{ 107} 2. What Rousseau means to indicate by his expression, “the General Will,” may seem to many persons, as he clearly saw, to have no actual existence. It is of the nature of a principle operating among and underneath a great variety of confusing and disguising factors, and can only be defined by the help of an “as such” or “in so far as.” It is, we might say, the will of the whole society “as such” or the wills of all individuals “in so far as” they aim at the common good. It is expressed in law, “in so far as” law is what it ought to be; and sovereignty, “as such,” _i.e._ when truly itself because rightly acting for the common interest, is the exercise of the General Will. In its idea, as the key to the whole problem of self-government and freedom under law, it is that identity between my particular will and the wills of all my associates in the body politic which makes it possible to say that in all social co-operation, and in submitting even to forcible constraint, when imposed by society in the true common interest, I am obeying only myself, and am actually attaining my freedom. It embodies indeed the same factors as the conception of self-government, but in a shape which is a stage nearer to reconciliation. It postulates a will which in some sense transcends the individual whose will it is, and is directed upon an object of wider concern. And in one way or other, we know that this may be, and indeed always is the case, for our will is always directed to something which we are not.
We may, perhaps, approach Rousseau’s thought more successfully by starting from the idea of what is implied in the nature of will, as a characteristic { 108} of an intelligent being. We may then find ground for conceiving that my will or yours, as we exercise it in the trivial routine of daily life, does not fulfil all that it implies or suggests. It is narrow, arbitrary, self-contradictory. It implies a “true” or “real” or “rational” will, which would be completely, or more completely, what ours attempts to be, and fails. Thus, it has been said that what Rousseau really aimed at, with his conception of the General Will, was the will “in itself,” or the will as it would be if it carried out what its nature implies and demands.