We can see that some notion of this kind floats before Rousseau’s mind from the predicates which he assigns to Sovereignty and the General Will, which are for him nearly convertible terms.
Sovereignty, for example, is inalienable and indivisible; [1] that is to say, it is a simple consequence of the nature of a body politic, “that by which a people is a people.” You can no more alienate or break it into parts than you can alienate or break into parts the use of your own judgment. To be capable of sovereignty means to be a people “as such” or “as a whole,” that is a living and choosing people. The people may of course give general orders to subordinates to hold good till revoked, as I may give a power of attorney for more or less specified purposes to another man. But that is the delegation “of power, not of will.”
[1] Bk. II., chs. i. and ii. Here Rousseau is following Hobbes very closely.
We see the author’s intention still more clearly when he maintains that the General Will is always { 109} right, [1] and is indestructible. [2] Though it is always right, as Will, yet the people may be misled in their knowledge and judgment of details; though it is indestructible in the human breast, yet a man may vote at the polling booth on another issue than that which he would have before him if he consulted the General Will. He may answer by his vote not the question, “Is this for the public good?” but the question, “Is this for my private good?” If so, he does not indeed extinguish the General Will in himself, but he evades it. Or, as we might say, the man does not altogether cease, however ignorant or interested, to possess a man’s leaning towards making the real best of himself, though his private interest may at times so master his mind as to throw the higher or common good into the second place. Thus, the relation of the general will to a community is plainly apprehended by Rousseau much in the spirit of the doctrine that man always aims at something which he takes to be good. And so the General Will is as much implied in the life of a society as some sort of will for good in the life of an individual. The two, in fact, are not merely analogous but to a great extent identical. The General Will seems to be, in the last resort, the ineradicable impulse of an intelligent being to a good extending beyond itself, in as far as that good takes the form of a common good. Though this impulse may be mastered or cheated in a degree, yet, if it were extinct, human life would have ceased.