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According to Rousseau, what is the collective will? What role does it play in his view of
political society?
The general will as per Rousseau is the public good’s dependable voice, and protecting it
obligation it is the Sovereign's to protect it. While the general will organizes the form of
government and creates laws, for example, it is neutral with respect to the particularities; its sole
aim is the public good. The general will is, effectively, an idea. It is embodied and formalized by
the political body and sovereignty that assembles to legislate and debate (Curtis, 2008).
Rousseau’s inversion of his predecessors’ accounts of sovereignty centered on the claim
that sovereignty is both inalienable and indivisible. Rousseau first argued ‘that sovereignty,
being only the exercise of the general will, can never be alienated’. The sovereign can be
represented only by itself because, although power can be transferred, the same is not true of
will. As per Rousseau, the alienation of both the people’s sovereignty and freedom occur at the
same point and in the same act; the act whereby sovereignty is conferred from the people to a
superior. It is worth noting that Rousseau’s argument here—that sovereignty cannot be
represented or alienated—was concerned only with the freedom of the people understood as a
collective body with a collective will, and not with the freedom of the individual citizens who
form the sovereign body.
On Rousseau’s account, any form of representative sovereignty would violate the moral
equality of citizens because it involves some individuals having greater legislative rights than
others. Such equality was crucial for the flourishing of a well-ordered republic and for the
preservation of freedo...