4. The other and more fruitful direction of Rousseau’s speculations upon the General Will is to be found in his remarks on the function of the Legislator. We will approach them by help of a short restatement of the problem as it now stands.
It was observed above that what Rousseau had before him in his notion of the General Will might { 118} be described as the “Will in itself,” or the Real Will. Any such conception involves a contrast between the Real Will and the Actual Will, which may seem to be meaningless. How can there be a Will which is no one’s Will? and how can anything be my Will which I am not fully aware of, or which I am even averse to?
This question will be treated more fully on psychological grounds in a later chapter. For the present, it is enough to call attention to the plain fact that often when people do not know what they mean, they yet mean something of very great importance; or that, as has commonly been said, “what people demand is seldom what would satisfy them if they got it.” We may recall the instances [1] in which even Mill admitted that it is legitimate to infer, from the inherent nature of will, that people do not really “will” something which they desire to do at a given moment. The example of slavery is a striking one. A man may contract to become a slave, but no civilised government will enforce his contract at law, and the ultimate reason for the refusal is, as Mill in effect points out, that man’s nature is to exercise will--to have liberty--and a resolution to divest himself of this capacity must be taken as _ipso facto_ void, by contradicting the very essence of humanity. [2]
[2] “Liberty is the quality of man.” (Rousseau, _Contrat Social_).
Now the contradiction, which here appears in an ultimate form, pervades the “actual” will, which we exert from moment to moment as conscious individuals, through and through. A comparison of our acts of will through a month or a year is { 119} enough to show that no one object of action, as we conceive it when acting, exhausts all that our will demands. Even the life which we wish to live, and which on the average we do live, is never before us as a whole in the motive of any particular volition. In order to obtain a full statement of what we will, what we want at any moment must at least be corrected and amended by what we want at all other moments; and this cannot be done without also correcting and amending it so as to harmonise it with what others want, which involves an application of the same process to them. But when any considerable degree of such correction and amendment had been gone through, our own will would return to us in a shape in which we should not know it again, although every detail would be a necessary inference from the whole of wishes and resolutions which we actually cherish. And if it were to be supplemented and readjusted so as to stand not merely for the life which on the whole we manage to live, but for a life ideally without contradiction, it would appear to us quite remote from anything which we know. Such a process of harmonising and readjusting a mass of data to bring them into a rational shape is what is meant by criticism. And criticism, when applied to our actual will, shows that it is not our real will; or, in the plainest language, that what we really want is something more and other than at any given moment we are aware that we will, although the wants which we are aware of lead up to it at every point.