ having died
“only for the salvation of the elect.” For that 1649 document had
rejected a series of theological “errors”: it denied the notion “that Jesus
Christ died for each and every individual [pour tous et un chacun des
particuliers]”; it denied that “there is a vocation of universal salvation
for all men, and that they can all, if they will, believe and be saved”; it
denied that “by his revealed will God wills to save all men.” All these
“errors” were rejected, together with the additional error of believing
that God “has some desire . . . or universal conditional grace, to save each
individual, if he believes in Jesus Christ.” And one article of the 1649
profession of faith explicitly added that Saint Paul’s letter to Timothy
asserting that “God wills that all men be saved” must be explained in
light of these “errors”: “general expressions from Scripture must not be
understood [as applying] to each and every man, but to the universality
of the body of Jesus Christ.”248 Since the “great quarrel” of 1669
recapitulated a quarrel of 1659, and 1659 recapitulated 1649,
48 Patrick Riley
Rousseau certainly knew all of this; and all of it is reflected in the
language of Montagne.
In any case, andwhatever may have been the facts of the great quarrel of
1669, the whole controversy over la grâce particulière is, in Rousseau’s
final judgment, one of those “questions that interest nobody and that no
one whosoever understands”; that being so, it should be “always left to the
theologians.”249 This is what one would expect Rousseau to say, given his
view in La Nouvelle Héloïse that “all” have received the only real grace;
and inMontagne he actually says it. (It is an irony worth noticing that
Rousseau, in appealing to the authority of the neo-Pascalian
Vauvenargues, does so in condemning as “quite ridiculous” the very
controversy over grâce particulière that Pascal himself had treated wholly
seriously in the Écrits sur la Grâce.250 But Rousseau’s citing of
Vauvenargues at least shows that Rousseau knew the thought of this
eighteenth-century Pascalian – hence that he might well have been familiar
with Vauvenargues’ Pensées-inspired thought that “a body that subsists by
the union of many members and confounds the particular interest in the
general interest . . . is the foundation of all morality.”251 And this would
establish an important link between Pascal and Rousseau, carrying
Pascal’s “body full of thinking members” into Rousseau’s own time.)
If, for St. Preux in La Nouvelle Héloïse, God is a Malebranchian
who operates through loix generals and avoids an unjust “acceptation of
persons,” of what use is prayer – which asks precisely for grace
particulière? Here St. Preux, though careful in his language, is strict: “in
seeking grace, one renounces reason . . . who are we to want to force God
to perform a miracle” on our behalf? Prayer, indeed, has the good effect of
“elevating” us to God and of “raising us above ourselves”; but this does
not mean that our prayers will be answered by God: “it is not he who
changes us; it is we who change [ourselves] by raising ourselves to him.”252
These quasi-Malebranchian passages –which seem to confirm Bossuet’s
fear that, if Malebranchian généralité is carried far enough, grace vanishes
altogether – got Rousseau into great difficulty with the French censorship;
and in a remarkable letter to the censor Malesherbes (March 1761),
Rousseau says that if he has made St. Preux a “Molinist” – mainly by
affirming freedom and minimizing grace to the vanishing point – he has
done so in order to avoid making him a “Manichean”: if equal and general
human liberty is not the cause of evil, then an evil spirit, equal to God, must
be. But, Rousseau adds, if St. Preux “wants to be a heretic on grace, that is
his affair.” As for the censor’s charge that St. Preux is the leader of “a
revolt against the authority of Scripture,” Rousseau says, he would sooner
The General Will before Rousseau 49
call it a “submission to the authority of God and of reason”: for God
and reason, he continues, must “go before” the Bible, and serve as its
“foundation.”253 And that is a perfectly Malebranchian sentiment. This
letter, together with other passages from La Nouvelle Héloïse treating
Fénelon and “quietism,” make it clear that Rousseau’s knowledge of the
history of French theology was rather extensive and also that, at the same
time, God’s “case” must be judged by the Rousseauean concept of
general justice, which cannot countenance any particularisme at all. For
St. Preux, as for Malebranche, one must never trade an “idea” for an
“anthropology.”
Part of St. Preux’ objection to prayer turns on the notion that no one is
entitled to demand a “miracle” on his own behalf; and this serves to
remind us that Rousseau was just as out of sympathy with miracles as
Malebranche had been. Rousseau’s treatment of miracles, indeed – in the
Profession de Foi du Vicaire Savoyard and in the Lettres écrites de la
Montagne – is so Malebranchian that it is sometimes almost a transcrip-
tion of Nature et Grâce.
In the third Lettre, Rousseau defines the miraculous in Malebranche’s
very language: “a miracle is, in a particular fact, an immediate act of the
divine power, a real and visible exception to her laws.”254 (Here, of course,
Malebranchisms are piled up: “particular,” “order,” “nature,” “laws.”)
Once one knows what a miracle is – or rather would be – there are two
remaining questions, Rousseau urges. The first is, can God perform
miracles? That, for Rousseau, is certainly no problem: “this question,
treated seriously, would be impious if it were not absurd.” The only
interesting question, Rousseau affirms, is “Does God will to perform any
miracles?”255 Does he actually do what he obviously could do? Here
Rousseau is quite clear: the (allegedly) miraculous adds nothing to “the
glory of God,” and indeed only favors human “pride” (Malebranche had
said “conceit”).256 In any case, Rousseau goes on, we shall never really
know certainly whether there are any miracles, thanks to the definition of
the miraculous itself:
Since a miracle is an exception to the laws of nature, in order to judge it one would
have to know these laws. . . . Thus he who announces that such-and-such an act is
miraculous declares that he knows all the laws of nature, and that he knows that
this act is an exception to them.
But where is this mortal who knows all the laws of nature? Newton did not pride
himself on knowing them. . . . All that one can say of him who prides himself on
performing miracles, is that he does quite extraordinary things: but who is denying
50 Patrick Riley
that quite extraordinary things happen? I have seen some of these things myself,
and I have even done some of them.257
And as an example of the “quite extraordinary things” that he himself
has done, Rousseau says that when he was secretary to the French
ambassador in Venice (1743) he performed a number of “new” and
“strange” magic tricks involving the mysterious appearance of writing
on “blank” paper; finally he adds, as a deliberate provocation, that “I
contented myself with being a sorcerer because I was modest, but if I had
had the ambition of being a prophet, who could have stopped me from
being one?”258 With a defiantly personal “confessional” touch, then,
Rousseau appropriates Malebranche’s notion that human conceit (allied
with magic) is at the root of most “miraculous” happenings. (Rousseau’s
argument is, ironically, Antoine Arnauld’s inverted: both appeal to the
limitations of human knowledge, Rousseau to defend a Malebranchian
nature ruled by general laws, Arnauld to defend God’s particular
providence.)259
Rousseau’s (more or less Malebranchian) distaste for miracles is at its
clearest – in the Lettres écrites de la Montagne – in his attempt to reduce the
miraculous elements of Christ’s mission to near-nothingness. Rousseau
begins by insisting that Christ himself started his earthly work, “not by
miracles but by preaching” in the Temple at the age of twelve. (What
mattered to Christ, according to Rousseau, was not miracles but la Parole;
Malebranche had said le Verbe, but the thought is the same.)260 When,
according to Rousseau, Christ “finally” undertook a few miracles, it was
“most often” (le plus souvent: Malebranche’s term) on “des occasions
particulières” such as the wedding-feast at Cana – and even here Christ’s
purpose was not at all to “manifest his power,” but simply to “prolong the
gaiety of the feast.” And this last observation is closely connected to
Rousseau’s view that what makes Christ “lovable is that he had a sensitive
heart” and was an “homme de bonne société.”261 Rousseau adds pointedly
that it is especially “Jansenists” who try to make Christ and Christianity
“tiresomely austere”; and in a footnote he tells an amusing story of a
“Jansenist curé” who said of Christ’s participation in the wedding-feast at
Cana that “Ce n’est pas ce qu’il fit de mieux.”262 Complaining that
Jansenism makes Christianity a “terrible and displeasing” religion that sub-
verts the “agreeable” and “sweet” “veritable loi de Jesus-Christ,” Rousseau
finishes the third Letter from the Mountain by lumping Jansenism with
partisanship for the miraculous: for he ends the letter with a general assault
on “fanatics” who have “disfigured and dishonored” Christianity.263
The General Will before Rousseau 51
Miraculous deviations from généralité are treated with equal reverence in
Rousseau’s single most important religious statement, the Profession de Foi
du VicaireSavoyard. Following countless Malebranchian insistences that
“God’s goodness is the love of order” and that it is through “order” that he
“links each part of the whole,”264 Rousseau has the vicar say withering
things about the “miraculous”missions of self-appointed divine agents: “Let
us suppose that divine majesty deigns to abase itself far enough to make a
man the organ of its sacred volontés: is it reasonable, is it just, to demand
that the whole human race obey the voice of this minister?”265
Rousseau has the vicar continue in a Malebranchian language, which
has been given a slightly nasty edge: “Is there any equity,” the vicar asks, in
having to accept, as evidence of a miraculous “mission,” nothing better
than “quelques petits miracles particuliers,” performed before “a few
obscure people” known to the rest of the world only by “hearsay”? If
one had to accept as authentically miraculous the “prodigies” which “les
simples” (Malebranche’s term) find astonishing, there would soon be
“more prodigies than natural events.” It is not quelques petits miracles
particuliers, the vicar insists, but “the unalterable order of nature that
best reveals the Supreme Being”; if there were “many exceptions” to
order, law, and generality one would no longer know “what to think.”
“For myself,” the vicar concludes, “I believe too much in God to believe in
so many miracles [which are] so little worthy of him.”266 (Again a
Malebranchian distinction: it is not a question of what God can do, but
of what is “worthy” of him.)
The same partisanship for an orderly, “general” nature, coupled with
the same hostility to miracles particuliers, recurs in Rousseau’s main
defense of Émile (including the Profession de foi) after its condemnation –
the Lettre à Christophe de Beaumont. In some fragments of this letter
(fragments left out of the final version because they were dangerously
sarcastic), Rousseau says that those who depict God as a miracle-worker
must imagine that he “amuses himself” with nature-defying “sleight of
hand” because he is “at loose ends” for something to do; and he adds a
further sarcasm in which (quite pure) Malebranchism takes an uncharit-
able turn: miracle lovers, Rousseau says, represent God:
as a bad workman [un mauvais ouvrier] who is forced at every moment to retouch
his machine for want of knowing how to make it run from the very beginning.267
And in an adjoining sentence which colors the whole passage, Rousseau
insists that “there are liars who say ‘believe,’ and imbeciles who believe
that they believe.”268
52 Patrick Riley
When, then, Rousseau says in the Confessions that he supplemented the
social education he was receiving from Mme. De Warens at Les
Charmettes with a very different sort of education – “I began with some
book of philosophy, such as the Port-Royal Logic, the Essay of Locke,
Malebranche, Leibniz, Descartes, etc.”269 – one can well believe that the
“book” of Malebranche that he pitched upon may have been the Traité de
la Nature et de la Grâce; without this St. Preux’ defense of généralité in
La Nouvelle Héloïse, and the arguments against grace particulière in the
Lettres écrites de la Montagne, have no traceable provenance. And if
Rousseau’s early poem, Le Verger des Charmettes, is indeed bad verse, it
at least reveals good reading – good reading that establishes a rapport
between the seventeenth century and Rousseau:
tantôt avec Leibniz, Malebranche et Newton
Je monte ma raison sur un sublime ton,
J’examine les lois des corps et des pensées,
Avec Locke je fais l’historie des idées.270
viii
The passages from La Nouvelle Héloïse, Lettres écrites de la Montagne,
and Émile, which demonstrate that Rousseau had a wide and deep
knowledge of seventeenth-century theological controversies, mainly reflect
those controversies – reflect without (very much) transforming. But there
are other passages that engage in a great deal of transforming – particularly
of works by Malebranche and Bayle. Now Malebranche, in Nature et
grâce, had insisted not only on generality, simplicity, and uniformity, but
also on Christ as “architect” of the church viewed as a “Temple”;271 and
Bayle had recalled much of this when he complained (in the Réponse
aux Questions d’un Provinical) that there is “nothing easier” for God as
world-architect than to “follow a simple, fecund and regular plan which is
at the same time suitable for all creatures” – that God’s “love for the public
good” should outweigh a mere show of divine “ability,” just as a prince, in
commissioning a palace, should insist that it be “suitable” for its
inhabitants, even at the expense of regularity or “magnificence.”272
Rousseau must have had Bayle’s “answer” to Malebranche in mind
when he wrote a portion of his Jugement (1756) of the Abbé de St.
Pierre’s Polysynodie: indeed Rousseau had to inject only a little extra
political content into inherited theological language. In the Jugement
Rousseau urges that perfection “in a whole as complicated [composé]
as the body politic” does not depend only on the perfection “of each
The General Will before Rousseau 53
part” – just as, by architectural analogy, “to design a palace it does not
suffice to place each item well, but one must also consider the rapports of
the whole, the most suitable connections, the most commodious order . . .
the most regular symmetry.”273 All of these “general objects” are so
important, Rousseau goes on, that the “able” architect willingly “sacrifi-
ces” for the “betterment of the whole” a thousand “particular advan-
tages” – particular advantages that he could have kept in a “less perfect”
and “less simple” arrangement.274 In just the same way, Rousseau adds,
politics “does not consider en particulier either finances, or war, or
commerce,” but “relates all of these parts to common objective.” And
the proportions that are most suitable to this common objective are the
result of “general plans” (les plans généraux), which, “in seeking the
greatest perfection of the whole” always look for “the simplest execu-
tion.”275 In this passage from the Jugement, as is evident, Rousseau is
plainly siding withMalebranche, against Bayle – after all, Rousseau insists
on generality, simplicity, the perfection of the whole. But the point is that
without a certain kind of tradition standing behind him, Rousseau would
not have spoken this language – an idiom addressed to those brought up on
Malebranche and Bayle. Rousseau is able, by using a few “code”words, to
summon up the force of a century’s argumentation over généralité and
simplicité.
Not that Rousseau thought that the Abbé de St. Pierre himself had
succeeded in arriving at a politique générale; on the contrary, in Book V
of ÉmileRousseau complains that “it was always the policy of the Abbé de
St. Pierre to look for a little remedy for each particular evil [chaque mal
particulier], instead of climbing to their common source and seeing that
one cannot cure them except all at once.”276 Falling back on the familiar
body-members metaphor, Rousseau adds that “it is not a matter of treat-
ing separately each ulcer that appears on the body of a sick person, but of
purifying the whole [la masse] of the blood that produces all of them.”277
And Rousseau illustrates his political dictum that one must go to the root
causes générales, not just toy with chaque mal particulier, by pointing out
that Augustus’ laws against celibacy neglected the general root in favor of a
futile attack on particular manifestations; had the goodness of his general
policies brought citizens to marry freely, he would not have had to make
“vain” particular regulations.278
But it is not just Rousseau’s political writings that reflect seventeenth-
century philosophy, and particularly Malebranchism. To be sure, one
doesn’t usually think of Rousseau as a writer on science – with the
exception of his late botanical studies. But when Rousseaudoes,
54 Patrick Riley
exceptionally, write on a scientific subject – as in the Institutions
Chymiques of c. 1747 – he uses the notions of généralité and
particularité as much in the realm of nature as in that of “grace:” as in
Malebranche, generality and simplicity have equal weight for Rousseau in
la physique and in la morale.279
This is especially clear in the fine set piece called “Of the Mechanism of
Nature,” with which Rousseau opens Book II of the Institutions
Chymiques. Beginning with an analogy between nature and the opera
(“in our opera-theaters . . . each gives his attention to a particular object;
rarely is there someone who appreciates the whole”), Rousseau goes on to
complain that even scientists become so obsessed with particularities (“des
Papillons, des Mouches”) that nature in the large escapes them altogether:
but if each part, which has only a particular function [une function particulière] and
a relative perfection, is capable of delighting with astonishment and admiration
those who take the trouble to consider it correctly, how [much finer] must it be for
those who know the relations of all the parts and who thereby judge the general
harmony [l’harmonie générale] and the operation of the whole mechanism [?]280
Here, inverting Pascal, one must imagine a body full of nonthinking
“members.” And here too, plainly, it is a fault to let particularité obscure
one’s view of the rapports of the parts in a harmonie générale – a perfectly
Malebranchian thought that also informs the Jugement of St. Pierre’s
Polysynodie.
Malebranchism is, if anything, even more evident in Rousseau’s
remarks about the God who must have produced this harmonie générale.
Setting out with the thought that “an intelligent Being is the active principle
of all things,” Rousseau goes on to urge that while it is true that such a
being “could no doubt have produced and preserved the universe by the
immediate concourse of his power and will alone” – that is, through a
multiplicity of volontés particulières – it was nonetheless “more worthy of
his wisdom to establish general laws [des loix générales] . . . whose effect
is alone sufficient for the preservation of the world and all that it
contains.”281 (This, as is evident, is simply Malebranche’s Nature et
Grâce recapitulated; equally evidently, the notion that general laws are
“worthy” of God’s “wisdom” anticipates St. Preux’s defense of
Malebranchian généralité in La Nouvelle Héloïse.)282
It is true enough that when it comes to knowing (adequately) the
“general laws” of nature, Rousseau is instantly more cautious – as he
was to be, later, in Lettres écrites de la Montagne, which insist that
miracle-recognizers must know perfectly what is “natural” and what is
The General Will before Rousseau 55
supernatural.283 “It would be necessary to know the structure of the
universe better than we do” Rousseau admits “in order to determine
which are the first and most general of these laws [of nature]; perhaps
they are all reducible to a single one.”284 But if general natural laws are
reducible to one only, in Rousseau’s view, it is hard enough to see how that
can be simple Cartesian motion: “we see well enough that movement is the
universal agent . . . but when Descartes claimed to draw from this one
principle the generation of the universe, he built a system singular for its
ridiculousness” – one that “armed” doctrinaire materialists with absurd
ideas of self-moved matter.285 Movement alone, however, Rousseau goes
on to complain, will never be able to produce “the least of all the plants,
nor the most vile insect”: anticipating the argument of Kant’s Critique of
Judgment, he insists that “the construction of an organized body
through laws of motion [alone] is a chimera that one is forced to leave to
those who content themselves with words.”286 Despite these fascinating
intimations of Kant, the crucial point of the Institutions Chymiques is still
that harmonie générale is the vérité to be recherché, even if one doesn’t
(yet) know that general harmony perfectly. Malebranche would never
have countenanced Rousseau’s harsh words about Descartes, but he
would have recognized the rest of the opening of Book II of the
Institutions Chymiques. And that is because Malebranche and Rousseau
both search after generality in nature and in grace.
ix
To be sure, Rousseau’s recherché de la généralité, particularly in politics,
is not without its difficulties; and his reflection and transformation
of seventeenth-century theological notions is perhaps not always
advantageous. No one has seen this more clearly than the Italian scholar
Alberto Postigliola, in a remarkable essay entitled De Malebranche à
Rousseau: Les Apories de la Volonté Générale et la Revanche du
‘Raisonner Violent.’ ”287
Postigliola begins by uncovering Malebranchian themes “of a
philosophical and epistemological character,” which he later finds echoed
in Rousseau. He specially stresses Malebranche’s “important depreciation
of that which is limited, finite, particular,” accompanied by the magnifi-
cation of “that which is universal, constant, general” – particularly of a
general order ordained by a God whose rational, nonarbitrary authority
operates through “the principle of the simplicity of means.” Without
claiming that Rousseau’s account of a just human society “reflects à la
56 Patrick Riley
letter” Malebranche’s “model” of a just universe, Postigliola still finds
striking parallels: inMalebranche “we have . . . the universal and sovereign
divine reason, which acts through general wills . . . that conform to general
laws which it establishes itself”; in Rousseau “we have the sovereignty of
themoi communwhich is exercised through general wills . . . which yield a
[system of] legislation.”288 Sometimes, in Postigliola’s view, Rousseau’s
reflecting of Malebranchian themes leads to an unfortunate, if interesting,
result: Rousseau, having appropriated Malebranche’s notion of justice
(“understood as a rationalist and ‘geometrizing’ generality”) committed
the “unforgivable” error of forgetting that the “general will” of a people
lacks “the divine attribute of infinity.” “The error of Rousseau,”
Postigliola concludes, “consisted precisely in using the epistemological
categories of Malebranche . . . while continuing to speak of a generality
of the will which could not exist in reality as ‘unalterable and pure’ unless it
were the will of an infinite being. . . . In the Rousseauean city, generality
cannot fail to be finite, since it can be no more than a sort of finite whole,
if not a heterogeneous sum.”289
This particular objection, so strikingly stated by Postigliola, leads to an
even more general one. In Malebranche, God’s will is essentially and
naturally general; in Rousseau’s men’s wills must bemade general through
a civic education supplied by a Moses or a Lycurgus – a problem that
Rousseau more than once likens to the problem of squaring the circle.290
But one can reasonably ask: is “will” still will if it must be transformed?
Do Rousseau’s notions of education – private and civic – leave will as an
autonomous “moral cause” (to recall Rousseau’s own expression)?291 Of
course Rousseau’s hope is that, at the end of political time – when
political “infancy” has been left behind, and civic maturity attained292 –
the “general will one has as a citizen” will have become a kind of second
nature, approaching the true naturalness of volonté générale in
Malebranche’s divinemodus operandi. But “approaching” is the strongest
term one can use, and the relation of “will” to the educative authority that
“generalizes” it remains a central problem in Rousseau – the more so
because he ordinarily denied that there is any “natural” authority on
earth, even in great educators.293
In any case, Postigliola’s historical inquiries into the provenance of
volonté générale cast valuable new light on the still-obscurehistory of
the “general will” before Rousseau. And they serve to remind us that
the argument that generality is good, and that particularism is bad – an
argument that gives shape to most of Rousseau, some of Kant, and even
part of Hegel294 – really has its origins in the late seventeenth century, in
The General Will before Rousseau 57
the arguments between Malebranche, Pascal, Fénelon, Bossuet, Arnauld,
Leibniz, and Bayle. Without knowing that, how could one make (much)
sense of Hegel’s claim – in section 140 of the Philosophy of Right – that
hypocrisy is “knowledge of the true general [or universal]” coupled with
“volition of the particular that conflicts with this generality” (a particular
willing that is “evil in character”)?295 (Hegel, immediately and revealingly,
goes on to cite Pascal’s Lettres Provinciales, then relates the
struggle between the general and the particular to “the old questions
about efficacious grace.”)296 If Hegel knew all of this, and also used the
notion of généralité in a wholly favorable sense – the “deep insight” of
Hegel’s “general class” of enlightened civil-servants springs to mind297 –
then one cannot stop inquiry with the general will before Rousseau; for
there is plainly a general will afterRousseau, not least in Hegel.298 But that
is a question for another day.
Notes
1. Judith N. Shklar, “General Will,” Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed.
Philip P. Wiener (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973), vol. II, p. 275.
This fine article should be read as a supplement to Shklar’s magisterial Men
and Citizens (see below).
2. Rousseau, Du Contrat Social, in Political Writings, ed. C. E. Vaughan
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962), vol. II, p. 50. (All translations from the
French are my own, unless otherwise indicated.)
3. Ibid., p. 35.
4. Ibid., pp. 35–36.
5. Rousseau, Économie Politique, in Political Writings, ed. Vaughan, vol. I,
pp. 255 ff; Rousseau, “Le Bonheur Public,” Political Writings, ed.
Vaughan, vol. I, pp. 327–329.
6. Diderot, “Droit Naturel,” in Rousseau, Political Writings, ed. Vaughan, vol.
I, p. 432. Cf. Diderot’s “Avertissement” to volume VIII of the Encyclopédie,
where he argues for “the superiority of morale universelle to all morales
particulières, which inspire hatred and trouble, and which break or weaken
the lien général et commun” (cited in P. Hermand, Les Idées Morales de
Diderot [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1923], p. 128).
7. Ibid., “Droit Naturel,” pp. 432–433.
8. Shklar, “General Will,” pp. 275–276.
9. 1 Timothy 2:4.
10. Or at least this is how many seventeenth-century Augustinians – such as
Pascal – read St. Augustine; see part II of this chapter.
11. Leibniz,Opinion on the Principles of Pufendorf, in The Political Writings of
Leibniz, ed. and trans. Patrick Riley (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1972), p. 3.
12. Matthew 22:14.
58 Patrick Riley
13. Bayle, Entretiens de Maxime et the Thémiste, cited in E. Labrousse, Pierre
Bayle (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), vol. II, p. 377.
14. Nigel Abercrombie, The Origins of Jansenism (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1936), pp. 3–47, 93 ff. A mainly reliable work, though Abercrombie inclines
toward Molinism and doubts the orthodoxy of Jansenism.
15. Jansenius, 172 Lettre à St.-Cyran [23 March 1635], in Les Origines du
Jansénisme, vol. I: Correspondance de Jansénius, ed. Jean Orcibal (Paris:
Vrin, 1947), p. 585. Complaining of the distractions that are keeping him
from producing Augustinus, Jansenius nonetheless says that “je crois que ce
divertissemens mesmes me sont donnez par un volonté particulière de Dieu.”
16. The Scholastic distinction between “antecedent” and “consequent” will was
perfected by Leibniz in sections 22–25 of his Théodicée.
17. Suarez,De Divina Substantia, Book III, ch. VIII (“De Voluntate Antecedente
et Consequente”), in Opera Omnia (Paris 1856), vol. I, pp. 221 ff. Suarez
treats antecedent and consequent will precisely with reference to St. Paul’s
letter to Timothy.
18. Leibniz, Theodicy, ed. A. Farrer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952),
p. 137: “God wills antecedently the good [e.g., the general salvation of all
men] and consequently the best [e.g., the particular salvation of some men].”
19. Arnauld, Réflexions Philosophiques et Théologiques sur le Nouveau Système
de la Nature et de la Grâce (Cologne, 1685), p. 198.
20. J. Paquier, Le Jansénisme (Paris: Librarie Bloud, 1909), pp. 159 ff;
Alexander Sedgwick, Jansenism in Seventeenth-Century France
(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977), pp. 50 ff.
21. Robespierre, Textes Choisis, ed. J. Poperen (Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1958),
passim. In his address entitled “Sur les principes de morale politique qui
doivent guider la convention nationale dans l’administration intérieure de la
république” (February 1794), Robespierre begs that no one permit “qu’au-
cun interêt particulier et caché puisse usurper ici l’ascendant de la volonté
générale de l’assemblée et la puissance indestructible de la raison.” And the
Revolution’s use of terror, he adds, is “moins un principe particulier qu’une
conséquence du principe générale de la démocratie appliqué aux plus press-
ants besoins de la patrie” (pp. 131, 118).
22. Sedgwick, Jansenism in Seventeenth-Century France, pp. 50 ff.
23. Correspondance du P[ère] Marin Mersenne, ed. Cornelis de Waard (Paris:
Éditions duCentreNational de laRecherche Scientifique, 1967), vol. X, p. 219.
24. Ibid., p. 287.
25. Including Descartes (above all) and Hobbes.
26. On this point see Abercrombie, The Origins of Jansenism, passim.
27. Sedgwick, Jansenism in Seventeenth-Century France, pp. 50 ff.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. Paquier, Le Jansénisme, pp. 163 ff.
32. Ibid., pp. 150 ff.
33. Arnauld, Oeuvres de Messire Antoine Arnauld (Brussels: Culture et
Civilisation, 1967), vol. 15–16, pp. 184–185.
The General Will before Rousseau 59
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. Arnauld, Oeuvres, vol. 18, p. 112.
37. Ibid.
38. Jean La Porte, La Doctrine de Port-Royal: Les Vérités sur la Grâce (Paris:
Librairie Vrin, 1923), pp. 250–251.
39. St. Augustine, Enchiridion, in Oeuvres de S. Augustin (Paris: Desclée De
Brouwer et Cie, 1947), vol. 9, p. 290.
40. Jansenius, Augustinus (Louvain: 1640), lib. III, ch. XX, p. 376.
41. Ibid.
42. Cited in La Porte, La Doctrine de Port-Royal, p. 251.
43. Ibid., pp. 251–252
44. St. Augustine, De la Correction et de la Grâce, trans. and introd.
Antoine Arnauld (Paris: 1644), p. 4.
45. Ibid., p. 7.
46. This, of course, was to be Rousseau’s argument against unequally conferred
grace in La Nouvelle Héloïse (see below).
47. Ibid.
48. Except for the Port-Royal Logic, which has been repopularized by the efforts
of Noam Chomsky.
49. Pascal, Écrits sur la Grâce, in Oeuvres de Blaise Pascal, ed. L. Brunschvicg
(Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1914), vol. XI, p. 133.
50. Ibid., pp. 135–140.
51. Ibid., p. 134.
52. Ibid., pp. 151–152.
53. Ibid., pp. 135–140.
54. Pascal, Pensées, inOeuvres de Blaise Pascal, ed. Brunschvicg, vol. II, pp. 381–
384.
55. Ibid., p. 385.
56. Ibid.: “Thus we are born unjust, for each inclines toward himself.”
57. Ibid. The Écrits sur la Grâce, however, were not fully published until 1908–
1912.
58. Ibid., pp. 381–385.
59. St. Paul, 1 Corinthians 12, cited by Locke in his A Paraphrase and Notes on
St. Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, in The Works of John Locke
(London: Otridge & Son et al., 1812), vol. 8, pp. 168–169.
60. Locke, A Paraphrase and Notes, inWorks, vol. 8, p. 168.
61. On this point cf. the author’s Will and Political Legitimacy: A Critical
Exposition of Social Contract Theory in Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant
and Hegel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), ch. III.
62. Pascal, Écrits sur la Grâce, inOeuvres, ed. Brunschvicg, cit., vol. XI, p. 150:
“les hommes sont sauvés ou damnés, suivant qu’il a pleu à Dieu deles choisir
pour leur donner cette grâce dans la masse corrompue des hommes, dans
laquelle il pouvoit avec justice les abandonner tous.”
63. Rousseau, Lettre à Christophe de Beaumont, inOeuvres Complètes de Jean-
Jacques Rousseau, eds. B. Gagnebin andM. Raymond (Paris: Pléiade, 1969),
vol. 4, p. 961.
60 Patrick Riley
64. Pascal, Pensées, inOeuvres, ed. Brunschvicg, vol. II, p. 386.
65. Rousseau, “Le Bonheur Public,” Political Writings, ed. Vaughan, vol. I,
p. 326.
66. Pascal, Pensées, 2nd “Port-Royal” edition (Paris: Chez Guillaume Desprez,
1678), pp. 268–269. See also the “Edition Nouvelle” of 1699 (Amsterdam:
Chez Henri Wetstein), copy in Bibliothèque du Musée Calvet, Avignon
(examined there in October 1982 by kind permission).
67. Leibniz, Theodicy, ed. Farrer, p. 254.
68. Bayle, “Nouvelles de la République des Lettres” (May 1684), cited in
Malebranche, Oeuvres de Malebranche, ed. André Robinet (Paris: Vrin,
1966), vol. 8–9, pp. 1152 ff.
69. Arnauld, Réflexions Philosophiques et Théologiques, passim.
70. Fontenelle, Doutes sur le Système Physique des Causes Occasionnelles, in
Oeuvres Complètes (Paris: 1818), vol. I, pp. 627 ff.
71. Bossuet, Oraison Funèbre de Marie-Thérèse d’Autriche, in Oeuvres de
Bossuet, eds. B. Velat and Y. Champailler (Paris: Pléiade, 1961), p. 110.
72. Fénelon, Réfutation du Système du Père Malebranche sur la Nature et la
Grâce, inOeuvres de Fénelon (Paris: Chez Lefevre, 1835), vol. II, pp. 232 ff.
The fourth of the Lettres sur la Grâce was published as early as 1718 in
Fénelon,Oeuvres Spirituelles (Antwerp: 1718).
73. For a good brief account of this polemic, see Ginette Dreyfus’ “Introduction”
to Malebranche’s Traité de la Nature et de la Grâce, in Oeuvres de
Malebranche (Paris: Vrin, 1976 [2nd ed.]), vol. 5, pp. xxxviii ff. For a fuller
account, see Dreyfus’ edition ofNature et Grâce (Paris: Vrin, 1958), pp. 47 ff.
74. Leibniz, Theodicy, ed. Farrer, pp. 254 ff.
75. Actually, Malebranche first used the notions of volonté générale and
particulière in the sixteenth “Éclaircissement,” which he wrote for the 1678
edition ofDe la Recherche de la Vérité. The Traité de la Nature et de la Grâce
is simply a fully elaborated version of this “Éclaircissement,” which can be
found inOeuvres de Malebranche, vol. 5, p. 147.
76. Malebranche, Traité de la Nature et de la Grâce, in Oeuvres deMalebranche,
vol. 5, p. 147.
77. Ibid., p. 148.
78. Ibid., p. 63.
79. Ibid., p. 166.
80. Ibid.
81. Rousseau, Du Contrat Social, in Political Writings, ed. Vaughan, vol. II,
p. 49: “When I say that the object of the laws is always general, I mean that
the law considers subjects as a body and actions in the abstract; never a man
as an individual, or a particular action.” There is never, he adds, “a general
will concerning a particular object.”
82. Malebranche, Traité de la Nature et de la Grâce, p. 32.
83. Ibid.
84. Ibid., pp. 63–64, 166 (inter alia).
85. Ibid., pp. 50–51.
86. Ibid., p. 47.
87. Leibniz, Theodicy, ed. Farrer, p. 62.
The General Will before Rousseau 61
88. Malebranche, Traité de la Nature et de la Grâce, p. 46.
89. Ibid., p. 63.
90. Ibid.
91. Malebranche, Traité de Morale, ed. M. Adam, in Oeuvres de Malebranche,
vol. 11, pp. 31–32.
92. Ibid., p. 32.
93. Ibid., pp. 32–33.
94. Malebranche, Traité de la Nature et de la Grâce, pp. 61–62.
95. Ibid., p. 62.
96. Ibid.
97. If one examines the 1684 edition of the Traité de la Nature et de la Grâce
(Rotterdam: Chez Reinier Leers, 1684), one finds that all the additions of the
1680 text are set in italic type.
98. Pascal,Écrits sur laGrâce, inOeuvres, ed. Brunschvicg, vol. XI, pp. 135–140.
99. St. Augustine,De la Correction et de laGrâce, trans. and introd. Arnauld, cit.,
p. 7.
100. Malebranche, Traité de la Nature et de la Grâce, p. 67.
101. Ibid., pp. 67–68.
102. Pierre Jurieu, L’Esprit de M. Arnau[l]d (Deventer: Jean Colombius, 1684),
pp. 80 ff, esp. p. 80: “Je ne scay si le P. Malebranche a eu un ami asses
fidele, pour lui apprendre qu’il n’y a jamais eu de Livre plus généralement
desapprouvé que” Nature et Grâce.
103. Malebranche, Traité de la Nature et de la Grâce, p. 204.
104. Ibid., p. 180.
105. Malebranche, Réponse à une Dissertation de M. Arnauld contre un
éclaircissement de la Nature et de la Grâce, in Oeuvres de Malebranche,
vols. 6–7, pp. 591–592.
106. Ibid., p. 592.
107. Malebranche, Traité de la Nature et de la Grâce, pp. 47–48.
108. Cited in Ginette Dreyfus, La Volonté selon Malebranche (Paris: Vrin, 1958),
p. 114.
109. Malebranche, Réponse au Livre I des Réflexions Philosophiques, inOeuvres
de Malebranche, vols. 8–9, p. 721. Cf. p. 722: “S’il [Dieu] avoit un volonté
absoluë de sauver tous les hommes, sans avoir égard à la simplicité des
moyens, il est certain qu’il les sauveroit tous.”
To be sure, it was not only Arnauld and Bossuet who, among
Malebranche’s contemporaries, had doubts about the Oratorian’s treatment
of God’s “will” to save “all”men. Indeed one of the most striking assaults on
Malebranchism came from the Jesuit Father Rodolphe du Tertre, who pub-
lished his Réfutation d’un Nouveau Système de Métaphysique proposé par le
Père Malebranche (Paris: Chez RaymondMazières, 1715) only a few months
before the death of Malebranche. In the “Troisième Partie” of this very rare
work, P. du Tertre says the following (pp. 275–277): “Selon notre auteur
[Malebranche], Dieu veut sauver tous les hommes en ce sense, que les voies . . .
qu’il a été indispensablement obligé de suivre dans l’éxecution de son ouvr-
age, feront entrer dans l’Église future le plus d’hommes que leur simplicité et
leur généralité puisse permettre. Il [Dieu] le veut, que tous les hommes soient
62 Patrick Riley
sauvés, en ce sense, que s’il pouvait y avoir quelque autre ordre de la grâce,
aussi digne de lui et plus utile aux hommes, que celui où nous sommes, il
l’aurait choisi, ou plutot il aurait été nécessité par sa sagesse à le prendre, pour
ne pas dementir ses attributs. Voilà encore un fois, ce que le M[alebranche]
appelle en Dieu, vouloir véritablement que tous les hommes soient sauvés;
quoi qu’en même temps il assure que Dieu ne peut pas en sauver plus qu’il en
sauve, sans faire des miracles que l’ordre immuable, qui est sa loi nécessaire,
ne lui permet de faire. . . . Cela veut dire que le nouveau théologien juge à
propos, pour de bonnes raisons, de donner le nom de volonté sincère et
véritable, à une chymerique velleïte qu’il lui plaît d’imaginer en Dieu par
rapport au salut des hommes, en sorte que selon son Dictionnaire, dire que
Dieu veut véritablement que tous les hommes soient sauvés, c’est ne dire autre
chose, sinon que Dieu voudrait cela, si cela se pouvait, quoique cela ne se
puisse pas: qu’il le voudrait, supposé une hypothèse impossible, qui serait
qu’il y eut une autre manière d’agir plus avantageuse aux hommes, et en
même temps aussi digne de ses attributs.” Evidently,Malebranche was able to
please neither the Jesuits, at one extreme, nor the Jansenists, at the other: for
the Jesuits, Malebranche’s God saves too few men, while for the Jansenists he
saves too many (and would save all if his generality and simplicity didn’t
forbid it). (The only available copy of du Tertre’s work is in the Bibliothèque
Nationale, Paris – through whose courtesy I was able to examine the Jesuit’s
critique of Malebranche in November 1982.)
110. Dreyfus, La Volonté selon Malebranche, p. 114.
111. Cited in André Robinet, Système et Existence dans l’Oeuvre de Malebranche
(Paris: Vrin, 1965), p. 104.
112. Ibid., p. 105.
113. On this point see particularly Alberto Postigliola, “De Malebranche à
Rousseau: Les Apories de la Volonté Générale et la Revanche du
‘Raisonneur Violent’,” Annales de la Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau
(Geneva: Chez A. Jullien, 1980), vol. 39, pp. 134 ff. (For a full treatment of
this excellent piece, see section IX.)
114. This was thefear of both Arnauld and Bossuet; see note 117.
115. Malebranche, Traité de la Nature et de la Grâce, p. 50.
116. Ibid., “Avertissement,” p. 7.
117. Bossuet, letter to the Marquis d’Allemans (May 1687), Oeuvres de
Malebranche, vol. 18, p. 445.
118. Malebranche, Reponse au Livre I des Réflexions Philosophiques, inOeuvres
de Malebranche, vols. 8–9, p. 780.
119. Malebranche,De laRecherche de la Vérité I, I, II, inOeuvres deMalebranche,
vol. I, p. 45.
120. Kant, Die Metaphysik der Sitten, “Einleitung in der Rechtslehre,” sec. E., in
Immanuel Kants Werke, ed. Ernst Cassirer (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer Verlag,
1922), vol. 7, p. 34.
121. Rousseau, Du Contrat Social, in Political Writings, ed. Vaughan, vol. II,
p. 50.
122. Elisabeth Labrousse, Pierre Bayle (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), vol.
2, pp. 592 ff.
The General Will before Rousseau 63
123. For details of the condemnation of Malebranche’s work, see Oeuvres de
Malebranche, vol. 19, pp. 550–558.
124. See Henri Gouhier, Fénelon Philosophe (Paris: Vrin, 1977), pp. 33 ff. This
brilliant book is the best introduction to French theological quarrels of the
seventeenth century.
125. Bossuet,Oeuvres Complètes de Bossuet (Bar-le-duc: Louis Guérin, 1870), vol.
5, pp. iii ff (for a brief historical account of the composition of the Défense).
126. Bossuet, “Sermon sur la Providence,”Oeuvres de Bossuet, ed. Velat, p. 1070.
127. Ibid.
128. Bossuet, letter to Neercassel (June 1683), Oeuvres de Malebranche, vol. 18,
pp. 248–249.
129. SeeOeuvres de Bossuet, ed. Velat, pp. 1235–1236, for notes concerning this
Oraison Funèbre.
130. Bossuet, Oraison Funèbre de Marie-Thérèse d’Autriche, in Oeuvres de
Bossuet, ed. Velat, p. 110.
131. Ibid., pp. 110, 1238 (notes).
132. Ibid., pp. 110–111.
133. Ibid., p. 109.
134. Ibid., p. 133.
135. Ibid.
136. Cited in Paul Vernière, Spinoza et la Pensée Française (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1954), vol. I, p. 181.
137. Ibid.
138. On Faydit’s treatment of Malebranche’s philosophy, see Oeuvres de
Malebranche, vol. 20, pp. 364 ff.
139. Ginette Dreyfus, “Introduction Philosophique” to Malebranche, Traité de la
Nature et de la Grâce [1680 ed.] (Paris: Vrin, 1958), pp. 127 ff (“l’opposition
commune de Bossuet et de Fénelon”).
140. Bossuet, letter to the Marquis d’Allemans (May 1687), in Oeuvres de
Malebranche, vol. 18, p. 144.
141. Ibid.
142. Voltaire, Dictionnaire Philosophique, article “Grâce,” cited in
Ferdinand Alquié, Le Cartésianisme de Malebranche (Paris: Vrin, 1974),
pp. 443–444: “Toute la nature, tout ce qui existe, est une grâce de Dieu . . .
La grâce de faire croître un arbre de soixante et dix pieds est accordée au
sapin, et refusée au roseau. Il [Dieu] donne à l’homme la grâce de penser, de
parler et de la connaître.” And Alquié himself adds (p. 444): “Ici, l’assimila-
tion de la nature et de la grâce est complète. Malebranche, assurément,
n’opère pas cette identification. Mais, en naturalisant la grâce, il prépare de
telles pensées.”
143. Bossuet, letter to the Marquis d’Allemans, in Oeuvres de Malebranche, vol.
18, p. 444.
144. Rousseau, Lettres écrits de la Montagne, in Oeuvres Complètes (Paris:
Éditions du Seuil, 1971), vol. 3, p. 424n. (The passage referred to is in the
notes of the Troisième Lettre.)
145. Bossuet, letter to the Marquis d’Allemans, in Oeuvres de Malebranche, vol.
18, p. 445.
64 Patrick Riley
146. Ibid., p. 446.
147. Ibid., p. 447.
148. Bossuet, Discours sur l’Histoire Universelle, in Oeuvres de Bossuet
(Versailles: J.A. Lebel, 1818), vol. 35, p. 556.
149. Ibid.
150. Ibid., p. 557, Montesquieu was surely thinking of this passage – if only to
refute it throughMalbranchian généralité –when he wrote the key paragraph
of Chapter XVIII of his Considerations on the Greatness and Decline of the
Romans: “It is not chance that rules the world. . . . There are general causes,
moral and physical, which act in every monarchy, elevating it, maintaining it,
or hurling it to the ground. All accidents are controlled by these causes. And if
the chance of one battle – that is, a particular cause – has brought a state to
ruin, some general cause made it necessary for that state to perish from a
single battle. In a word, the main trend draws with it all particular accidents”
(trans. D. Lowenthal [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968], p. 169).
151. See Henri Gouhier, Fénelon Philosophe, pp. 33 ff.
152. Fénelon,Oeuvres de Fénelon (Paris: Chez Lefevre, 1835), vol. 2, p. 258.
153. Ibid., p. 258n.
154. Ibid., pp. 258–259.
155. Ibid., p. 259.
156. Ibid., p. 270.
157. Ibid., p. 270n.
158. See Bossuet’s notes to Fénelon’sRéfutation, inOeuvres de Fénelon, pp. 270n–
273n.
159. See Henri Gouhier, Fénelon Philosophe, pp. 77 ff.
160. Théodore Belmont, Bossuet et les Saints Pères (Geneva: Slatkine, 1970 [orig.
ed. Paris 1896]), pp. 590 ff.
161. Bossuet, Défense de la Tradition et des Pères, in Oeuvres Complètes de
Bossuet, 1870 ed., vol. 5, p. 324.
162. Ibid.
163. Ibid., pp. 357–359.
164. Except, of course, for the late works of Antoine Arnauld contra
Malebranchian Généralité.
165. For an appreciation of Bayle’s knowledge of (particularly Malebranchian)
theology, see Labrousse, Pierre Bayle, vol. II, pp. 187 ff.
166. Melchior de Polignac, L’anti-Lucrèce, Poème sur la Religion Naturelle, trans.
de Bougainville (Paris: Desaint et Saillant, 1749), vol. II, p. 304.
167. R. Shackleton, “Bayle and Montesquieu,” Pierre Bayle, le Philosophe de
Rotterdam, ed. P. Dibon, (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1959), p. 147.
168. See Alquié, Le Cartésianisme de Malebranche, pp. 16–17.
169. Bayle, Compte Rendu du Traité de la Nature et de la Grâce, from the
“Nouvelles de la République des Lettres” (May 1684), in Oeuvres de
Malebranche, vols. 8–9, p. 1153.
170. Ibid., pp. 1153–1156.
171. Bayle, Pensées Diverses, écrits à un Docteur de Sorbonne, 4th ed. (Rotterdam:
Chez Reinier Leers, 1704), vol. II, pp. 452–453.
172. Ibid., pp. 462–463.
The General Will before Rousseau 65
173. Ibid., p. 458.
174. Ibid., p. 457.
175. Ibid., pp. 455–456.
176. Ibid., p. 456.
177. Ibid., p. 457.
178. Ibid., pp. 456–457: “Il est d’ailleurs indubitable, que la nécessité où se
trouvent les Politiques, de corriger leurs loix . . . suppose en eux une intelli-
gence bornée.” This is the very language of Malebranche’s Nature et Grâce.
179. Bayle, Nouvelles Lettres Critiques sur l’Histoire du Calvinisme, in Oeuvres
Diverses de M. Pierre Bayle (The Hague: Compagnie des Libraires, 1737),
vol. II, p. 282.
180. Ibid.
181. Ibid.
182. Ibid.
183. Malebranche shows an unabating hostility to Hobbes: see Réflexions sur la
Prémotion Physique, inOeuvres de Malebranche, vol. 16, p. 98.
184. See Elisabeth Labrousse, “Introduction” to Bayle, Ce que c’est que la France
toute Catholique (Paris: Vrin, 1973), pp. 7 ff.
185. C. Brush,Montaigne and Bayle (TheHague:MartinusNijhoff, 1966), p. 239.
186. Bayle, La France toute Catholique, ed. Labrousse, p. 62.
187. Ibid.
188. See notes for pp. 197–200 below.
189. Bayle, La France toute Catholique, p. 46.
190. Ibid.
191. Ibid.
192. Bayle, Commentaire Philosophique, inOeuvres Diverses de M. Bayle, vol. II,
p. 368.
193. Ibid., p. 379.
194. Rousseau, Du Contrat Social, in Political Writings, ed. Vaughan, vol. II,
p. 106.
195. Bayle, Commentaire Philosophique, inOeuvres Diverses de M. Bayle, vol. II,
p. 379.
196. Ibid.
197. Bayle, Réponse aux Questions d’un Provincial, in Oeuvres Diverses de
M. Bayle, vol. III, pp. 812, 825.
198. Ibid., p. 825.
199. Ibid., p. 826.
200. Ibid.
201. Aristotle, Ethics, Book V, 1137b ff.
202. Bayle, Réponse aux Questions d’un Provincial, in Oeuvres Diverses de
M. Bayle, vol. III, pp. 826.
203. Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary, ed. R. Popkin (Indianapolis:
Library of Liberal Arts, 1965), p. 206 (from the article “Pyrrho”).
204. Malebranche, Traité de Morale, inOeuvresde Malebranche, vol. II, p. 34.
205. Bayle, Dictionnaire Historique et Critique (Rotterdam: 1720), vol. III,
p. 2540.
206. Ibid.
66 Patrick Riley
207. Pascal, Les Provinciales, ed. Louis Cognet (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1965),
pp. 72 ff. It is in the Cinquième Lettre above all that Pascal ridicules the
Jesuit doctrine of probablism, as enunciated by Bauni and Escobar.
208. Ibid., pp. li ff of Cognet’s Introduction.
209. Bayle, Entretiens de Maxime et de Thémiste, in Oeuvres Diverses de
M. Bayle, vol. IV, pp. 3 ff.
210. Ibid., pp. 57–58.
211. Ibid., p. 58.
212. Ibid., p. 62.
213. Ibid., p. 63.
214. Ibid.
215. Ibid., p. 66.
216. Ibid.
217. Malebranche, De la Recherche de la Vérité, Conclusion des Trois Premiers
Livres, in Oeuvres de Malebranche, cit., vol. I, pp. 488 ff. esp. pp. 491–492:
“On se peut donc servir de sa raison en toutes choses, et c’est le privilège
qu’elle a sur les senses et sur l’imagination.”
218. Bayle, Entretiens de Maxime et de Thémiste, in Oeuvres Diverses de
M. Bayle, vol. IV, p. 64.
219. Ibid., p. 67.
220. Ibid.
221. For the influence of Bayle on Montesquieu, see Shackleton, “Bayle and
Montesquieu,” Pierre Bayle, ed. Dibon, pp. 142–149.
222. Rousseau, Les Confessions, eds. B. Gagnebin and M. Raymond, in Oeuvres
Complètes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Paris: Pléiade, 1959), vol. I, p. 237: “Je
commencois par quelque livre de philosophie, comme la Logique de Port-
royal, l’Essai de Locke, Malebranche, Leibnitz, Descartes, etc.”
223. C. E. Vaughan, “Introduction” toRousseau: PoliticalWritings, vol. I, pp. 71 ff.
224. Judith N. Shklar, Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau’s Social Theory
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 184.
225. On this point see particularly Rousseau’s Gouvernement de Pologne, in
Political Writings, ed. Vaughan, vol. II, pp. 424 ff.
226. Rousseau, Du Contrat Social, in Political Writings, ed. Vaughan, vol. II,
pp. 105, 28.
227. Rousseau, Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, ed. René Pomeau (Paris: Garnier
Frères, 1960), 660.
228. Ibid.
229. Émile Bréhier, “Les lectures malebranchistes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau,”
Études de Philosophie Moderne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1965), p. 95.
230. Rousseau, La Nouvelle Héloïse, p. 671.
231. Ibid.
232. Ibid., p. 672.
233. Rousseau, Letter to Voltaire on Providence (1756), inReligiousWritings, ed.
R. Grimsley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 44.
234. Rousseau, La Nouvelle Héloïse, cit., p. 672.
235. Ibid., p. 671.
The General Will before Rousseau 67
236. Particularly in his earliest works: see above all Rousseau, Chronologie
Universelle, ou Histoire Générale des Temps (c. 1737), in Annales de la
Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Geneva: Chez A. Jullien, 1905), vol. I,
pp. 213 ff, esp. pp. 214–215: “Nous sommes tous frères: notre prochain
doit nous être aussi cher que nous-mêmes. ‘J’aime le genre humain plus que
ma patrie,’ disoit l’illustreM. de Fénelon, ‘ma patrie plus quema famille et ma
famille plus que moi-même.’ Des sentiments si pleins d’humanité devroient
être communs à tous les hommes. . . . L’univers est une grande famille dont
nous sommes tous membres; nous sommes donc obligez d’en connoitre aussi
la situation et les interêts. Quelque peu loin que s’étende la puissance d’un
particulier, il est toujours en état de se rendre utile par quelque endroit au
grand corps dont il fait partie.” Later in his career, of course, Rousseau would
abandon the universelle in favor of the générale, would exchange a
Fénelonian Respublica Christiana for more modest republics: Sparta,
Rome, Geneva. Indeed Rousseau’s great struggle with Diderot – in the
Première Version du Contrat Social – rests precisely on Rousseau’s rejection
of a reason-ordained morale universelle.
237. Fénelon, Oeuvres Spirituelles ([1718] 1751), vol. IV, 290. For a good com-
mentary see Henri Gouhier, Fénelon Philosophe, pp. 55ff.
238. Ibid., p. 294.
239. Ibid., p. 321.
240. Ibid., pp. 320–321.
241. ThoughMalebranche, in part II, ch. xi of theTraité deMorale, says that while
men are “naturally” equal, force and ambition have brought men to abandon
“universal reason, their inviolable law,” in favor of “visible protectors.” In
this passage natural equality and universality (not simple generality) go hand
in hand. See Traité de Morale, pp. 242–243.
242. Alberto Postigliola, in his excellent “De Malebranche à Rousseau,”
pp. 136–137, argues persuasively that Rousseau erroneously attributed to
the volonté générale of a sovereign people the “infinite” qualities that can
attach only to a Malebranchian divine general will; see section IX, ahead.
243. Rousseau, Lettres écrites de la Montagne (Amsterdam: Rey, 1764),
pp. 170n–171n.
244. Ibid.
245. Ibid., p. 171n.
246. Rousseau, “Manuscrit autographe,” Lettres écrites de la Montagne, ed.
J. S. Spink, in Annales de la Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Geneva: Chez
A. Jullien, 1932), vol. 21, p. 13n.
247. This is particularly clear in the “Manuscrit autographe” of the Lettres, first
published by Spink in 1931–1932.
248. Jean Pierre Gaberel, Histoire de l’église de Genève (Geneva: Jullien Frères,
1862), pp. 121–123.
249. Rousseau, Lettres écrites de la Montagne, 1764 edition, p. 171.
250. Pascal, Écrits sur la Grâce, inOeuvres, ed. Brunschvicg, vol. XI, pp. 133 ff.
251. Vauvenargues, Introduction à la Connaissance de l’Esprit Humain, in
Oeuvres Complètes de Vauvenargues, ed. H. Bonnier (Paris: Hachette,
1968), vol. I, p. 241. And on the following page Vauvenargues adds a passage
68 Patrick Riley
that could have been approved equally by Pascal and Rousseau: “La
préférence de l’interêt général au personnel est la seule définition qui soit
digne de la vertu et qui doive en fixer l’idée: au contraire, le sacrifice mercen-
aire du bonheur public à l’intérêt propre est le sceau éternel du vice.”
252. Rousseau, La Nouvelle Héloïse, p. 673.
253. Rousseau, “Letter toMalesherbes (March 1761),” in Lettres Philosophiques,
ed. Henri Gouhier (Paris: Vrin, 1974), pp. 58–59.
254. Rousseau, Lettres écrites de la Montagne, III, cited in Religious Writings, ed.
Grimsley, 356.
255. Ibid.
256. Malebranche, Méditations Chrétiennes et Métaphysiques, eds. H. Gouhier
and A. Robinet, in Oeuvres de Malebranche, vol. 10, pp. 88–89: “Que les
hommes sont vains, et ridicules de s’imaginer, que Dieu troublera sans raison
l’ordre et la simplicité de ses voies pour s’accommoder à leur fantaisie . . . [le]
commun des hommes . . . pleins d’un orgueil insupportable, et de l’amour
d’eux-mêmes, s’attendent que Dieu pense à leurs affaires.”
257. Rousseau, Lettres écrites de la Montagne, cited in Religious Writings, ed.
Grimsley, p. 357.
258. Ibid., p. 358n.
259. Arnauld, Réflexions Philosophiques et Théologiques, in Oeuvres de Messire
Antoine Arnauld, vol. 39, p. 177. “if one considers a particular effect,”
Arnauld begins, “and if one finds nothing but conformity to general laws of
nature, one has reason to say that God has acted, with respect to this effect,
according to general laws.” But, Arnauld goes on, since this particular effect
has many “remote causes,” one would have to be “assured” that there has
never been a “particular” or miraculous divine “intervention” in this causal
sequence, before one could say “absolutely” that any particular effect was
“only a consequence of the general laws of nature.”Onewould have, in short,
to be omniscient. Now who, Arnauld asks triumphantly, can “assure us of
this, without a prodigious temerity, and without ruining the faith we have in
Providence?” Both Arnauld and Rousseau rely on human ignorance, but to
make opposite points.
260. Rousseau, Lettres écrites de la Montagne, 1764 edition, p. 85. Cf.
Malebranche, Méditations Chrétiennes, passim.
261. Ibid., p. 131.
262. Ibid., p. 131n.
263. Ibid., pp. 131–132.
264. Rousseau, Émile, cited in Religious Writings, ed. Grimsley, p. 152.
265.Ibid., p. 173.
266. Ibid.
267. Rousseau, Lettre à Christophe de Beaumont, inOeuvres Complètes, Pléiade
edition, 1023–1024 (“fragments de la lettre”).
268. Ibid., p. 1023
269. Same as note 222.
270. Cited in Brehier, “Les lectures malbranchistes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau,”
p. 85.
The General Will before Rousseau 69
271. Malebranche, Traité de la Nature et de la Grâce II, xvi, pp. 74–75: “Jesus
Christ ayant besoin pour la construction de son Église des esprits d’un certain
mérite . . . peut en général s’appliquer à eux, et par cette application repandre
en eux la Grâce qui les sanctifie: de même que l’esprit d’un Architecte pense en
général aux pierres quarrées, par exemple, lorsque ces sortes de pierres sont
actuellement necessaires à son bâtiment.”
272. Bayle, Réponse aux Questions d’un Provincial, cit., p. 825.
273. Rousseau, Jugement sur la Polysynodie, in Political Writings, ed. Vaughan,
vol. I, p. 419.
274. Ibid.
275. Ibid. Rousseau then goes on to make two characteristic arguments against
particularisme: against St. Pierre’s lingering monarchism, Rousseau asks how
the abbé has failed to see “dans le cours de sa vie et de ses écrits, combien c’est
une vaine occupation de recherché des formes durables pour un état de choses,
qui depend toujours de la volonté d’un seul homme; against St. Pierre’s reten-
tion of corps intermediaires, Rousseau declares that “les interêts des sociétés
partielles ne sont pas moins separés de ceux de l’État, ni moins pernicieux à la
République, que ceux des particuliers.” Plainly the creation of a public volonté
générale is the remedy for both of these defects. (The Jugement sur la
Polysynodie is a significant, but utterly neglected, work of Rousseau.)
276. Rousseau, Émile, inOeuvres Complètes, Pléiade edition, p. 851.
277. Ibid.
278. Ibid. Indeed, according to Rousseau, Augustus’ policies came too late: “ces
loix montroient déjà le déclin de l’empire Romain.”
279. Rousseau, Institutions Chymiques, in Annales de la Société Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, vol. XIII, pp. 44 ff. For a good appreciation of this important
early work, see Pierre Burgelin, La Philosophie de l’éxistence de J.J. Rousseau
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1952), pp. 412–413.
280. Ibid. (Institutions Chymiques), p. 45.
281. Ibid., p. 46.
282. Same as note 230.
283. Ibid. (Institutions Chymiques), p. 47.
284. Ibid.
285. Ibid.
286. Ibid. For a comparison of Rousseau’s and Kant’s use of nonmechanistic
teleology in biology, see the author’s Kant’s Political Philosophy (Totowa,
New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield, 1983), 72–73.
287. Alberto Postigliola, “De Malebranche à Rousseau,” passim.
288. Ibid., pp. 132, 135.
289. Ibid., p. 137. Postigliola’s article has the enormous merit of proving that the
history of volonté générale is of philosophical importance – that one may be
able to understand some of Rousseau’s arguments better if one knows the
provenance of “general will.” Postigliola endows with philosophical impor-
tance an inquiry that could have been of merely antiquarian interest.
290. Rousseau, Considérations sur le Gouvernement de Pologne, in Political
Writings, ed. Vaughan, vol. II, p. 426. Cf. “Rousseau’s letter to Mirabeau
(July 1767),” Political Writings, ed. Vaughan, vol. II, p. 160.
70 Patrick Riley
291. Rousseau, Première Version du Contrat Social, in Political Writings, ed.
Vaughan, vol. I, p. 499.
292. Rousseau, Du Contrat Social, in Political Writings, ed. Vaughan, vol. II,
p. 53: “Pour qu’un peuple naissant pût goûter les saines maximes de la
politique et suivre les regles fondamentales de la raison d’État, il faudrait
que l’effect pût devenir la cause: que l’esprit social, qui doit être l’ouvrage de
l’institution, presidat à l’institution même; et que les hommes fussent, avant
les lois, ce qu’ils doivent devenir par elles.” At least provisionally, therefore,
for Rousseau, a new-born people needs a legislator (or rather civic educator)
who can help that people “find” the volonté générale that it is “seeking.”On
this point see the author’sWill and Political Legitimacy,p. 117.
293. Rousseau, Du Contrat Social, in Political Writings, ed. Vaughan, vol. II,
pp. 27 ff: “no man has natural authority over his fellow-man.”
294. Particularly the Kant of Critique of Judgment, part I (“Aesthetic Judgment”),
sec. 40: “[it] indicates a man of enlarged mind if he detaches himself from the
subjective personal conditions of his [aesthetic] judgment . . . and reflects
upon his own judgment from a general standpoint [aus einem allgemeinen
Standpunkte] (which he can only determine by shifting his ground to the
standpoint of other).” Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft I, in Immanuel Kants
Werke, ed. Cassirer, vol. 5, p. 365. Ingenious but misguided is the attempt of
Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1983) to “find” Kant’s “unwritten” political
philosophy in Aesthetic Judgment’s notion of an intersubjective “general
standpoint”; mere generality is not sufficient for the Kant who could say
that “true politics cannot take a single step without first paying homage to
morals” – to the categorical imperative enjoining respect for persons as ends-
in-themselves. Since, however, Arendt cannot share Kant’s belief in “apodic-
tic” moral certainty, she wants to reconstruct a quasi-Kantian politics based
on the intersubjectivity and generality of aesthetic judgment. This will not do
as a reading of Kant an sich, whatever merits it might have.
295. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, in Sämtliche Werke,
“Jubilaumsausgabe,” ed. H. Glockner (Stuttgart: Frommann Verlag, 1952),
vol. 7, p. 205.
296. Ibid., pp. 205–206.
297. See George A. Kelly, Hegel’s Retreat from Eleusis (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1978), pp. 15–16, 209–212, for a splendidly sympathetic
understanding of what Hegel meant by a general or universal class.
298. See Judith Shklar, “General Will,” pp. 279–280, for an excellent brief
account of the career of volonté générale after Rousseau – in Kant, Fichte,
Hegel, T. H. Green, and Bosanquet.
The General Will before Rousseau 71
2
Malebranche’s Shadow: Divine Providence and
General Will in the Leibniz–Arnauld Correspondence
Steven Nadler
Over the past quarter century, Antoine Arnauld hasmovedwell beyond his
character-actor status as “the author of the Fourth Set of Objections to
Descartes’Meditations” and has achieved renown not only for his rigorous
analytical skills (and irascible temperament) but also for his substantive
philosophical views on such topics as perception, free will, and conscious-
ness. Part of Arnauld’s new-found acclaim derives from the recognition
that the debates that this supremely gifted intellectual jouster engaged in
with Malebranche and Leibniz not only represent significant moments in
the philosophical development of the latter two thinkers, but are also
fascinating philosophical events in their own right. As scholars have long
recognized, the exchanges making up the Arnauld–Malebranche debate
and Arnauld’s correspondence with Leibniz are as valuable as sources of
early modern philosophizing as are the period’s systematic treatises.
In addition to Arnauld’s separate engagements with Malebranche and
Leibniz, however, the Leibniz–Arnauld–Malebranche three-way relation-
ship is itself of particular interest. All three individuals were in Paris in the
early-to-mid-1670s.We know that Leibniz was thenmeeting with Arnauld
and with Malebranche separately – Arnauld immediately after his arrival
in Paris, and Malebranche shortly after the publication of the latter’s
Search After Truth. But I also believe that by 1675 the three men were
meeting together as well. Arnauld and Malebranche were still friends at
this point, and all three thinkers had shared acquaintances and intersecting
intellectual and social circles. They also had remarkablysimilar philosoph-
ical interests, particularly questions about the nature of God and divine
agency, as well as questions of theodicy involving the problem of evil.
Leibniz, Arnauld, and Malebranche must have had much to talk about.
72
Now Malebranche certainly has a substantial role to play in Robert
C. Sleigh, Jr.’s groundbreaking study of the Leibniz–Arnauld correspond-
ence – and rightly so.1As Sleigh shows, the Oratorian’s views on causation
and theodicy form an important part of the background for understanding
the philosophical content of that correspondence. And I have elsewhere
examined the way in which Arnauld’s likely response to Leibniz’s
approach to the problem of evil would be informed by Arnauld’s objec-
tions to Malebranche’s theodicy – more particularly, the way in which
Arnauld would see both theodicies as failing to safeguard divine omnip-
otence and freedom, as well as the necessary efficacy of God’s will.2
What I consider in this chapter is another aspect of Malebranche’s role
within the Leibniz–Arnauld correspondence, one that – unlike his occa-
sionalism – does not so explicitly appear in the letters themselves. As Sleigh
points out, Arnauld’s first letter to Leibniz ofMarch 13, 1686, was written
less than a year after the publication of Arnauld’s monumental
Philosophical and Theological Reflections on the New System of Nature
and Grace, an extended (and highly repetitive) attack on Malebranche’s
Treatise on Nature and Grace. A central theme of these Reflections is the
nature and extent of divine providence and Malebranche’s failure to treat
this in an adequate manner. Now, while the question of God’s liberty
seems to have the upper hand in the first couple of exchanges between
Arnauld and Leibniz, the question of providence is there as well, lurking in
the references to God’s decrees and what He knows about the course of
events. As both Arnauld and Leibniz realize, where divine freedom is at
stake, the issue of divine providence is never far behind. But what I want to
do in this essay – and I admit it is a verymodest aim – is useMalebranche to
deepen our appreciation of the role that the question of providence plays
both in Arnauld’s initial reaction to the title-summary of one of the
important articles in Leibniz’s Discourse on Metaphysics and in Leibniz’s
responses to Arnauld. More particularly, I want to show that Arnauld’s
views on divine providence, as these appear primarily in his attacks on
Malebranche in the Reflections, may have much to tell us about his first
two letters to Leibniz and about what he is really worried about; and
moreover that Leibniz’s familiarity with the substantive details of the
Arnauld–Malebranche debate influenced how he replied to Arnauld’s
objections.
Part of the value of this is to see yet again that Arnauld the philosopher,
while he may be a bit of a loose cannon, is not the ad hoc, unsystematic
counterpuncher he is often made out to be and that it is possible to find a
common set of concerns running throughout both his objections to
Malebranche’s Shadow 73
Malebranche and his objections to Leibniz. In fact, there is a common
thread that subtly unites his philosophical outbursts in the mid-1680s. In
an earlier article, I showed that one of these concerns is to safeguard a
particularly strong conception of divine freedom.3Here I want to examine
how Arnauld, throughout both of these sets of exchanges, is also con-
cerned to safeguard a particular conception of how and where divine
providence operates.
1
Arnauld did not read the Discourse summary that Leibniz had sent him
under the best of circumstances. As Arnauld wrote to Count Ernst von
Hessen Rheinfels in his first, very brief letter of March 1686, he was so
busy that he was not able to study even such a short piece until a month
after receiving it. Moreover, he was not feeling well. “At the present time I
have such a bad cold that all I can do now is to tell Your Highness [my
opinion] in a couple of words.” Read it he did, finally, and the words he
used were chosen for maximum effect: “I find in his [Leibniz’s] thoughts so
many things that frightened me and that, if I am not mistaken, almost all
men would find so startling that I cannot see any utility in a treatise that
would be evidently rejected by everybody.” It was now Leibniz’s turn to be
the target of Arnauld’s famous temper.4
The title of article thirteen of the Discourse, which is all that Arnauld
initially had to go on and which he cites in his first letter to Leibniz, states
that “the individual concept of each person includes once and for all
everything that can ever happen to him.” Thus, Adam’s sinning by eating
the fruit of the tree of knowledge and Adam’s being the father of Cain, as
well as every other event in Adam’s life are contained in the concept of
Adam. But then – because Adam is the first man, and because (as the title of
article nine says) “every individual substance expresses the whole universe
in its own manner, and . . . in its full concept is included all its experiences
together with all the attendant circumstances and the whole sequence of
exterior events” – presumably included in Adam’s concept is every other
event in the history of humankind, all of which should follow from what
Adam does. This much is clear to Arnauld from the start. Moreover,
although this is not yet something of which Arnauld is fully aware, since
Leibniz explains it only in his replies to Arnauld’s first two letters (July
1686), the concept of an individual is therefore distinguished from the
concepts of all other individuals by the totality of the properties, states, and
actions it contains. To conceive of any single feature of that substance, any
74 Steven Nadler
moment of its existence, no matter how apparently insignificant, being
other than what it is, is in fact to conceive of an entirely different substance,
albeit one that is very similar in many other respects to the original
substance.5 As Leibniz says, if the first man had not eaten the fruit of the
tree of knowledge, then he would not have been Adam but rather
some other individual very much like Adam but lacking one of Adam’s
properties.6 Eating the fruit is, like every other feature or action of Adam,
an essential part of the concept of Adam. Thus, if God creates Adam,
Adam will sin; for if he does not sin, then it is not Adam whom God has
created.
Arnauld is perhaps the greatest defender of God’s absolute liberty in
the seventeenth century. And he basically insists that if Leibniz is right
about the concept of an individual containing everything that will hap-
pen to him, then God’s first free choices in creation are also His last free
choices. For God may have been free to create or not to create Adam –
that is, the first human being, whose individual concept includes and thus
necessarily implies not just the original sin but everything that succeeds
him, including all his progeny (the entire human race and everything that
happens to it). But then supposing that God does decide to create Adam,
Arnauld insists,
all that has since happened to the human race or that will ever happen to it has
occurred and will occur with a necessity more than fatal. For the individual concept
of Adam involved that he would have somany children and the individual concepts
of these children involved all that they would do and all the children that they
would have, and so on. God has therefore no more liberty in regard to all that,
provided He wished to create Adam, than He was free to create a nature incapable
of thought, supposing that He wished to create me.7
As Arnauld reads Leibniz – or, rather, as he reads the titles of the articles of
theDiscourse – if God creates Adam, then not only will Adam sin, but also
there is nothing that God can do about it. Having chosen to create Adam,
God thereby gives up His liberty with respect to everything that subse-quently happens.
Thus, in that first letter, Arnauld’s response to article thirteen of the
Discourse seems to be deeply grounded in his concern to safeguard divine
freedom and omnipotence. He is concerned that, according to Leibniz’s
view, God, having created the initial conditions, does not have any “free-
dom to make a change” (in Leibniz’s paraphrase),8 to step in and alter the
course of nature. But, as I hope to show, there is more to it than that.
Arnauld’s response also represents an abiding concern to safeguard the
Malebranche’s Shadow 75
proper conception of the nature and extent of divine providence. In short,
if Leibniz (as Arnauld reads him) is right about Adam and his concept – not
just in the title of article thirteen, but also in his subsequent
explanation about the individuation of concepts of substances – then this
has problematic implications for divine providence, implications that put
Leibniz in as serious trouble as Malebranche.
2
Arnauld’s attack on Malebranche’s Treatise on Nature and Grace reveals
how far apart the two Catholic theologians are on some central issues of
theodicy, including whether or not there are real evils and imperfections in
God’s creation. But the assault on Malebranche’s conception of the status
of evil reflects an even deeper difference between the two thinkers on the
nature of God’s activity itself. The most problematic aspect of
Malebranche’s theodicy, for Arnauld, is also its most central one: the
idea that God acts only by general volitions and never by particular ones.
Such a claim, which relieves God of having to take direct responsibility for
everything that happens in the universe, is what allows Malebranche to
concede that some elements of God’s handiwork really are imperfect
or defective without convicting God Himself of impotence, ignorance, or
injustice.
Malebranche is fond of insisting that a wise, simple, eternal, and
constant God acts only by “general volitions [volontez générales]” and
(almost) never by “particular volitions [volontez particulières].”9 A
general volition is a will to do something that is in accordance with some
law or general principle. A law of physics, for example, specifies that if a
body of a certain size at rest is struck by a body of a certain size in motion,
then it will be moved in a certain way. When Malebranche’s God then
moves a body in the appropriate way on the occasion of its being struck by
another body, He is acting by a general volition. Similarly, if God causes a
feeling of pain in some person on the occasion of his being pricked by a
needle, this is done through a general volition, since it is in accordance with
the laws of mind-body union that He has established. A particular volition,
by contrast, does not obey any law, but is (relative to the laws) ad hoc.
If God were to move a body without its having been struck by another
body or if He were to cause pain in someone without anything having
happened to that person’s body, He would be acting by a particular
volition.10 Malebranche insists that such arbitrary acts by God, just
because they are not regulated by general laws of nature, are miracles.11
76 Steven Nadler
Thus, Malebranche’s God not only institutes the most simple laws, but
He also is bound by his own nature – as a wise, good, immutable, and
absolutely simple being who acts with perfect constancy – to follow
those laws in the causal operations through which He makes nature
function.
In addition to the a priori reasoning that Malebranche provides for this
claim about the generality of God’s will, based on the consideration of
God’s attributes, Malebranche adds a secondary argument based on more
practical considerations. If God acted by particular volitions – that is, if
God regularly brought about events not because they were, given the
antecedent conditions, demanded by the laws of nature but because He
simply and directly wanted those particular events to happen – then it
would always be a sin not to accept passively everything that happens. A
person caught in a burning building would sin against God were he to try
to escape from that building, since the building’s collapse on him would be
something willed very specifically by God Himself, and not just something
that happens to be brought about in the law-governed, ordinary course
of nature.12
Why, then, is there evil in the world? Why are individuals born without
limbs, why are there floods and droughts, why is there sin and suffering,
and why do virtuous people sometimes suffer while vicious people
prosper? And why, especially, are not all human beings saved by the
grace of God?
Malebranche believes that it is important, above all, to bear inmind that
God does not will any of these evils with a particular volition. God does
not choose them for their own sake and regardless of what else happens to
be the case.
If rain falls on certain lands, and if the sun roasts others; if weather favorable for
crops is followed by hail that destroys them; if a child comes into the world with a
malformed and useless head growing from his breast, andmakes himwretched; it is
not that God has willed these things by particular wills.13
These unfortunate events occur because God allows them to occur – or,
rather, brings them about – as a part of the ordinary course of nature as
this is regulated by its most simple laws. General laws have a wide variety
of effects. As anyone whose plans have ever been disturbed by the
weather knows, these laws, which on the whole make for an orderly
and predictable world, cannot take into account the convenience and
wishes of particular individuals or even those of an entire species. Birth
defects, earthquakes, and other natural disorders are but the “necessary
Malebranche’s Shadow 77
consequences [of] laws so simple that they serve to produce everything
beautiful that we see in the world.”14 God, obliged as He is to following
the laws of nature, “makes it rain on fallow lands as well as on those that
are cultivated,” because that is the meteorological result to which the
laws lead. Likewise, if a person should be “dropping rocks on the heads
of passers-by, the rocks will always fall at an equal speed, without
discerning the piety, or the condition, or the good or bad dispositions
of those who pass by.”15 Just as the rain falls where it must, regardless of
what lies underneath, so the rocks, falling as rocks do, will land on the
heads of the virtuous and the vicious alike. In these and other cases, God
is simply carrying out the natural consequences of the laws of nature –
laws that are so simple that they admit of no exceptions and specify that
when certain things occur, other things must happen.
God, then, is more committed to acting in a general way and to a
nature governed by the most simple laws than He is to the well-being of
individuals and the justice of the distribution of rewards and punishments.
As the universal cause, He follows those laws, come what may to those
affected by them. For this reason, Malebranche says that God “permits
disorder but He does not create it, He does not will it.”16 But the word
“disorder” is ambiguous. An event is a disorder in one very relative sense if
it frustrates the ends or ambitions of an agent. A rock falling on one’s head
is certainly a disorder for the injured party. But from a more global
perspective, such an event is perfectly ordered, since it follows from the
sequence of previous events in a lawlike way. “It is no disorder for lions to
eat wolves, wolves sheep, and sheep the grass that God tends so carefully
that He has given it all the things necessary for its own preservation.”17 For
Malebranche, nature is perfectly well ordered – and that is exactly why
disorders happen.
Thus, there is sin and suffering in the world; rain falls on the
oceans while soil planted with seeds suffers drought; there are murders,
deformitiesof birth, and tsunamis; and not every individual receives
the grace necessary to move him to faith. But none of this happens
because God directly wills it. Rather, such things happen as a result
of the simple laws of nature and grace, which were instituted by
God at creation and which He is committed to carrying out, come what
may.
When Arnauld read all this in the Treatise on Nature and Grace,
everything changed. He revised not only his previously positive assessment
of Malebranche’s Search After Truth, but his opinion of the man himself.
As Arnauld explains at great length in the Reflections, Malebranche’s
78 Steven Nadler
theodicy and its account of divine agency completely undermines God’s
providence by removing Him from a direct and immediate care for every
part of His creation. And this doctrine, Arnauld believes, no good
Christian can possibly tolerate.
Whatever God wills, Arnauld insists, He wills in particular, by a
“positive, direct and particular volition.” This applies to everything in
the world, nomatter how small and insignificant, regardless of its apparent
beauty or deformity. Every natural disaster, monster, and failed ambition,
every life and every death – and, above all, every soul’s salvation or
damnation – are intended parts of God’s plan. “God makes every drop
of rain fall with a particular volition,” he says. To suggest otherwise, as
Malebranche does, is to compromise the universality of divine governance.
“Nothing happens in theworld – be it a leaf or a fruit falling from a tree, or,
more importantly, the birth or death of an animal, except by the will of
God applied to each event . . . by the particular commands of His
providence.”18
We do not always know why God wills this or that event. The purposes
of God’s volitions escape our finite understanding. We may not be able to
see a reason why the rain falls on unseeded soil or on an already swollen
river. But this does not justify the conclusion that such events are defects of
nature or are not things willed positively by God, by whom everything in
particular is ordained. Arnauld insists that this is what “everyone who has
read Scripture for thousands of years” knows. OnlyMalebranche feels the
need to provide a figurative or metaphorical interpretation of the Bible’s
words when it speaks of God acting in particular ways; Malebranche
alone, he says with typical sarcasm, believes that Scripture employs “a
language so extraordinary that it has misled everyone who has read these
divine books for more than a thousand, two thousand, three thousand
years, and that it has not been intelligible except to only one man, who,
after somuch time of error and illusion, has found the secret to interpreting
these puzzles.”19
The unfortunate but necessary conclusion of Malebranche’s view that
“God acts only by general volitions,” Arnauld claims, is that God’s true
providence manifests itself only in miraculous events. In these cases alone,
where the ordinary course of nature as determined by its general laws is
violated, does God will something directly and by a particular volition.20
But Arnauld believes that God’s providence is revealed in every single and
particular aspect of the world. All of nature, from the smallest detail to the
largest cataclysm, is a direct expression of God’s power and other
attributes.
Malebranche’s Shadow 79
This does not mean that God is constantly acting in ad hoc and
unpredictable ways. Divine providence, at least in the realm of nature,
plays itself out in a perfectly lawlike manner. God, Arnauld says,
accomplishes his eternal designs “under the appearance of inferior [i.e.,
natural] causes and through the ordinary course of things in the world.”21
The difference is that, whereas Malebranche’s God (at least as Arnauld
reads him) acts by general laws, through volitions whose content is general
and do not regard anything in particular22 – like a distant king issuing
broad commands about how his subjects should in general behave, come
what may and without paying any attention to individual subjects –
Arnauld’s God acts (in nature) for the most part according to or following
general laws through particular volitions directed at specific things and
events (or, perhaps a better way to put it, the effects of the particular
volitions of Arnauld’s God generally exhibit a lawlike regularity). Like a
king who directly orders an individual subject to perform a certain action
because that is how he wants people in general to behave, Arnauld’s God
sees to it that a leaf falls under certain circumstances (a strong wind,
decreasing hours of daylight) because that is the regular way in which
He desires nature to proceed.
In the realm of grace, wherein Arnauld’s God dispenses with laws and
generalities altogether and acts to save individual souls only through
particular, unmotivated acts of infinite mercy, the unreasonableness of
Malebranche’s position and its inappropriateness for God is even more
evident. Malebranche grants that there are rare times when God’s wisdom,
as determined by Order, require Him to act by a particular volition and to
perform a miracle – for example, to aid the people of Israel or to cause or
forestall some disaster of nature. Moreover, Malebranche maintains that
the creation of the world itself, including all the individual beings it initially
contained, as this is described in the opening chapters of the Bible, must
have taken place through particular volitions. This is because until God
first creates something, there are no natural events to get the system of
general laws working. God can act by general volitions only if there are
particular occasional causes to determine Him to bring about
consequent events; Godmust create the earth, Adam and Eve, and the beasts
surrounding them through particular volitions because until He does so,
there is no world nor any creatures whose activities occasion the working of
the laws governing nature and living beings. But, Arnauld asks, if God can
act by a particular volition to keep Daniel from being eaten by the lions or to
create a lowly fly, then surely Hewould act by a particular volition to keep a
natural disaster from killing thousands or to save a soul from eternal
80 Steven Nadler
damnation, a much more momentous and important achievement,
especially if, as Malebranche insists, His ultimate aim is to build His
“Eternal Temple.” If anything could justify God’s departure from “the
most simple and general ways,” it would be the salvation of a soul that
God wants to save but that is destined for damnation by the laws of grace.
We are not talking here about preventing an overabundant rain from flooding a
field of wheat, or an animal from having six feet instead of four. It is a matter of the
salvation of those whom God presumably wants to save, and of the sanctification
of those whomHe presumably wants to sanctify. And will one dare say that, if God
acted in these cases by particular volitions, then the effect of each volition – that is,
the eternal salvation of a soul that God wants to save, and that was worth the
sacrifice of [the son of] God – would not be worth the action by which God would
save that soul, if He had to accomplish that salvation by a particular volition?23
Only a God acting by particular volitions – in nature and in grace – is a
true providential God. “God orders all things,” Arnauld reminds
Malebranche, “this is what His providence consists in.”24 Only this
conception of God’s action – which makes Him directly and intentionally
responsible for everything that happens – is conducive to the proper
worship of God, to the love and fear of Him alone.25
3
Now let us go back to Arnauld’s criticisms of article thirteen of Leibniz’s
Discourse. Recall that this was written soon after Leibniz completed the
Philosophical and Theological Reflections on Malebranche’s Treatise on
Nature and Grace. The termsof Arnauld’s debate with Malebranche
provide a nice framework for seeing more deeply into what may really be
bothering him in Leibniz’s Discourse outline.
Arnauld is certainly concerned about the ramifications of Leibniz’s view
for divine freedom. But he is also concerned about the way in which
Leibniz’s account of the complete concept of an individual removes God
from direct providential care with respect to every aspect of creation,
distancing God from an immediate, intentional involvement with
everything that happens. As Arnauld initially reads Leibniz’s view, God
may get to choose to create or not create Adam. But having chosen to
create Adam, he neither has any control over the subsequent course of
events nor even any practical intentions regarding them. What happens,
happens because it is embedded in the concept of Adam, whether or not
God wants it to happen, whether or not it is the expression of – or even
consistent with – God’s wisdom.
Malebranche’s Shadow 81
Keeping in mind the proximity of Arnauld’s first letter to Leibniz with
the composition of his response to Malebranche’s account of providence
(less than a year separates the two), Arnauld’s initial objections to Leibniz
appear to be not only an expression of his desire to safeguard God’s
freedom – that is, could God, having chosen to create Adam, possibly
then stop Adam from sinning or keep Judas from betraying Jesus? – but it is
also a natural extension of his recent attack on Malebranche, an attack
grounded in Arnauld’s belief that there is nothing that happens except
because God directly and positively wants and intends it to happen.
Leibniz’s God should seem to Arnauld to be as uninvolved in the unfolding
of events in the world as Malebranche’s God is. Or, to put it in terms
Arnauld might prefer, Leibniz’s God – as Arnauld first understands
it – wills nothing in human history with a particular volition except the
existence of Adam.
I should add that the issue here is not, as Sleigh describes it, a causal
one – that is, whether a particular volition in God is the real cause of some
event.26 Even if, on Leibniz’s view, every event in nature is causally related
to a volition that is particular in God, this would not satisfy Arnauld’s
concern. Rather, the issue is an explanatory one. Is everything that
happens in conformity with and explained by what God directly wants
and intends in particular to happen? Does every individual aspect of the
world express one of God’s providential desires? In his first two letters,
Arnauld, fresh from tearing into Malebranche on just this issue, is under
the impression that in Leibniz’s scheme things fare no better.
Arnauld, of course, gives us good reason to think that this, and not just
divine freedom, is the issue. For example, in the letter ofMay 13, 1686, it is
clear that what bothers Arnauld is that if God knows all the individuals
who have come into the world only because they are all involved in the
individual concept of Adam, then “they would then have been thus
involved independently of God’s decrees.”27 He goes on to insist that, as
he see things, “an infinite number of human events . . . have occurred by the
express and particular commands of God” (emphases added in both
quotes), and not because they are simply “involved in the individual
concept of the possible Adam.”
4
But here is a deeper question. In his third letter to Leibniz, Arnauld
expresses his satisfaction with Leibniz’s response to his inquiries about
Leibniz’s doctrine of the concept of an individual substance and what it
82 Steven Nadler
seems to imply about Adam, his posterity, and the proper understanding
of divine freedom and providence. Of course, it may be that the always-
impatient Arnauld is tired of pressing this point and simply wants to
move on to the next issue. But to anyone familiar with Leibniz’s views on
theodicy and Arnauld’s demands for an acceptable account of
providence, Arnauld’s conciliatory reply here should be puzzling. How
can he be satisfied? After all, like Malebranche, Leibniz believes that while
everything that happens is envisioned by God (in Leibniz’s case, as
constituents of the best of all possible worlds) and nothing happens that
is not strictly speaking brought about by God (and thus presumably
causally related to a volition that is particular), it is not the case that
everything that happens is directly desired or intended by God. To see
this, consider article seven of the Discourse. Leibniz there says that while
everything in creation is certainly in accordance with God’s general voli-
tion insofar as it all “conforms to the most perfect order He has chosen,”
there are many things that God “allows” or brings about with what
Leibniz elsewhere calls a “permissive will” but that are not things that
God directly wills or desires – namely, the evils in the world, especially
human sins.
We can say also that Godwills everything that is an object of His particular volition
[viz., miracles]. But we must make a distinction with respect to the objects of His
general volitions, such as the actions of other creatures, particularly the actions of
those that are reasonable, actions with which God wishes to concur. For, if the
action is good in itself, we can say that God wills it and sometimes commands it,
even when it does not take place. But if the action is evil in itself and becomes good
only by accident, because the course of things (particularly punishment and atone-
ment) corrects the evilness and repays the evil with interest in such a way that in the
end there is more perfection in the whole sequence than if the evil had not occurred,
then wemust say that God permits this but does not will it, even thoughHe concurs
with it.28
Like Malebranche’s God, Leibniz’s God acts knowing full well, even
concurring with, the consequences of His action, including those
consequences that are not really what He desires or prefers, that are not
the objects of particular volitions. Both Malebranche’s God and Leibniz’s
God permit, rather than positively will, the evils that exist in the world.
This should be troubling to Arnauld, and, as perceptive as he is, he might
not need to have read the full text of article seven to see it.
But now look closely at what Leibniz actually says to Arnauld in his
replies to the first two letters. He explains that God’s creative act, in
choosing one possible Adam over all the others, is not just about choosing
Malebranche’s Shadow 83
to create an underdetermined or limited Adam but includes intentions that
are directed at every single thing that occurs in the subsequent course of
events.
Wemust not think of the volition of God to create a certain man Adam as detached
from all the other volitions which He has in regard to the children of Adam and of
all the human race, as though God first made the decree to create Adam without
any relation to his posterity. . . . We must think rather that God, choosing not an
indeterminate Adam but a particular Adam whose perfect representation is found
among the possible beings in the Ideas of God and who is accompanied by certain
individual circumstances and among other predicates possesses also that of having
in time a certain posterity –God, I say, in choosing him has already had in mind his
posterity and chooses them both at the same time. . . . [W]e must think of God as
having a certain more general and more comprehensive volition which has regard
to the whole order of the universe because the universe is a whole which God sees
through and through with a single glance. This more general volition embraces
virtually the other volitions touching what transpires in this universe, and among
these is also that of creating a particular Adam who is related to the line of his
posterity which God has already chosen as such. And we may even say that these
particular volitions differ from the general volitiononly in a single respect, that is to
say, as the situation of a city regarded from a particular point of view has its
particular geometrical plan.29
Notice that while Leibniz says here that there are particular volitions
directed at “what transpires in this universe,” he does not say whether or
not there is a particular volition for every circumstance that transpires in
the universe, leaving open, even suggesting the possibility – which he
knows would be attractive to Arnauld – that every single feature of
creation corresponds to a particular intention in God (in contrast to
Discourse VII, where many things are not the objects of particular
volitions). In his next letter, Leibniz seems to go a bit further and insist
explicitly that every contingent fact included within Adam’s concept
(and thus within the concept of the world) is the object of a correspond-
ing particular desire in God. This allows him to say that whatever
happens, presumably whether it is a good thing or a sin, is an intended
expression of God’s purposes, a result of God’s “resolution” or
“determination”:
All human events cannot fail to happen as they have actually happened, supposing
that the choice of Adam was made. But this is so, not so much because of the
concept of the individual Adam, although this concept involves them, but because
of the purposes of God, which also enter into this individual concept of Adam and
determine the concept of the whole universe.30
Earlier in the same letter Leibniz had said that
84 Steven Nadler
the designs of God regarding all this universe being inter-related conformably to his
sovereign wisdom, He made no resolution in respect to Adam without taking into
consideration everything which had any connection with him. It was therefore not
because of the resolve made in respect to Adam but because of the resolution made
at the same time in regard to all the rest . . . that God formed the determination in
regard to all human events.31
Leibniz, taking his lead from Arnauld, prefers to conclude his explanation
in terms of how this all avoids “fatalistic necessity” and anything “con-
trary to the liberty of God.” But the passage also shows that he is sensitive
to what he knows about Arnauld’s concerns about the universal scope of
divine providence, as these aremanifest in the debate withMalebranche. In
fact, Leibniz is being very clever here. He knows, first of all, that Arnauld
has not seen article seven of theDiscourse, where Leibniz is quite clear that
not everything that “transpires in the universe” is the intended object of a
particular volition in God and is quite open about God’s merely permitting
(but not desiring) some things to happen. Second, by insisting that in
making the free choice to create one world rather than another God does
not merely select some initial collection of substances and then watch
passively and helplessly as the world’s series of events necessarily unfolds
independently of His will; and by explaining that an omniscient God,
knowing full well what every concept of every individual involves, chooses
to actualize one particular set of original substances – that is, the initial
state of one possible world – just because of what will follow necessarily
from them; and by going so far as to say that God has a “resolution” or a
“determination” for every contingent circumstance, even sins, Leibniz can
all but say that every aspect of creation is envisioned by God and forms a
part of His plan, and even (despite what he says in Discourse VII)
corresponds to a particular volition in God.
But notice that what Leibniz does not do in his replies to Arnauld is to
elaborate on the content of theDiscourse article whose title gives Arnauld so
much trouble and to mention anything about God’s merely “permissive”
will, or God’s not desiring certain things that happen – and it is a good thing
for Leibniz that he does not, since these would set Arnauld off as much as
Malebranche’s use of God’s general volitions did. As we have seen, Arnauld
could not accept the idea that God merely permits, as opposed to positively
willing, the evils that exist in the world. Arnauld is committed to the claim
thatGod does, through his providential will, will in particular the existence of
each and every item in the world, including each and every act of sin and the
damnation of every damned soul. If only Arnauld could have seen behind the
scenes here, he would not have so quickly accepted what Leibniz was saying.
Malebranche’s Shadow 85
But then again, Leibniz in 1686 knows exactly what to say to Arnauld.
He knows that Malebranche’s errors on providence are not far from
Arnauld’s mind. He is aware that the person he is now arguing with is
also the author of the just published Reflections – which he has read only
within the last six months – and thus he has no illusions about the demands
that his Jansenist friend will make on any account of divine agency.
Fortunately, Leibniz also knows what it takes to assure Arnauld, rather
misleadingly, that, on the question of the extent of divine providence
throughout the details of nature, they are not that far apart.
Notes
1. Robert C. Sleigh, Jr., Leibniz and Arnauld: A Commentary on Their
Correspondence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).
2. Steven Nadler, “Choosing a Theodicy: The Leibniz-Arnauld-Malebranche
Connection,” Journal of the History of Ideas 55 (1994): 573–589. See also
Sleigh, Leibniz and Arnauld, pp. 46–47.
3. Nadler, “Choosing a Theodicy.”
4. Arnauld toCount Ernst vonHessen-Rheinfels, 13March 1686, inG.W. Leibniz,
Philosophische Schriften, 7 vols., ed. C. I. Gerhardt (Berlin: Weidmann, 1875–
1890; reprinted Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1978; henceforth, GP), vol. II, p. 15.
The translation is from Discourse on Metaphysics/ Correspondence with
Arnauld/ Monadology, ed. and trans. George Montgomery (La Salle, IL: Open
Court, 1980; henceforth, M), p. 73.
5. Leibniz to Arnauld, 14 July 1686, GP II.47–59; M 127.
6. See Discourse on Metaphysics XXX, GP IV.455; M 50.
7. Arnauld to Ernst, 13March 1686, GP II.15; M 73.
8. Letter to Arnauld, 14 July 1686, GP II.48; M 120.
9. For a study of the history of the notion of “general will” and ofMalebranche’s
role therein, see Patrick Riley, The General Will before Rousseau: The
Transformation of the Divine into the Civic (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1986), esp. chs. 1–3.
10. Malebranche’s clearest statement on general vs. particular volitions is at
Treatise on Nature and Grace (henceforth, TNG), Elucidation I.
11. TNG I.57. While miracles are “arbitrary” in the sense that they are violations
of the laws of nature, they are not arbitrary in the stronger sense that there is
no reason for them; Malebranche insists that miracles are necessitated either
by higher-level laws unknown to us or by what he calls “Order,” the eternal
truths that transcend the laws altogether and provide the reasons for them (see
TNG II.45; and Dialogues on Metaphysics VIII.3).
12. See Traité de Morale XXV. For a study of the importance of law – natural,
social, and salvific – in Malebranche’s philosophy, see M.-F. Pellegrin, Le
Système de la loi de Nicolas Malebranche (Paris: J. Vrin, 2006).
13. TNG I.18, Oeuvres completes de Malebranche, ed. André Robinet, 20 vols.
(Paris: J. Vrin, 1958–1976; henceforth, OC), vol. V, p. 32. The translation is
86 Steven Nadler
from Treatise on Nature and Grace, trans. Patrick Riley (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1992), p. 118. Henceforth, R.
14. TNG I.18, OC V.32; R 118.
15. TNG I.59, OC V.63; R 137.
16. Dialogues onMetaphysics IX.9, OCXII.212. The translation is fromDialogues
on Metaphysics and on Religion, ed. Nicholas Jolley, trans. David Scott
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997; henceforth, JS), p. 161.
17. Search After Truth, Elucidation 15, OC III.218. The translation is from The
Search After Truth, trans. ThomasM. Lennon and Paul J. Olscamp
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1980; henceforth, LO), p. 665.
18. Philosophical and Theological Reflections on the New System of Nature and
Grace (henceforth, Reflections), in Oeuvres de Messire Antoine Arnauld,
docteur de la maison et société de Sorbonne, 43 vols. (Lausanne: Sigismond
d’Arnay, 1775; henceforth, OA), vol. XXXIX, p. 197.
19. Reflections, OA XXXIX.238.
20. Ibid., OA XXXIX.312.
21. Ibid., OA XXXIX.303.
22. I argue elsewhere that Arnauld misreads Malebranche on the nature of God’s
volitions; see “Occasionalism and General Will in Malebranche,” Journal of
the History of Philosophy 31 (1993): 31–47.
23. Reflections, OA XXXIX.586.
24. Ibid., OA XXXIX.292.
25. Ibid., OA XXXIX.350.
26. Leibniz and Arnauld, pp. 155–156.
27. GP II.29; M 93.
28. GP IV.432; M 12. See also Theodicy, sections 119 and 265.
29. Leibniz to Ernst, 12 April 1686, GP II.19; M 78–79.
30. GP II.51; M 124.
31. GP II.48; M 120.
Malebranche’s Shadow 87
3
Locke’s Ideas, Rousseau’s Principles, and
the General Will
James Farr
John Locke scarcely appears in discussions of the general will. When he
does, he is usually made to play the part of liberal adversary to Jean-
Jacques Rousseau, whose Social Contract gave enduring fame and notori-
ety to the concept. A crucial exception is to be found in Patrick Riley’s
magisterial conceptual history, The General Will before Rousseau. While
Locke is by no means a central figure in Riley’s history – as compared to
Arnauld, Pascal, Malebranche, Bayle, Montesquieu, and Rousseau him-
self – he is at least an instructive one, who contrasts with them on key
points of theology and politics. One senses more of the presence of Locke,
as in the closing sentence of Riley’s preface. “The genesis of the ‘general
will’ lies in God; the creation of the political concept – yielding a covenant
and law that is a mosaic of the Mosaic, the Spartan, the Roman, and the
Lockean – is the testament of Rousseau.1”
In Riley’s other works, Lockean voluntarism about the will and a
psychology based on sensation proved influential on Rousseau.2 It was
Locke, in short, who inspired Rousseau’s insistence that the citizen must
will freely to will generally and whose political education must be tailored
to his senses and psyche.
In the spirit of, and drawing upon, Riley’s conceptual history, this
chapter further incorporates Locke into it, from Locke’s perspective and
Rousseau’s, too. Well before Rousseau, Locke had directly engaged the
general will in his critiques of Nicolas Malebranche and the English
Malebranchean, John Norris. Indeed, Locke twice quoted Malebranche’s
use of “general will” – as he himself translated it – when criticizing
Malebranche’s “opinion of seeing all things in God” and defending his
own account of “ideas.”He was, it appears, the first to have done so, well
88
before the English translations of Malebranche’s Recherche de la Vérité
were published. Moreover, Locke quoted or paraphrased the texts of
Scripture by St. Paul that were at issue in the original general-will debates
over salvation and church membership. He was also steeped in the works
of the other leading figures in the debate beyond Malebranche – Antoine
Arnauld, Blaise Pascal, and Pierre Bayle.
When, half century later, Rousseau defended himself against the
governmental condemnation of Social Contract and Émile, he singled
out Locke “in particular” as having shared with him “the same princi-
ples.”3 Those Rousseauian principles, I believe, were none other than
Locke’s ideas – politically transformed from his theological reflections –
about “theWill of the society, declared in its laws,” to which citizens owed
their liberty.4That is, citizens had such liberties as they had because of their
laws; and those laws declared their sovereign will and supreme power, as a
voluntary society. When, furthermore, the will of society was violated or
the law usurped by tyrannical magistrates, the people had the right to resist
and to reassert their supreme legislative power by creating a new govern-
ment. These “Lockean” ideas lay at the core of the general will, as
Rousseau conceived it, and offer us a broader perspective on Locke and
the conceptual history of the general will.
theologians of the general will
To undertake a conceptual history of the general will – with Jean-Jacques
Rousseau’s mature reflections as its end-in-view – would be an enormous
undertaking. Conceptual historians would have to consider the many
theoretical strands evident in Rousseau’s writing,5 as well as the many
complex constituents of the general will as he conceptualized it. For these
reasons, it makes good historical and philosophical sense – and imposes a
decisive economy – to trace the concept when it ismatched by the complex
term “general will.”6 Thus, Patrick Riley justifiably and rigorously traced
the complex “transformation of the divine into the civic” where “general
will” was terminologically invoked by various writers. With that historio-
graphical decision, Riley identified (as far as his “diligent inquiry”
revealed) the first known use of “general will” in Antoine Arnauld’s
Première Apologie pour M. Jansénius in 1644.7
The terminological inventiveness of Arnauld was occasioned by the
long-standing debate between Christian theologians over the scope of
salvation – among them, Augustinians, Pelagians, Thomists, Jesuits,
Jansenists, Calvinists, Oratorians, and Socinians. At the heart of this
Locke’s Ideas, Rousseau’s Principles, and the General Will 89
debate was a hermeneutic question about Scripture, touching upon the
interpretation of God’s will and grace. How should Christians interpret St.
Paul’s message – “God wills that all men be saved” – as declared in 1
Timothy 2:4?8 In defending Jansenius and his severe reading of Augustine,
Arnauld upheld the Pauline doctrine that it was indeed God’s “general
will” to save all men. But he proceeded, hermeneutically, as Riley demon-
strates, to render “the ‘general will’ . . . as little general as possible,” doing
so “by diminishing the compass of ‘all’ [and] by shrinking the meaning of
‘will.’”9 Thus, a much smaller subset of “men” were actually chosen to
receive God’s particular grace and be saved in the afterlife as an elect few.
The terminology of “general will” was thus unleashed, according to
Riley. Famous theologians and philosophers – the brilliant Jansenist
Pascal, the visionary Oratorian Malebranche, and the sometime
Calvinist Bayle – soon contested the meaning of salvation and God’s will
in St. Paul’s Epistle to Timothy. Moreover, the concept underwent exten-
sive innovation in a mere few decades. It became a theological vehicle to
interpret other texts of Scripture, as well as to proffer varying accounts of
God’s design of the universe and the beings populating it. In Pensées
(1670) and Écrits sur la Grâce (c. 1656), Pascal transferred “general
will” to another Pauline doctrine found in 1 Corinthians 12 about mem-
bers in the church (read expansively to cover “bodies politic”).
Malebranche responded to Arnauld at great length in Traité de la Nature
et de la Grâce (1682) which began its life as a “clarification” appended to
Recherche de la Vérité (1680). In both works, Malebranche not only
contested the scope of salvation as Arnauld delimited it, but also expanded
on the generality of God’s will. God willed that all men be saved, more
inclusively, but also that the entire universe be ordered and governed by
simple, uniform, natural laws. This, in turn, became the basis for
Malebranche’s theories of occasional causation and of human “ideas,”
as well. The indefatigable Arnauld responded with Des Vrayes et des
Fausses Idées (1683) – on general-will topics ranging from grace to
ideas – prompting the return favor from Malebranche, Defense de
l’Auteur de la Recherche de la Vérité (1684). Nothing appeared capable
ofending the cascade of critiques and counter-critiques between them.
Bayle entered this fray initially by following Malebranche in finding
God’s “general will” as a law-governed plan for the natural and moral
universe, especially in his famous Pensées Diverse sur la Comète (1682). In
this text on the extraordinary comet of 1680 and in later less-
Malebranchean texts – especially Commentaire Philosophique (c. 1686)
and Dictionnaire Historique et Critique (1697) – Bayle innovated yet
90 James Farr
further. Before him, the “general will” had at most been suggestive of
political content, as in Pascal’s “bodies politic.” But Bayle made the
general will a manifestly political concept regarding parental authority,
magistracy, and justice. It was Bayle, then, who, in Riley’s words,
“secularized” and “politicized” the “general will,” making him the direct
predecessor to Montesquieu and Rousseau.10
Neither these theorists nor their texts escaped the attention of John
Locke. Locke became familiar with them in different contexts: during his
travels to France in the 1670s, while exiled in Holland in the 1680s, and
when engaged in his own debates of the 1690s. His extensive library
contained several of the central or related texts on nature, grace, and the
general will.11 He owned the 1675 and the (“Nouvelle”) 1678 editions of
the Pensées. Hailing him as “that prodigy of parts,” Locke subsequently
paraphrased Pascal’s account of “reputation” and employed a variant of
his famous wager.12 Among his prized books, Locke numbered
Malebranche’s Traité de la Nature et de la Grace (1684) and no less than
four editions ofRecherche de la Vérité. As if that were not enough “search-
ing for the truth” in Malebranche – for whom he confessed “a personal
kindness”13 – Locke also had on his shelves Critique de la Recherche de la
Vérité (1675) by Simon Foucher,Critique de la Critique de la Recherche de
la Vérité (1675) by Robert Desgabets, and Malebranche’s ownDefense de
l’Auteur de la Recherche de la Vérité (1684). He first became acquainted
with Malebranche’s nemesis and dogged critic, the Port Royal Jansenist
Arnauld, as the co-author of La Logique, ou l’Art de Penser (1666), whose
fourth French edition (1674) was in Locke’s library and to whose English
translation Locke may have lent a hand.14 Locke’s acquaintance was not
passing since one finds considerable resonance between the Port Royal
logic and Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, particularly
on “ideas.”15 He owned several other works of Arnauld’s, including Des
Vrayes et des Fausses Idées (1683). From this crucial book, Locke took
extracts of criticisms of Malebranche in 1684–1685,16 two years after
Henri Justel, the bibliophile friend of Bayle, called to his attention the
debate between Arnauld and Malebranche.17 Bayle and his works were
extremely important to Locke, as well, when, as often, he agreed with
them, and when, especially in the case of an imagined society of atheists, he
did not. The two philosophers may have met; and they certainly referred to
each other in their respective correspondence. “I value his opinion in the
first rank,” Locke shared with his Quaker friend Benjamin Furly in hopes
of getting Bayle’s thoughts on the Essay.18 Bayle quoted or cited passages
from the Essay and A Letter concerning Toleration in the Dictionnaire, a
Locke’s Ideas, Rousseau’s Principles, and the General Will 91
work Locke owned and hailed as “Bayle’s incomparable dictionary.” He
also recommended its reading for “aGentleman.”19 Locke not only had on
his shelves Commentaire Philosophique, he likely wrote the unsigned
review of it in Jean Le Clerc’s Bibliotheque Universelle et Historique.20
Fascinated with the comet – and engaged in correspondence about its
properties and measurement21 – Locke perused his own first edition to
comment upon a particular section of Bayle’s Pensées Diverses,22 the text
wherein began the politicization of the general will.
His library books aside, Locke engaged the scriptural issues – beginning
with salvation – touching upon the general will. In different texts, Locke
consistently identified salvation as the grace of God, the crux of Christian
belief, and “absolutely necessary to happiness.”23 However, he provided
“no detailed discussion of soteriology,” as John Marshall tells us, coming
close only when condemning “those who presumed to define whom God
would save.”24 This distanced Locke from, say, the Calvinism of Bayle or
the Jansenism of Arnauld. It also aptly characterized Locke’s response to
Jonas Proast amidst their acrimonious letters on toleration whose duration
and word-count rivaled the debate between Arnauld and Malebranche. In
them, Locke condemned Proast’s orthodox Anglican dictate that magis-
trates could use “force or coactive power” over ordinary believers to “keep
them in the right way to salvation.” “It is plain,” Locke accused Proast,
“that you have an itch to be handling the secular sword.”25 He quoted
nearly verbatim 1 Timothy 2:4 in the final chapter of the Third Letter of
Toleration: “It is the will of God also, that men should be saved; but to this
it is not necessary that force or coactive power should be put into men’s
hands, because God can and hath provided other means to bring men to
salvation: to which you [Proast] indeed suppose, but can never prove force
necessary.”26
Having denied original sin in earlier works – since men sinned freely and
copiously enough to warrant eternal miscarriage “by their own fault”27 –
Locke went on to note: “That some men shall be saved, and not all, is, I
think past question to all that are Christians: and those that shall be saved,
it is plain, are the elect.”28 But Locke neither enumerated the saved nor
backed his reference to “the elect”with anything like a systematic theology
of election.29 Indeed, he had no “systematic theology” at all.30
There was, however, something of a political theology at work in
Locke’s dispute with Proast. That is, politics attended God’s general will
that all men should be saved. “Government is the will of God,” proclaimed
the sentence immediately preceding the allusion to St. Paul’s epistle to
Timothy. This concluded Locke’s argument that God-given “reason has
92 James Farr
taught [men] to seek a remedy in government” to “avoid mutual inju-
ries.”31 Thus God gave “the community itself” – through its magistrates –
the right to punish violations of civil law, though not in matters concerning
salvation. Moreover, in willing government, God willed civil laws. He
willed them in general, leaving particular civil laws to the free will of
men in their particular contexts.
Locke dealt even more directly with 1 Corinthians 12, the second signal
Scripture text in the conceptual unfolding of the general will. He did so inA
Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul when applying himself
“to the Study of the way to Salvation.”32 This work of scriptural herme-
neutics came at the end of the decade when Locke was most engaged with
the French theologians of the general will, especially Malebranche.
Composed in 1703–1704, it was his last literary act. However, Locke
was goaded into this task a few years earlier by another orthodox divine,
Jonathan Edwards. Edwards had accused Locke’s Reasonableness of
Christianity (1695) as being “atheistic” and “all over Socinianized.”33
Amidst these damning accusations, Edwards charged that Locke’s procla-
mation that the Gospels contained the “fundamental articles of faith” in
effect denied the doctrinal importance of the Epistles. Locke responded
with A Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity (1695). “I have
as high a veneration for the epistles as you [Edwards] or any one can
have.”34 And Edwards’ charge was easily refutable by Locke’s frequent
invocation of the Epistles in earlier writings – though, being anonymous,
Locke could hardly refer his critics to them.Perhaps unsurprisingly, then,
the Epistles – including both Corinthians – figured in Locke’s responses to
Edwards, Proast, and Edward Stillingfleet, the bishop of Worcester. A
Paraphrase and Notes silenced any doubt on the matter when published
posthumously in 1705–1707 under Locke’s name.
In the hermeneutic preface to Paraphrase and Notes,35 Locke described
“Contents,” quoted “Text” (namely, the King James Bible), and offered
“Paraphrase” of five of the Epistles of St. Paul, including 1 Corinthians.
His paraphrase of chapter 12 – verses 12, 14, 18, 19, 20 and 25 – captures
the spirit of his reading.
For as the body being but one hath many members, and all the members of the body
though many yet make but one body, soe is Christ in respect of his mistical body the
church. . . . For the body is not one sole member but consists of many members all
vitaly united in one common Sympathie and usefulness.. . . . Accordingly god hath
fitted several persons as it were soe many distinct members to several offices and
functions in the church by proper and peculiar gifts and ability which he has bestowd
on them according to his good pleasure. But if all were but one member what would
Locke’s Ideas, Rousseau’s Principles, and the General Will 93
become of the body? there would be noe such thing as a humane body. Noe more
could the church be edified and framed into a growing lasting societie if the gifts of the
spiritwere all reduced to one. But nowby the various gifts of the spirit bestowedon its
several members it is as a well organized body wherein the most eminent member
cannot despise the meanest.. . . . [Thus] god hath soe contrived the Symmetry of the
body, that he hath added honour to those parts that might seem naturally to want it,
that there might be noe disunion noe schisme in the body, but that the members
should all have the same care and concerne one for an other.36
With only slight license, one could (in Pascalian and Malebranchean terms)
paraphrase Locke’s own paraphrase as proclaiming it the general will of
God that members be fitted into the body by their peculiar gifts and abilities.
The “body” in question – while analogized to the human one – was the
church or, rather, any given church. When citing Locke’s paraphrase, Riley
suggests that, in contrast to Pascal, Locke (“with characteristic sobriety and
caution”) read 1Corinthians 12 in “a more orthodox and cautious”way.37
If (debatably) fair in this context, any broader portrait of Locke as sober,
cautious, or orthodox would not capture his controversial views about the
Trinity or the divinity of Christ.Much less does it capture the polemical sting
of his theological forensics against Proast and Edwards in the decade before
Paraphrase and Notes. Locke, it is true, did not replace “church” with
“body politic” in the manner of Pascal. However, it cannot be denied or
avoided that Locke directly quoted and paraphrased theCorinthian Epistles,
as Pascal did not, giving Pascal greater leeway.
A broader assessment of Locke’s thoughts on membership in a body
would invoke bodies politic (made clearer below when discussing “the
members of a Commonwealth . . . combined together into one coherent
living Body”).38 The earlier reference to a church as “a growing lasting
societie” already hints in this direction. Moreover, Locke’s view of a church
as a “free and voluntary society” was utterly political in the context of
Proastian advocacy of uniformity and the use of force by magistrates to
police faith andworship.39While it is true, then, that Locke did not expressly
use the term “general will”when discoursing about membership in a church
or body politic, it is not an unfair rendering of his political theology, in light
of what we know he knew of Pascal, Bayle, and Malebranche.
locke’s ideas
Locke, yet, did in fact invoke the “general will” – in term and concept –
when confronting Malebranche over “ideas.” And he did so
before – setting the scene for – his encounters with Proast, Edwards, and
94 James Farr
general-will scriptural texts. It was John Norris, the premier acolyte of
Malebranche and a countryman whom Locke had once befriended, that
prompted the matter.40 Indeed, Norris published the first critique of An
Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690) as an appendix to his
Christian Blessedness (1690), under the title Cursory Reflections on a
Book call’d, An Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690). Norris
began by offering up “so rare a Curiosity asMr. Lock’s book” and his own
“Free Censure” of its “pretty Smiling sentences.” He then proceeded in
forty-four pages to freely censure Locke’s “impugnation” of innate prin-
ciples and of “Platonists” (with their alleged “Gibberish” about “the Soul
of the World”). Norris’s principal criticism took aim at Locke’s account of
“ideas” as mental perceptionswhose empirical origins and natural history
were to be found in the impressions of sensation. This made them a
species of “Material Beings,” an inconceivable notion to Norris and
other neo-Platonists. Norris insisted that, whereas Locke could not, “I
can tell what an Idea is, viz. the Omniform Essence of God partially
represented or exhibited, and how it comes to be united to my Mind.”
“You know Sir,” he addressed Locke, “I account for the Mode ofHuman
Understanding after a very different way, namely, by the Presentialness of
the Divine λοηος or Ideal World to our Souls, wherein we see and perceive
all things.”41 Behind these enigmatic words lay doctrines of a divinely
ordained, law-governed universe and, in particular, of Vision in God.
And behind these doctrines lay Nicolas Malebranche’s Recherche de la
Vérité whose Latin translation Norris duly cited.42
Recherche de la Véritéwas a brilliant work of great complexity, at odds
in most respects with An Essay concerning Human Understanding.43
Locke allowed that it was the work of an “acute and ingenious author,”
filled with “a great many very fine thoughts, judicious reasonings, and
uncommon reflections.”44 However, he clearly recognized the yawning
gulf between Malebranche’s masterwork and his own on “the way of
ideas.” That gulf was reinforced in correspondence, especially with
William Molyneux.45 Locke also refuted – or challenged to a
standstill – both Malebranche and Norris. While he had taken notes as
early as 1684–1685 from his first copy of Recherche (1676) and from
Arnauld’s Des Vrayes et des Fausses Idées, it was Norris’s attack on the
Essay in 1690 (and again in a second edition of 1692) that spurred him to
respond in four separate manuscripts.46 Locke’s pique was evident in
them, especially “JL Answer to Mr. Norris Reflection [16]92” and
“Some other Loose Thoughts” (1693), posthumously published as
Remarks upon Some of Mr. Norris’s Books (1720). Locke dismissed the
Locke’s Ideas, Rousseau’s Principles, and the General Will 95
Platonism in Norris’ Cursory Reflections and in Reason and Religion
(1689) about ideas being literally “in God.” Malebranche, however,
played a far larger part in Locke’s critique, consistent with the
Oratorian’s fame across Europe. The longest and most important of the
four manuscripts – “JL Of seeing all thing[s] in God 93” – was composed
and paginated by Locke in 1693. Locke seriously considered adding it as a
full chapter to a subsequent edition of the Essay, but, in the end, decided
against it for fear of needless controversy.47 However, he encouraged
posthumous publication, and it came out, in 1706, as An Examination
of P. Malebranche’s Opinion of Seeing All Things in God. In the
manuscript and the Examination, Locke expressly addressed the
“general will.”
Locke was, it appears, the first in England or in English to cite
Malebranche on the “general will” when criticizing him and Norris in the
(unpublished) manuscript of 1693.48Had he published it as a chapter of the
Essay, this would surely have been recognized during his lifetimeor soon
thereafter. In any case, Locke did in fact use the term “general will” in
assailing Malebranche before the English translations of Recherche by
Thomas Taylor and Richard Sault, both in 1694.49 He also appears to
have done so even before Norris did. Of course, it was Norris who
brought the greatest attention to Malebranche’s doctrines in his own
works – notably The Theory and Regulation of Love (1688), Reason and
Religion (1689),50 Christian Blessedness (1690), and Cursory Reflections
(1690). But the term “general will”was not used in these works, though the
concept lay behind what Norris stated about love, vision in God, and a law-
governed universe. In his later andmost important work of 1701 and 1704 –
The Theory of the Ideal or Intelligible World, to which he was already
calling advance notice in Cursory Reflections – Norris would use the term
when recycling his Malebranchean doctrines.51
The most objectionable features of Malebranche’s account of the gen-
eral will – as regards Vision in God – came out in Locke’s “Summary of his
Doctrine.” In the middle of section 47 of the 1693 manuscript (appended
below) – which, after editing, became section 42 of the Examination –
Locke quoted in translation the key sentences from the penultimate para-
graph of Book 3, Part 2, Chapter 6 of Recherche de la Vérité.
Thus our Soules depend on God all manner of ways..For as it is he which makes
them feele pleasure and pain and all the other sensations by the natural unionwhich
he has made between them and our bodys which is nothing else but his decree and
generall will, So it is he who by the natural union which he has made betwixt the
will of man and the representation of Ideas which the immensity of the Divine being
96 James Farr
conteins, makes them know all that they know and this natural union is also
nothing but his generall will.52
Locke then pressed his objections: “This phrase [of] the union of our wills
to the Ideas conteind in Gods immensity, seems to me a very strange one
and what light it gives to his Doctrine I truly cannot finde.”53 Being
strange – whether in the sense of odd or novel – was not in and of itself
objectionable since Locke called many doctrines “strange” – including a
few of his own.54 What was problematic, however, was the dogmatic
assertion that human ideas – much less speculative opinions or articles of
religion – depend in any significant way upon the will.55 In A Letter
concerning Toleration, Locke had expressly argued that “to believe this
or that to be true, does not depend upon our Will.”56 Indeed, he claimed
that he was so surprised to see Malebranche invoking “the will” in con-
nection with “ideas” that he compared different editions of Recherche to
ensure that some editorial error was not to blame. Similarly problematic
was the lack of explanatory power in Malebranche’s doctrine: “this union
of our wills to the ideas contained in God’s immensity, does not at
all explain our seeing of them.” Our having ideas, via sight, on
Malebranche’s or indeed any other account, “is brought about in a way
we comprehend not.”57
Locke’s own doctrine of ideas as perceptions emphasized empirical
origins and natural history. Ideas, he argued, were produced by “the
motion of some parts of our bodies” –whether “nerves or animal spirits” –
after receiving the sensory impressions of sight. This doctrine was in no
way undermined by Malebranche’s speculations, even granting that
everything in the universe was due to the general “will of God.”58 The
options need only be weighed.
Here is the will of God giveing union and perception in both cases, but how that
perception is made in both ways seemes to me equally incomprehensible. In one
[that is, Malebranche’s], God discovers Ideas in himself to the Soule united to him
when he pleases and in the other [Locke’s own] he discovers Ideas to the Soule or
produces perceptions in the Soule united to the body by motion according to Laws
establishd by the good pleasure of his will.59
Locke concluded the section by confessing his “incapacity to comprehend”
such subtle processes that God had produced by his will and laws. He
would need, he said, to “know a great deal more of him [God] and
myself.”60 Locke’s theological humility, if a trifle feigned, was
nonetheless the counterpart of an accusation against the hubris, impiety,
and enthusiasm of Malebranche for claiming to know so much of God’s
Locke’s Ideas, Rousseau’s Principles, and the General Will 97
will. Molyneux certainly decried the “enthusiasm” he claimed to find in
Malebranche – and this was an accusation soon echoed in English
philosophical circles.61 Locke was even more pointed in his charges in
this regard when coupling Norris with Malebranche as “Dictators in
the Commonwealth of learning.”62 “I hope they will not deny God the
privilege to give such a power of motion, if he pleases.” But, alas, these
dictators “make God like themselves, or else they would not talk as
they do.”63
The precise difference between Locke andMalebranche – it is important
to underscore – did not turn upon any concept of the general will as such,
much less their shared view of God’s design of an orderly, law-governed
universe.64 Locke clearly granted, as quoted above (and in the appendix),
that general “Laws establishd by the good pleasure of his will” governed
the universe. This did not require a doctrine of “an irresistible, fatal
necessity” – much less “the religion of Hobbes and Spinoza” – as Locke
thought Norris implied.65 For God created his universe to be populated
with human beings with free will. Rather, the precise difference between
Locke and Malebranche might be recast in terms reminiscent of first
Timothy. It is God’s general will that all men see. However, some
particular men might be born or become blind by means of natural
processes or human accidents that are fully compatible with God’s
design of a law-governed universe. But how or by what mechanism men
see is not known as a matter of certainty, whether “ideas” are (with
Malebranche) Platonic conceptions lodged inGod or (with Locke) sensory
perceptions of material beings created by God. Locke and Malebranche
embraced competing “hypotheses” about these matters, as Locke termed
them.66 Not incidentally, Locke’s sophisticated reflections on “method” –
consisting of balancing out the evidence for competing hypotheses67 –was
composed in just this context of his debate with Malebranche and Norris.
Locke’s intervention in the debate over the general will – structured as
it was by Malebranche’s doctrine of Vision in God – thus had as one of its
very striking consequences Locke’s own reflections on the hypothetical
method of scientific reason.
From Locke’s perspective, the debate over God’s general will subsumed
the debate over human ideas, a debate in which he had the highest stakes.
Long familiar with the works of theology and philosophy in which the
“general will” figured prominently, Locke contributed to the debate when
defending the “ideas” of his Essay concerning Human Understanding
against Malebranche and Norris. Like Pascal, Locke gave matters a
political twist when decrying “Dictators in the Commonwealth of
98 James Farr
learning” and underscoring that government was the will of God.
However, he did not overtly politicize the “general will” as would Bayle,
Montesquieu, and Rousseau in due course. However some of his
most important theological reflections on will, law, and liberty had direct
implications for the general will in its overtly political form.No less a figure
than Jean-Jacques Rousseau fully appreciated this.
rousseau’s principles
From Rousseau’s perspective, “the general will . . . conveys everything he
most wanted to say.”68 In concluding The General Will before Rousseau,
Riley quotes this authoritative declaration by Judith Shklar. Endorsing it,
he lists Locke as a voice that is “too resonantnot to be heard” in
Rousseau’s crowning concept.69 Rousseau himself, it would appear,
thought Locke’s voice was resonant in his own political theory. In
concluding the sixth of the Letters Written from the Mountain (1764) –
in reference to “natural and political right,” as well as “matters of
Government” – he stated forthrightly: “Locke in particular treated them
exactly in the same principles as I did.”70 The questions naturally arise:
what were these principles, and how were they related to the general will?
Prior questions exist, too: how serious was Rousseau’s invocation of
Locke, and what broader affinities between the two make Rousseau’s
invocation credible?
From exile in 1764, Rousseau invoked Locke in these terms when
defending The Social Contract and Émile.71 Allegedly destructive of
religion and government, these instantly famous works had been
condemned and publically burned in Paris and Geneva in 1762.
Rousseau responded to warrants for his arrest or inquisition by fleeing
France to Switzerland and, within a year, renouncing his Genevan
citizenship. He also sent a letter to some Genevan reformers – whom he
considered his supporters – to make a legal représentation on his behalf.
The représentants did so, albeit cautiously.72 Then, Rousseau’s enemies
among the Genevan authorities denounced Rousseau’s letter as “the tocsin
of sedition.”73 Rousseau and the représentants came under attack in
Letters Written from the Country (1763) by Jean-Robert Tronchin, the
public prosecutor in Geneva. Tronchin had advised the government to
censor Rousseau’s works in the first place for, among other crimes, seeing
“all forms of Government only as provisional forms, as Experiments that
one can always change.”74 “Can anyone,” Tronchin asked rhetorically,
“close his eyes to the fact that in Émile or in The Social Contract, Religion
Locke’s Ideas, Rousseau’s Principles, and the General Will 99
and Government are delivered into the hands of their most audacious
critic?”75 Rousseau answered in Letters Written from the Mountain
(1764) – soon condemned, too – rebutting Tronchin, accusing the
Genevan authorities of violating the republican principles of their consti-
tution, and defending The Social Contract and Émile against critics and
censors.
Given this charged and dangerous context, Christopher Kelly and
Eve Grace – in their recent edition of the Letters – find a polemical
defensiveness in Rousseau’s remark about Locke. But they see no shared
principles at stake, only a similar boldness.
This statement is sometimes taken as a claim that Rousseau agreed with Locke’s
conclusions about the principles of political right, but, in context, it seems more
obviously to be a claim that the two of them wrote bold general treatments of
political right without making explicit applications to particular governments.76
Kelly and Grace are right to underscore the polemical context of
Rousseau’s defensiveness; and Rousseau did call attention to famous
thinkers who treated politics, as he did, with “some boldness.” He explic-
itly named Sydney, Althusius, Locke, Montesquieu, and the Abbé de
St. Pierre.77 However, he then invoked Locke a second time – “in
particular” – for their sameness of principle, not manner of treatment.
In that grave context, moreover, Locke was not an inappropriate figure
with whom Rousseau might well have identified his principles. Locke, too,
had been attacked for allegedly undermining religion and government, as
in the controversies with Proast and Edwards. And there were similar
controversies surrounding the Two Treatises of Government, as well.
There is good reason to believe, then, that Rousseau meant what he said
about sharing the “same principles” with Locke.
Rousseau’s invocation of Locke was not limited to the sixth Letter.
Other gestures suggest Rousseau’s intellectual affinities with Locke. Locke
was one of only three philosophers – with Plato and Malebranche – in
whose works Rousseau found “the most profound metaphysics.”78 The
“Essay of Locke” was named in The Confessions (written in 1769) as a
select “book of philosophy” – alongside “the Port Royal Logic” and
unnamed texts by “Malebranche, Leibniz, Descartes, and so on” – with
which Rousseau “began” his self-education.79Agreement with Locke on a
project of philosophy also occurred earlier in Rousseau’s development, to
judge by a 1739 ditty:
Tantôt avec Leibniz, Malebranche et Newton
Je monte ma raison sur un sublime ton,
100 James Farr
J’examine les lois des corps et des pensées,
Avec Locke je fais l’histoire des idées.80
The recurring figure of Malebranche is noteworthy, especially for “the
laws of bodies and thoughts.” However, it is “with Locke” – not
Malebranche – that Rousseau undertook a natural history of ideas,
implying empirical origins and sense impressions. Thus Rousseau, by his
own admission, placed himself in the epistemological company of his
friend, the ideologue Abbé de Condillac, who translated and popularized
Locke’s Essay.81 Rousseau also went on to include a sensationalist
psychology in the “creed” of the Savoyard priest in Émile. This invites
speculation that, had he known for sure,82 Rousseau would have sided
with Locke againstMalebranche about the manner in which God’s general
will caused the transmission of human “ideas.” Rousseau, though, did not
endorse Condillac’s later materialism or the speculation that God created
thinking matter – “whatever Locke may say.”83
Rousseau displayed other affinities and debts to “the wise Locke.”84 In
the draft of Discourse on Political Economy, he followed Locke’s view on
“fundamental law,” bidding his readers to “see Locke” about the obligation
“by a general will” that all citizens contribute to the public weal.85 InÉmile,
he repeatedly singled out Locke for praise (or blame) regarding Some
Thoughts concerning Education. “Better reasons and more sensible rules
cannot be found than those in Locke’s book.”86 Sensible rules were crucial
to Rousseau because, as Riley argues, a proper regimen of education must
nourish and instruct the general will of a sovereign citizenry. “The Creed of
the Savoyard Priest,” moreover, echoed Locke’s theological reflections and
ecclesiastical criticisms, by then well known. Like Locke’s, Rousseau’s
theology embraced reasonableness, free will, and doctrinal simplicity. Both
entail overt denials of original sin, atheism, and papal authority, while
displaying a guarded skepticism about miracles, the Trinity, and the divinity
of Christ. The minimal core of theocentric belief necessary for founding
and maintaining a legitimate civic order in The Social Contract bore
Locke’s traces, as well. Indeed, “here Rousseau’s debt to John Locke’s
Letter concerning Toleration is most striking.”87 This included, a policy of
toleration in the form of its paradoxical complement – not tolerating intol-
erance. The “horrible doctrine” of intolerance was condemned as “contrary
to good morals” in Émile.88 In The Social Contract intolerance was the one
and only “negative dogma” of civil religion, for “wherever theological
intolerance is allowed, it is impossible for it not to have some civil effect;
and as soon as it does, the Sovereign is no longer the Sovereign.”89
Locke’s Ideas, Rousseau’s Principles, and the General Will 101
Toleration is one of two principles that Christopher Brooke has
identified when offering the best contemporary treatment of Rousseau’s
invocation of Locke in the sixth of the Letters Written from the Mountain.
Regarding toleration, Brooke argues: “Rousseau’s central conclusions
about religion and politics are in fact extremely Lockean.”90 The only
reason for hesitating to identify toleration as one of the very “same
principles” Rousseau claimed to share with Locke, on that fraught
occasion, was that toleration was not at issue in the charges against
Rousseau emanating out of Geneva or Paris; and the topicscarcely
shows up in the Letters when Rousseau defended himself against those
charges.91 While toleration genuinely bridges the political theories of
Locke and Rousseau, it seems that the “same principles” confessed in the
sixth letter lie elsewhere, closer to the charges that Rousseau’s “principles
[were] destructive of all Governments.”92 The second of the two principles
that Brooke identifies – the distinction between sovereignty and govern-
ment – leads to the core of the matter, once reconstructed to pay particular
attention to law, liberty, and the (general) will.
When summarizing the key doctrines ofThe Social Contract in the sixth
of the Letters, Rousseau reiterates that the state or body politic in action
was “sacred and inviolable.”93 Sovereignty was most sacredly in action
when the citizenry made fundamental law. Law itself was “a public and
solemn declaration of the general will, on an object of common interest.”94
Thus, Émile’s tutor lectured, “the essence of sovereignty consist[s] in the
general will.”95 Given the mutually constitutive character of citizen and
sovereign, the general will could be characterized as either the will of a
citizen to realize the public good in making law or the will of the sovereign
in decreeing law for the public good. Conceptually, these were comple-
mentary locutions that Rousseau deployed to make his signature point
about lawmaking and the general will. When an individual followed the
law, he was a “subject,” in Rousseau’s sense. He was also, to put it differ-
ently, following “the supreme direction of the general will.”96 Either way,
the subject was following the law that he helped make as a citizen, as a
member of the sovereign body. In obeying the law, therefore, he obeyed
himself. In this, he remained free, at liberty.97 Indeed, according to the
ninth of the Letters, “no liberty is possible except in the observation of the
Laws or the general will.”98 He drove home the point with some fury
against Tronchin in the sixth, shortly before invoking Locke:
Read it, Sir, this Book that is so decried, but so necessary; throughout you will see
the Law put above men; throughout you will see liberty laid claim to, but always
102 James Farr
under the authority of the laws, without which liberty cannot exist, and under
which one is always free, in what manner one might be governed.99
Being “governed” or governing, then, was not strictly a matter of
sovereignty.
“The constitution of the State and that of the Government are two very
distinct things,” Rousseau insisted.100 In identical formulations in The
Social Contract and Letter number six, he asked and answered the
question:
What is Government? It is an intermediate body established between the subjects
and the Sovereign for their mutual communication and charged with the execution
of the Laws and the maintenance of civil as well as political liberty.101
Government was but the executive power, constrained to apply general
laws (dictated by the general will) to particular objects or actions. Ideally, it
“always executes the Law and it never executes anything but the Law.”
Alas, herein lurks trouble because the government was “a body itself”with
“its own will”; and the government’s will and the general will “sometimes
agree with and sometimes combat each other.” Worse yet:
Since sovereignty always tends toward relaxation, the Government always tends to
become stronger. Thus the executive Body ought in the long run to prevail over the
legislative body, and when the Law is finally subjected to men, only slaves and
masters remain; the State is destroyed.102
The provocative terminology of “slaves,” “masters” and “destruction”
channeled the republican and agonistic lexicon of The Social Contract.103
This is strikingly evident in Book III, Chapters 10 and 11: “Of the Abuse of
Government and of Its Tendency to Degenerate” and “The Death of the
Body Politic.” There, Rousseau put the onus on government, almost
uniquely, when explaining the decline of the active sovereignty of the
people. “Just as the particular will incessantly acts against the general
will, so the Government makes a constant effort against Sovereignty.” It
is the Government that “usurps the sovereign power.” It becomes “no
longer anything to the rest of the People but its master and tyrant.” And
“tyrant and usurper are two perfectly synonymous words.”104
Given such provocation, Rousseau’s readers – whether persecuting
magistrates or radical republicans – had good reason to doubt the
innocence of his plea in the sixth of the Letters that “far from destroying
all Governments, I have established all of them.”105 But they had no good
reason to doubt the sincerity of his concluding invocation of Locke. For
Locke like Rousseau indeed held the “same principles” in these matters,
Locke’s Ideas, Rousseau’s Principles, and the General Will 103
not only about the tyrannical tendencies of government to usurp supreme
power, but the salvific vision of a free citizenry under law.
The last sentence of Locke’s Two Treatises of Government
proclaimed that “the People have a Right to act as Supreme” – even to
“continue the legislative in themselves” – on those revolutionary occasions
in which power had been “forfeited” by “the Miscarriages of those in
Authority.”106 This brought to a close Locke’s blistering critique of
tyranny, usurpation, and “slavery under Arbitrary Power.”107 His
critique, in turn, justified “an appeal to heaven” – namely, armed
resistance to governments that had violated their trust in failing to rule
by law.108 The origin of Two Treatises in English crises of the early 1680s
did not dampen the universal appeal of such language of critique and
resistance, to judge by later revolutionaries – especially in France – who
summoned Locke’s stirring words for their own causes.109
The radical conclusions that Locke reached were based on some
fundamental principles. The most important and theoretically fecund of
these, implicit above, was precisely the conceptual distinction between
sovereignty and government. However, terminologically, the first of the
Two Treatises was such a sustained onslaught against “absolute sover-
eignty” that, in the second, Locke used the term “sovereignty” sparingly,
even when shorn of “absolute.” In its place, he used “supreme Power,”
which, in turn, he connected to law, distinguished from the executive, and
bottomed on the consent of the people.110 Moreover, “this Legislative is
not only the supream power of the Commonwealth, but sacred and
unalterable in the hands where the Community have once placed it.”111
Yet, the people could alter this “sacred” power in extremis, for “the
Community perpetually retains a Supream Power of saving them-
selves.”112 Political salvation in and through (making or changing) the
law was not a mere theoretical possibility for Locke.113 “The People of
England” had in fact exerted their supreme power in 1689 when, altering
the legislative power, they “saved the Nation when it was on the very
brink of Slavery and Ruine.”114
Law – to articulate these matters differently – was a declaration of “the
Will of Society,”115 just as natural law was a declaration of the will of
God.116 Through the legislative power – to which individual citizens must
have given their free consent – a larger political ontology centered on the
will emerged in Locke’s theory.
The Members of a Commonwealth are united, and combined together into one
coherent living Body. This is the soul that gives Form, Life, and Unity to the
104 James Farr
Commonwealth. From hence the several Members have their mutual Influence,
Sympathy, and Connexion: And therefore when the Legislative is broken, or
dissolved, Dissolution and Death follows. For the Essence and Union of the
Society consist[s] in having one Will, the Legislative.117
Just as any body wished its own good,118 the bodypolitic wished the
public good through its laws. “The public good is the rule and measure
of all law-making,” declared Locke in A Letter concerning Toleration. “If
a thing be not useful to the commonwealth . . . it may not presently be
established by law.”119 The general point – as “public good,” “common
good,” “good of the whole,” or “good of the people” – was repeatedly
made in Two Treatises.120 Along with castigating Sir Robert Filmer for
the “Tumult, Sedition, and Rebellion” that the doctrine of absolute
sovereignty had unleashed, this was the very note on which Locke began
the second of the Treatises. “Political power” was a “Right of Making
Laws” in a commonwealth “only for the Publick Good.”121
Locke went further to connect law with liberty – indeed, liberty under
law – as a theological principle loaded with political implication. “God
[gave]Man . . . a freedom ofWill, and liberty of Acting . . .within the bounds
of that Law he is under.”122 The concept of law here was expansive, cover-
ing natural and civil law. In an utterly remarkable passage, Locke forged a
unity between several concepts and principles (shared later by Rousseau):
law, liberty, public good, free will, consent, property, and nondomination
(as the freedom from the arbitrarywill of others). The passage embedded the
striking phrase: “where there is no Law, there is no Freedom.”
For Law, in its true notion, is not so much the Limitation as the direction of a free
and intelligent Agent to his proper Interest, and prescribes no farther than is for the
general Good of those under that law. . . . So that, however it may be mistaken, the
end of Law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge Freedom: For in
all the states of created beings capable of Laws, where there is no Law, there is no
Freedom. For Liberty is to be free from restraint and violence from others which
cannot be, where there is no Law: But Freedom is . . . a Liberty to dispose, and
order, as he lists, his Person, Actions, Possessions, and his whole Property, within
the Allowance of those Laws under which he is; and therein not to be subject to the
arbitrary Will of another, but freely follow his own.123
In glossing this passage, Peter Laslett made the dramatic connection:
“Locke is much closer here than was once recognized to Rousseau’s
position that men can be compelled to be free, compelled by the law of
the legislative which they have consented to set up.”124 If Locke would
have winced at Rousseau’s articulation of the verbal paradox of “being
forced to be free,” he would nonetheless have understood the point – since
Locke’s Ideas, Rousseau’s Principles, and the General Will 105
he himself was making it – that citizen-members of the body politic are
free – and freely follow their own will – when they obey the laws that are
declared by the will of Society to which they have given their consent. This
is surely one of the “same principles” – connected to the others in the above
paragraphs – to which Rousseau was referring when he justifiably called
Locke to his defense.
conclusion
John Locke was not, as Rousseau was, a theorist of the general will. In his
political and theological writings, there was neither sustained use of the
requisite terminology nor systematic exposition of the concept’s reach and
range. He was certainly no Rousseauian avant la lettre. Too many differ-
ences separated them. To take one example, Locke agreed that the will of
society was sacred and inviolable, but he could not have abided Rousseau’s
claim that sovereignty (or the general will) was “absolute.”His critique of
“absolute sovereignty” precluded such a pairing of terms.125 To take
another, he would surely have rejected the portrait of all Christianity in
Rousseau’s discussion of civil religion.126 But some of their most cherished
principles were nonetheless “the same,” as Rousseau confessed. In so
doing, from his perspective, Rousseau inducted Locke into the conceptual
history of the general will. From Locke’s perspective, the induction
would not have been unwarrantedly proleptic, either, as would be his
canonization as bourgeois, liberal, or libertarian. His criticism of
Malebranche and Norris had occasioned his use of “general will” while
being familiar with Arnauld, Pascal, Bayle, and contests over Scripture.
The conceptual history of the general will is richer for the incorporation
of Locke into it, just as Locke is more richly understood in connection with
Rousseau, Malebranche, and the general-will theologians. We understand
these thinkers better, for understanding them together; and we get a fuller
picture of the range of sources, insights, and debates on a defining concept
of modern political thought.
appendix
“JL Of seeing all thing[s] in God [16]93”
(Bodleian Library, MS Locke d. 3, pp. 1–88)127
§ 47. The reader must not blame me for makeing use here all a long of the
word Sentimentwhich is our Authors owne and I understood it so litle that
106 James Farr
I knew not how to translate it into any other. He concluds that he beleives
there is no appearance of truth in any other way of Explaining these things,
and that his of seeing all things in God is more than probable. I have
considerd with as much indifferency and attention as is possible and I must
owne it appears to me as litle or lesse intelligible than any of the rest, and
the Summary of his Doctrine, which he here subjoyns, is to me wholly
incomprehensible. His words are Thus our Soules depend on God all
manner of ways..For as it is he which makes them feele pleasure and pain
and all the other sensations by the natural union which he has made
between them and our bodys which is nothing else but his decree and
generall will, So it is he who by the natural union which he has made
betwixt the will of man and the representation of Ideas which the immen-
sity of the Divine being conteins, makes them know all that they know and
this natural union is also nothing but his generall will. This phrase the
union of our wills to the Ideas conteind in Gods immensity, seems to me a
very strange one and what light it gives to his Doctrine I truly cannot finde.
It seemd so unintelligible to me that I guessed it an error in the print of the
Edition I used whichwas the 4th printed at Paris 78 and therefore consulted
the 8° printed also at Paris and found it Will in both of them, Here again
the immensity of the Divine Being being mentioned as that which conteins
in it the Ideas to which ourwills are united, which Ideas being only those of
quality (as I shall shew hereafter) seemes tome to carry with it a very grosse
notion of this matter as we have above remarked but that which I take
notice of principally here is that this union of ourwills to the Ideas conteind
inGods immensity does not at all Explain our seeing of them. This union of
our wills to the Ideas or as in other places of our Soules to God is, says he,
nothing but the will of God. And after this union, our seeing them is only
when God discovers them i.e. our haveing them in our mindes is nothing
but the will of God, all which is brought about in a way we comprehend
not; and what then does this Explain more than when one says our soules
are united to our bodys by the will of God and by the motion of some parts
of our bodys v.g. the nerves or animal Spirits have Ideas or p<er>ceptions
produced in them and this is the will of God. Why is not this as intelligible
and as clear as the other? Here is the will of God giveing union and
perception in both cases, but how that perception is made in both ways
seemes to me equally incomprehensible. In one, God discovers Ideas in
himself to the Soule united to him when he pleases and in the other he
discovers Ideas to the Soule or produces perceptions in the Soule united to
the body by motion according to Laws establishd by the good pleasure of
his will, but how it is done in the oneor the other I confesse my incapacity
Locke’s Ideas, Rousseau’s Principles, and the General Will 107
to comp<r>ehend. So that I agree perfectly with him in his conclusion, that
there is nothing but God that can enlighten us, but a clear comprehension
of the manner how he does it I doubt I shall not have, till I know a great
deale more of him, and my self than in this State of darknesse and
ignorance our Soules are capable of.
Notes
1. Patrick Riley, The General Will before Rousseau: The Transformation of the
Divine into the Civic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. xiii
(hereafter, General Will).
2. Patrick Riley, “Rousseau, Fenelon, and the Quarrel,” The Cambridge
Companion to Rousseau, ed. Patrick Riley (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001), pp. 78, 88, 91. Also see Patrick Riley, Will and
Political Legitimacy: A Critical Exposition of Social Contract Theory in
Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1982).
3. Letters Written from the Mountain, in The Collected Writings of Rousseau,
vol. 9, eds. Christopher Kelly and Eve Grace, trans. Christopher Kelley and
Judith R. Bush (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2001),
p. 236 (hereafter, Letters).
4. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1960), 2.151, 213, 222. Cf. 2.22, 57 (hereafter,
Two Treatises followed by treatise and section numbers, all italics in original).
5. In “Rousseau, Fenelon, and the Quarrel” (p. 89), Riley identifies these
strands: “Fenelonian, Plutarchian, Lockean, Roman, Christian, Platonic,
Machiavellian, Spartan, and Augustinian.” For a sustained study of the
Platonic strand, see David Lay Williams, Rousseau’s Platonic
Enlightenment (University Park: State University of Pennsylvania Press,
2007).
6. Quotation marks used for the complex term “general will,” but not for the
concept of the general will. On “matching” terms and concepts, see
Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), vol. 2, p. 352.
7. General Will, p. 6.
8. Some modern theologians and historians have come to doubt – as
seventeenth-century theologians did not doubt – that the epistles to
Timothy were not actually written by Paul. For discussion, see Garry Wills,
What Paul Meant (New York: Viking, 2006), p. 16.
9. General Will, pp. 9, 11.
10. Ibid., esp. pp. 14–21, 82–83.
11. JohnHarrison and Peter Laslett,The Library of John Locke (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1965).
12. John Locke, Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 2.10.9 (hereafter, Essay followed by book,
108 James Farr
chapter, and section numbers). On “reputation” and Pascal’s wager, see
references in James Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in
Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 212 and 216.
More generally on Locke and Pascal, see John Barker, Strange Contrarieties:
Pascal in England during the Age of Reason (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s
University Press, 1975).
13. The Correspondence of John Locke, 8 vols., ed. Edward S. de Beer (Oxford:
Clarendon Press: 1976–1989), #1887 from Locke to William Molyneux
(hereafter, Correspondence followed by letter number).
14. Locke was also familiar with Arnauld’s co-author, Pierre Nicole, as early as
1664. He later translated three of Nicole’s Essais de Morale. See John Locke
as Translator: Three of the Essais of Pierre Nicole in French and English, ed.
Jean S. Yolton (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2000). A longer study would
include Nicole for his attention to God’s will and laws, especially “la loi
generale de la charité.”
15. John Yolton argues more strongly that Locke “followed’ Arnauld regarding
ideas. See Perceptual Acquaintance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1984), pp. 89–93.
16. See Charlotte Johnson, “Locke’s Examination of Malebranche and Norris,”
Journal of the History of Ideas 19 (1958): 551–558, at p. 556 n12.
17. Correspondence, #747A listing books Justel was sending (or Locke should
acquire), including “le Systeme de la Nature et de la grace par le Pere
Malebranche auquel Mr arnaud respond.” “In the history of debates about
this debate,” Denis Moreau has added, “Locke is probably the precursor of
all commentators on the debate, being greatly interested in Arnauld,
Malebranche, and their quarrel.” See his “The Malebranche-Arnauld
Debate,” in The Cambridge Companion to Malebranche, ed. Steven Nadler
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 93, 109 n6.
18. See Correspondence, #3198.
19. Some Thoughts concerning Reading and Study for a Gentleman, in Locke:
Political Essays, ed. Mark Goldie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
[1703] 1997), p. 354.
20. For Locke’s authorship, see John Marshall, John Locke: Resistance,
Religion, and Responsibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994), p. 300.
21. See Correspondence, #623 with Nicholas Toinard, endorsed by Locke as
“Comet.” Also note “the motion of a comet” in Essay, 2.14.22.
22. “Sacerdos” (1698), in Locke: Political Essays, pp. 343–345 when
commenting on section 127 of Bayle’s Pensées.
23. A Third Letter for Toleration in The Works of John Locke, vol. 6 (London:
J. Johnson, 1801), p. 165 (hereafter Third Letter andWorks generally).
24. Marshall, John Locke, p. 333.
25. Third Letter, p. 503.
26. Ibid., p. 504.
27. “It is necessary, for the vindication of God’s justice and goodness, that those
who miscarry should do so by their own fault” in Third Letter, p. 160.
28. Third Letter, p. 521.
Locke’s Ideas, Rousseau’s Principles, and the General Will 109
29. His fragment on “Election” is telling. See Victor Nuovo, ed. John Locke:
Writings on Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), pp. 17–18.
30. Quoting from the Editor’s Introduction to John Locke, Paraphrase andNotes
on St. Paul’s Epistles, ed. Arthur Wainwright (Oxford: The Clarendon Press,
1988), vol. 1, p. 29 (hereafter, Paraphrase and Notes). CompareMarshall on
Locke’s “creedal minimalism” and “theological eclecticism” in John Locke,
pp. 341, 345.
31. Third Letter, pp. 503–504.
32. Paraphrase and Notes, vol. 1, p. 116.
33. Locke repeats these charges in A Vindication of the Reasonableness of
Christianity inWorks, vol. 7, pp. 159–60.
34. Works, p. 175.
35. Locke gave it the title, An Essay for the Understanding of St. Paul’s Epistles
by Consulting St. Paul Himself.
36. Paraphrase and Notes, vol. 1, pp. 233–234.
37. General Will, pp. 19–20.
38. Two Treatises, 2.212. This passage (and many others like it) should give
pause to those interpreters who make (too) much of Locke’s so-called indi-
vidualism and liberalism.
39. A Letter concerning Toleration in Works, vol. 6, p. 18. More accessible
editions are James Tully, ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1983), p. 28, and
Mark Goldie, ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2010), p. 15.
40. For Norris (and the English reception of Malebranche), see Charles
J. McCracken, Malebranche and British Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1983). McCracken notes Locke’s animus toward Norris because of
prying into a personal letter of his to Lady Masham in 1692. This can be
traced inCorrespondence, ##1546, 1548, 1559, 1564, 1575, 1595 and 1606.
41. John Norris, Cursory Reflections: Or, Discourses upon the Beatitudes of our
Lord and Savior Jesus Christ (London, 1690), pp. 20, 22, 31, 36.
42. Norris, Cursory Reflections, p. 24.
43. See Steven Nadler,Malebranche and Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1992). I follow Nadler in distinguishing “ideas” as either (Malebranchian)
conceptions or (Lockean) perceptions. Locke also disagreed withMalebranche
and Norris over their doctrine of occasionalism (or occasional causation). But
he did not quote or discuss the “general will” in that connection.44. With these words Locke beganAnExamination of P.Malebranche’sOpinion
of Seeing All Things in God (London: 1706).
45. Summarizing the gulf, Molyneux wrote Locke that Norris was “an incon-
vincible Enemy” because he was “so overrun with Father Malbranch and
Plato.” Correspondence, #2324.
46. See Paul Schuurman, “Vision in God and Thinking Matter: Locke’s
Epistemological Agnosticism Used against Malebranche and Stillingfleet,” in
Studies on Locke: Sources, Contemporaries, and Legacy, eds. Sarah Hutton
and Paul Schuurman (Dordrecht: Springer, 2008), pp. 177–193.
47. Correspondence, ##1620, 1887. Discussing him so extensively would also
have made Malebranche too outsized in the Essay, making Locke seem
defensive.
110 James Farr
48. General Will surprisingly fails to mention Locke’s quoting “general will” in
Malebranche.
49. William Grigg gave Locke notice of these in Correspondence, #1752: “The
translating humour is very much in Vogue and Malebranche’s Search of
Truth is follow’d by Mr Taylor here with great application whilst a Rival-
Translation [by Sault] sweats under the Press at London.”
50. Locke cited Reason and Religion in “JL Answer to Mr. Norris” (1692) and
“Some other Loose Thoughts” (1693).
51. John Norris, An Essay towards the Theory of the Ideal or Intelligible World
(London, 1701), pp. 43, 289 (in reference to “certain Laws of Motion, which
are the same with what we call theCourse of Nature, and are indeed no other
than the fix’d and general Will of its Author”). Malebranche’s translator,
Thomas Taylor, concurred with this sentiment, claiming that everything is
determined by “fixt and standing Laws of Nature” being “the GeneralWill of
an All-wise and Universal Being, who holds the reins of the Universe in his
Hands.” Quoted in Stuart Brown, “The English Malebrancheans,”
Cambridge Companion to Modern Philosophy, ed. Steven Nadler
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 380.
52. Quotation from § 47 of “JL Of seeing all thing[s] in God [16]93,” Bodleian
Library, MS Locke d. 3, pp. 1–88 (transcription appended below). A digital
copy may now be found at http://www.digitallockeproject.nl.
53. “JL Of seeing,” § 47.
54. See Essay, 1.2.4; 3.6.38; also Two Treatises, 1.80; 2.13, 180. Locke allows
his “very strange doctrine” (at 2.9) that anyone may punish violators of the
law of nature.
55. As he stated in the manuscript “Recherche”: “the will is not ordinarily
necessary to haveing of ideas.” Moreover, “many have not the ideas they
will.”
56. Letter concerning Toleration inWorks, vol. 6, p. 40.
57. “JL Of seeing,” § 47.
58. Ibid.
59. Ibid.
60. Ibid.
61. Correspondence ##1857 and 1887, from Locke to Molyneux, place enthusi-
asm and Malebranche in proximity; #1867 and 2221, from Molyneux to
Locke, contain charges of the “enthusiastical” notions of Malebranche and
Norris, respectively. For other English critics of Malebranchean enthusiasm,
see McCracken, Malebranche and British Philosophy, pp. 10–12. Locke
intended to write a manuscript on “enthusiasm” – alongside the one on
“Method” – at the time he was criticizing Malebranche and Norris. He
added the chapter “Of Enthusiasm” to the fourth edition of the Essay
(4.19), hints from which indicate that his likely targets included
Malebranche and Norris, as well as Quakers (and other inspired sectaries).
The first line hails the “search for truth” and quickly complains of those who
would assume “anAuthority of Dictating to others” (Essay, 4.19.1–2) what it
is that God sees and wills.
62. “JL Of seeing,” § 3.
Locke’s Ideas, Rousseau’s Principles, and the General Will 111
63. “JL Answer to Mr Norris” and Remarks upon Some of Mr. Norris’s Books,
§§ 11, 15.
64. “All things observe a fixed law of their operations.” Essays on the Law of
Nature, in Locke: Political Essays, ed. Goldie, p. 86.
65. “JL Answer,” § 16.
66. For example, “JL Of seeing,” §§ 2 and 5, and “JL Answer to Mr Norris,” §
16. Locke embraced the “corpuscularian hypothesis” and referred to some of
his own doctrines as “hypotheses.”
67. James Farr, “The Way of Hypotheses: Locke on Method,” Journal of the
History of Ideas 48 (1987): 51–72, with Locke’s manuscript on “Method”
appended. Also see Peter Anstey, John Locke and Natural Philosophy
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
68. Judith Shklar, Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau’s Social Theory
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 184.
69. General Will, p. 260.
70. Letters, pp. 230, 235 f. Rousseau’s words figure in the title of Christopher
Brooke, “‘Locke en particulier les a traitées exactement dans les mêmes
principes que moi’: Revisiting the Relationship between Locke and
Rousseau,” in Locke and Political Liberty: Readings and Misreadings, eds.
ChristopheMiqueu andMason Camie (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2009),
pp. 69–81.
71. For the Letters in relation to The Social Contract andÉmile, see JamesMiller,
Rousseau: Dreamer of Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1984), esp. chs. 3–4.
72. See RichardWhatmore, “Rousseau and theReprésentants: The Politics of the
Lettres Écrites de laMontagne,”Modern Intellectual History 3, no. 3 (2006):
385–413.
73. On “the tocsin of sedition,” see Maurice Cranston, The Solitary Self: Jean-
Jacques Rousseau in Exile and Adversity (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1997), ch. 4, esp. pp. 67–68. For context, also see Leo Damrosch, Jean-
Jacques Rousseau (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), chs. 18–20.
74. Quoted in Miller, Rousseau, p. 81.
75. Jean-Robert Tronchin, Letters Written from the Country, trans.
Kenneth Goodwin (Sussex: Center for Intellectual History, 2006), p. 7 (refer-
ring to p. 11 in the original).
76. Letters, p. 326 n48. For others who share this view, see those listed in Brooke,
“Locke en Particulier,” pp. 71–73.
77. Ibid., pp. 235–236.
78. Ouevres Complete, vol. 4, p. 1111. Quoted in General Will, p. 197; and
Williams, Rousseau’s Platonic Enlightenment, pp. 116 n26, 207 n1.
79. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 237. Quoted in General Will, p. 196.
80. Quoted in General Will, p. 197.
81. The project of Condillac and the ideologueswas a Lockean one, as they saw it.
See George Lichtheim, The Concept of Ideology (New York: Vintage, 1967).
82. It is uncertain whether Rousseau read Locke’s Examination, though it had
long been available in print and he was familiar with the criticisms of
Malebranche.
112 James Farr
83. Émile, ed. P. D. Jimack, trans. Barbara Foxley (London: Dent, 1974), p. 241.
84. The “wise Locke” is noted this way Émile (Jimack, ed. p. 22) for counseling
no drugs to children. He is more importantly noted this way in Rousseau’s
Discourse on the Origins of Inequality in reference to Locke’s logical
“axiom” about “property” and “injury” in Essay 4.3.18 (as distinguished
from the substantive theory of property inTwoTreatises). SeeTheDiscourses
and Other Early Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 166. Voltaire and Montesquieu, too,
referred to “the wise Locke.” Not unlike Locke’s reference to “the judicious
Hooker,” this conveys a guarded respect, rhetorically useful when making
contentious points.
85. The Social Contract, ed. and trans. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 29, 295.
86. Readers of Some Thoughts concerning Education know how much more
indebted Rousseau was to Locke than he allowed in Émile.
87. Helena Rosenblatt, Rousseau and Geneva: From the First Discourse to the
Social Contract, 1749–1762 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997), p. 265.
88. Émile, p. 273n.
89. The Social Contract, p. 151.
90. Brooke, “Locke en Particulier,” p. 76. Brooke acknowledges Pierre-Maurice
Masson, La Religion de J. J. Rousseau, 3 vols. (Paris: 1916). As noted in
conclusion to this chapter, Rousseau’s views on civil religion and his critique
of Christianityare not “extremely Lockean,” limiting the comparison
between the two thinkers.
91. The sole exception was a sarcastic reference to “that spirit of toleration that
[Voltaire] preaches ceaselessly, and that he sometimes needs.” Rousseau
followed this with an imaginary speech by Voltaire – which infuriated
Voltaire when he read of it – but nothing of his own considered views
about toleration. Letters, pp. 225, 326 n38.
92. As Rousseau reiterated the charges in Letters, p. 234.
93. The Social Contract, p. 63.
94. Letters, p. 232.
95. Émile, p. 511.
96. Ibid., p. 508.
97. Famously in The Social Contract, p. 54: “Obedience to the law one has
prescribed to oneself is freedom.”
98. Letters, p. 301.
99. Ibid., p. 234.
100. Ibid., p. 233.
101. Ibid., p. 232; and The Social Contract, p. 83 (in slightly different
translations).
102. Ibid., p. 232.
103. On the lexicon of “slavery” in republican thought, generally, see
Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998).
104. The Social Contract, pp. 106–108.
Locke’s Ideas, Rousseau’s Principles, and the General Will 113
105. Letters, p. 235.
106. Two Treatises, 2.243.
107. Ibid., 2.222 (and the rest of chapter 16, “Of Conquest”). “Slavery” in this
political sense and domestic context had nothing to do with New World
slavery in which Locke was nonetheless deeply implicated. See James Farr,
“Locke, Natural Law, and NewWorld Slavery,” Political Theory 36 (2008):
495–522.
108. Ibid., 2.241–242 (and the general legitimation of resistance in the final
chapter, “Of the Dissolution of Government”).
109. In his introduction to Two Treatises (p. 15), Peter Laslett noted that “during
‘L’an III de la République Française’ (1795), [Two Treatises] appeared in
revolutionary Paris in four different sizes, a neat tapering pile.”
110. Important instances may be found in Two Treatises, 2.9, 131, 132, 134, 135,
138, 149, 153.
111. Two Treatises, 2.134.
112. Ibid., 2.149.
113. Might it be said that “the appeal to heaven” presumed, as a principle of
Locke’s political theology, that it was God’s general will that all men save
themselves from tyrants and oppressive governments?
114. Two Treatises, Preface (added in 1689).
115. Ibid., 2.151. Also see important references at 2.22, 57, 149, 212, 214.
116. Ibid., 2.135. Cf. 1.92.
117. Ibid., 2.212. Cf. 2.96. At 2.135, Locke quotes Hooker on “the Law” being
“the very Soul of a Politick Body.”
118. Locke, like Rousseau later, also argued the logical complement of this,
namely, that a body (individual or collective) cannot be supposed to will itself
harm. Locke insists (at 2.168) that it is “out of a Man’s power so to submit
himself to another as to give him a liberty to destroy him.”
119. Tully, ed., Letter concerning Toleration, p. 39.
120. Important instances may be found in Two Treatises, 1.92; 2.3, 11, 89, 131,
134, 135, 143, 158, 162–167, 222.
121. Two Treatises, 2.3.
122. Ibid., 2.58.
123. Ibid., 2.57.
124. Introduction, Two Treatises, p. 113.
125. The Social Contract, pp. 61–63. Perhaps Locke would have needed only to
point out the irony or contradiction in Rousseau using the unguarded adjec-
tive “absolute” in the chapter “Of the Limits of Sovereign Power.”
126. See Terence Ball, “Rousseau’s Civil Religion Reconsidered,” Reappraising
Political Theory: Revisionist Studies in the History of Political Thought
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).
127. A digital copy is available at http://www.digitallockeproject.nl.
114 James Farr
4
Spinoza and the General Will
David Lay Williams
Judith Shklar wrote, “The phrase ‘general will’ is ineluctably the prop-
erty of one man, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He did not invent it, but he
made its history.”1 To be sure, no one disputes Rousseau’s ownership of
the term, yet its origins has invited much speculation. Threads of the
general will have been traced to Montesquieu,2 Malebranche,3 Leibniz,4
Arnauld,5 Pascal,6 Pufendorf,7 and Gersonides.8 Most accounts of its
origins, however, have one thing in common – its source in Platonic
metaphysics. Patrick Riley has made this particularly evident, citing
Montesquieu’s,9 Malebranche’s,10 and Leibniz’s11 affection for Plato
and Platonic ideas. This affection is matched by an equally powerful
distaste for Hobbes’s and Spinoza’s perceived materialism12 which, as
they see it, seems to preclude the very extension of filial bonds that
enables the general will. Indeed, it is fair to say that the general will has
been traditionally understood as emanating from an early-modern
Platonist movement.
It is, then, surprising that perhaps the least Platonic of all the modern
metaphysicians, Benedict Spinoza,13 also appears to have employed a
variant of the general will even before Malebranche. To be sure, the
general will does not dominate Spinoza’s political thought as Rousseau’s
would dominate his. But careful examination of Spinoza’s work reveals it
to play a significant role. Indeed, his version of the general will resides close
to the core of his political thought in ways that parallel Rousseau’s.14
This essay examines the nature and role of the general will in Spinoza’s
political thought, drawing special attention to how it deviates from the
dominant Platonic version. Spinoza’s general will is unorthodox, like his
philosophy generally. And this originality provides a stark contrast and
115
intriguing alternative to the more widely known variants of the general
will. A surprising revelation in Spinoza’s naturalistic “common mind” is
the role played by love and harmony – in contrast to the emphasis on
fear assumed to underlie naturalistic politics. So while Spinoza shares
little of the metaphysics underlying the general will tradition, he shares
much in substance. Finally, I suggest that Spinoza’s naturalist approach
to the general will might be relevant to contemporary approaches in
political theory – specifically, in Rawls. Spinoza’s naturalism is far more
in tune with Rawls’s own metaphysics, and at the same time his appeals to
the bonds of community might temper communitarian critiques of
the Rawlsians, were they to avail themselves of Spinoza’s approach.
1. spinoza’s “one mind” or general will
Although Spinoza is never cited as part of the general will tradition, he
employs a phrase that evokes the concept: the “common mind” (veluti
mente). For Spinoza, citizens bound together in a state “are all guided, as it
were, by one mind.”15 This term – rendered as “one mind,” “union of
minds,” or “harmony of minds” – appears several times in Spinoza’s
treatment of political foundations16 and is clearly central to his conception
of the state. Yet his various employments of it serve as much to confuse as
enlighten his readers. I identify three contexts in which he describes a
community as governed by a “common mind.” Each context draws on
different faculties to achieve this harmony, and each is burdened by its own
particular flaws. Nevertheless, as society evolves from its lowest to highest
forms, it achieves more perfectly this preservation, since “the best method
of ensuring that one preserves oneself as far as possible is to live in the way
that reason prescribes.”17
1.1. Building the Common Mind, Part I: the Republic of Fear
Spinoza’s naturalism plays a significant role in his politics. Namely, he
argues that political analysis must begin with a full accounting of human
nature as it is in reality rather than with what it might aspire to be; and
human nature in a state of nature is nothing more than a bundle of
emotions. These are primarily dedicated – somewhat clumsily – to the
object of self-preservation.18 But since most individuals suffer from
inadequate knowledge, their impetus to self-preservation manifests itself
in myriad conflicting fashions.19 Thus, humankind’s natural condition is
strife and conflict.20
116 David Lay Williams