His stance is not politically naïve: he knows very well that obeying a general rule, especially when it directly contravenes our interests, goes against the crooked timber of humanity. But in order to understand why specific institutions were needed, one must first understand how Rousseau connects the general will with the particular interests of citizens. In order to maintain a sense of common interest, or public good, among citizens, Rousseau believed that the general will needed to be supported by specific institutions. Why did Rousseau need to particularize the general will? Finally, in response to the argument that Rousseau’s general will would be ungovernable, because he didn’t understand the techniques of government available in his time, I shall try to show that Rousseau actually appropriated concepts that originated in the anti-republican theories of reason of state and used them in his own theory of government. However, that first approach also constitutes a source of theoretical difficulties that I would like to contemplate, in the second part of my article, by analyzing what I call the anarchistic objection to the idea of a republican government. This particularization of the general will is both a condition for the very possibility of a republican government and a first response to the accusation of abstraction put forward against Rousseau by his liberal critics. In contrast with the widespread notion of the abstract nature of Rousseau’s republic, I would like to stress in the first part of my article that the general will-that is, the sense of the general interest-needs to be forged, shaped, and strengthened by specific institutions that are always linked to a concrete society, to a particular history and to determinate places. What does governing according to the general will mean? It means, first, that political institutions should serve the community of citizens and not the most powerful social minority it means, second, that the government’s mission, if it is republican, is not to amass state power and wealth for itself, but to ensure that this economic and social power is best suited to the desire for equality expressed by the general will. Nevertheless, those wishing to take French republicanism to task for incoherence should first carefully examine the implications of Rousseau’s idea of a government according to the general will. If it is man in society, and not the citizen in the republic, who is to be governed, then the very idea of a republican government seems compromised. From the perspective of a theory of government, central to the present paper, a classic liberal critique of Rousseau might add that republicanism’s failure lies in the fact that, since Rousseau’s de-socialized citizen is an abstraction and abstract beings cannot be governed, Rousseau was insufficiently, if at all, aware of the dangers of a government implementing an absolute sovereignty. Not surprisingly, that opposition and the political exclusion of commerce it entails were the main targets of Rousseau’s liberal critics: it was all too tempting for them to assert that the contractual relationship that creates Rousseau’s citizen does not actually exist and that the only things that exist in reality are the personal relationships that turn the abstract citizen into a socialized person. That opposition, amongst others, would have fully justified Rousseau’s inclusion in Pocock’s Atlantic Republican tradition. In a country that is really free, the citizens do everything with their hands and nothing with their money.” In the tradition begun by Rousseau and illustrated by French republicanism, Republican politics is thus opposed to commerce: the citizen’s dependence on all citizens is opposed to dependence on particular men and women who are linked by commercial exchange. That word finance is a slave’s word it is unknown among citizens. In his sharp critique of political representation, he utters some of the harshest words ever pronounced against commerce and finance: “Give money and you soon will have chains. Rousseau revealed how the political relationship on which a republic is founded is typically different from the religious, economic, ethnic, and domestic links that connect men and women in society to one another, but he did so by exacerbating the contrast between commerce and virtue.
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