The General Will was Rousseau’s “most successful metaphor” in the words of Judith Shklar. “It conveys everything he most wanted to say” (Men and Citizens 1969, 184). At the risk of overstatement, I would suggest that the General Will continues to be our most successful metaphor for thinking about democratic politics. It includes everything we want from politics: justice, freedom, equality, democracy, tolerance, and civic virtue. It is all there, which is why it is also the place we go to if we want to understand what can go wrong when we try to have all of these things at once. (If I have a criticism of these two major contributions to the literature on Rousseau, it would be that they do not engage the robust contemporary literature that turns to Rousseau for an account of the exclusions and repressions that follow from a politics grounded in generality. See, for example, Alan Keenan, Democracy in Question, 2003; Anna Stilz, Liberal Loyalty, 2009; and Bonnie Honig, Emergency Politics, 2011).

David Lay Williams’s Rousseau’s Social Contract is a deep dive, exploring the nuances of Rousseau’s On the Social Contract and of the intellectual landscape from which it emerged. Though it is subtitled An Introduction, it is closer to a detailed, step-by-step guide to the argument. It will be most profitably read alongside Rousseau’s original, as an exegesis and as a series of erudite, well-reasoned annotations, particularly helpful for new readers to the text but useful for scholars as well. Williams does admirably well in addressing the most difficult problems Rousseau’s text presents, while—and this is what most distinguishes the book—situating Rousseau’s argument within the context of the history of political thought. One feels oneself being directed backward toward the origins of Rousseau’s ideas and forward to trace their influence and legacy over later thinkers.

There is much to recommend in Williams’s book, but two things in particular stand out. First, the author’s emphasis on virtue is a welcome corrective to more procedural treatments of Rousseau’s political theory. Second, his careful reading of Books III and IV, which are often neglected in the scholarship on Rousseau, is the best available account of the relevance of Rousseau’s history of Rome for the philosophical argument of Books I and II of the text.

Close readers will find much to argue with in Williams’s interpretation, but that seems to be fine with him. His ambition—wholly achieved—is to set out Rousseau’s argument in a way that offers readers the “capacity to make informed judgments on those elements of his political philosophy that continue to spark debate” (p. 3). Williams has made a particular effort to accomplish this with respect to the General Will, which he discusses in an appended essay. Because Rousseau never offered a clear definition of the General Will, it can only be defined, Williams argues, by undertaking a “thorough tour of Rousseau’s constructive political thought” (p. 271), which is exactly what Williams proceeds to do in the essay, a version of which appears as Chapter 8 of The General Will.

While Rousseau’s imprint on the history of the General Will vastly exceeds that left by anyone else, The General Will reminds us that Rousseau’s was neither the first nor the last word on it. Conceived in recognition of the work of Patrick Riley, who sadly passed away before it went to press, this volume, edited by James Farr and Williams, stands a worthy memorial to him.

The text is divided into four sections: “The General Will before Rousseau,” “The Prehistory of the General Will,” “The General Will in Rousseau,” and “The General Will after Rousseau.”

The first section includes essays by Patrick Riley and Stephen Nadler on the theological origins of the General Will. These essays address the writings of Arnauld, Malebranche, Pascal, and Leibniz, among others, emphasizing the role played by the General Will in conceptualizing the meaning of God’s will that all be saved. Nadler develops Riley’s seminal history, adding nuances to the ways in which God can be said to follow general laws through particular volitions. Although Rousseau would later secularize the General Will, this transcendent—Williams calls it Platonic—dimension of the General Will carried over into Rousseau’s formulation.

The first section also includes essays by Farr on Locke, Williams on Spinoza, and Sharon Krause on Montesquieu. Locke, on Farr’s reading, explains how the General Will might combine constraint (law) and liberty, which later becomes a—perhaps the—central problem for Rousseau (“to find a form of association in which each will remain as free as before”). Williams makes the case that Spinoza’s version of the General Will, based on his concept of “one mind,” shares affinities with Rousseau, without the problematic baggage of Rousseau’s (and Kant’s) transcendental metaphysics.

If Farr and Williams are interested in expanding the General Will tradition, Krause winnows the field somewhat by taking Montesquieu largely out of it. Though he used the term, and was, significantly for Rousseau, the first to secularize it, Montesquieu deployed it in a way that Krause reveals to be largely at odds with the General Will as conceptualized before and after his invocation of it. Montesquieu used the General Will to refer only to the application of the law and did not incorporate into it a conception of the common good. In fact, Krause argues, identifying justice with generality as Rousseau seems to do—“The most general will is also the most just”—is highly susceptible to a subversion of the common good through the general application of what are otherwise unjust laws. Moreover, Montesquieu did not believe that political freedom required an exercise of will. In culling Montesquieu from the General Will tradition, Krause helps us to understand two things about it, at least as Rousseau would develop it: Citizens can only be said to be free when they are able to express their will in law, and the common good can only be pronounced by the people assembled.

The second section of the volume includes essays by Daniel J. Kapust on Cicero and Andrew R. Murphy on John Winthrop. Kapust’s essay addresses the role of eloquence in supplying the motive whereby citizens willingly privilege their general interest over their particular interests. Rousseau, Kapust argues, was overly dismissive of Cicero’s eloquence, which could be deployed to serve both public and private ends. Murphy reads the General Will broadly enough to include Winthrop’s ideal of a New England township. The essay makes a strong case that Winthrop’s conception of Christian charity was a “sentiment of sociability” as much as a “dogma of religion” (p. 201). This comparison should not be taken too far, however, as Rousseau recoiled at the notion that the state would be placed at the service of religion, making very clear that he desired precisely the reverse.

In addition to Williams’s aforementioned essay on Rousseau’s General Will, the third section of the volume includes essays on Rousseau by Richard Boyd, Sankar Muthu, and Tracy Strong. Boyd explores the contours of generality in the General Will, which he finds to be actually quite particular. The General Will is “properly general only with respect to a given political community, and necessarily partial with respect to other nations, foreigners, or even nonmembers who reside within its territorial borders” (p. 263. Emphasis in the original text). For Boyd, this produces a “paradox of generality,” an idea that Muthu develops as he attempts to translate Rousseau’s General Will into a General Will of humanity. The project will not succeed, of course, as Rousseau himself made clear in his refutation of Diderot’s articulation of the idea. But Muthu shows that the same argument that vitiates a General Will of humanity—that particular attachments are always operating to subvert more general ones—applies equally to the viability of the General Will in a single society.

Strong emphasizes that in formulating the General Will, each citizen wills individually (“thinks only of himself in voting for all”). Strong shows that the will can be individual without compromising its generality. The General Will must be willed by individuals and it must be willed individually. It is not the product of a collective mind, Strong argues, because there is no collective mind. Strong’s interpretation of the General Will goes some way toward defending Rousseau against the criticisms of Montesquieu and Constant.

The final section of the volume includes essays on the General Will after Rousseau, all of which put some distance between Rousseau and the thinkers they discuss. Patrick Riley describes Kant’s “good will,” as having been inspired by Rousseau’s General Will but as having superseded it by virtue of its moral—as opposed to merely political—status. Riley assigns Rousseau’s “radically civic” (p. 333) General Will a supporting role in Kant’s architecture of moral agency, inasmuch as it facilitates a context from which moral agents are best positioned to enact the good will.

Shannon Stimson reads Adam Smith’s metaphor of the invisible hand as an alternate solution to the problems that Rousseau’s General Will was intended to solve, principally sociability and inequality. The invisible hand—which Stimson reads broadly as “a chain of causation, of systematic coordination” (p. 371)—solves these problems, or at least mitigates them, to the point that the General Will, with all of its attendant problems (including especially an erroneous presupposition about the efficacy of the will), is not needed.

Bryan Garsten reconnects Rousseau’s secularized General Will with its theological origins in order to clarify the basis for Benjamin Constant’s criticism of it. For Constant, only an appeal to divine authority could justify giving society “an unlimited authority over individual existence” (p. 386). The problem was that Rousseau had removed the General Will's divine authority while retaining the idea that it is always right. There is no such infallible will in the secular world, and so Rousseau’s total alienation of each to all meant not that “you are giving yourself to no one,” as Rousseau had argued, but rather that you are “surrender[ing] yourself to those who act in the name of all” (p. 386). In fact, Constant argued, there is no such thing as the General Will at all, understood as a set truths common to all associates. There is only a consensus of particular wills, which Rousseau called the will of all and which, for him, could not be the foundation of a just society. In juxtaposing Constant to Rousseau, Garsten’s essay illuminates one more element of Rousseau’s General Will: Society cannot flourish when it is grounded on a coincidentally overlapping set of interests; rather, it depends on citizens’ willingness to sort through their various interests and to decide together to privilege the general over the particular.

Michael McLendon argues that Alexis de Tocqueville should not be read as a Rousseauean, mostly because he was much more amenable to particularity. Tocqueville reveals Rousseau to have at least exaggerated and possibly even misunderstood completely the dangers posed by particular associations. Rousseau erred, on Tocqueville’s account, first, because he overestimated the connection between generality and justice, and, second, because he failed to grasp the potentially salutary effects of participating in civic associations. Generality had its place, for Tocqueville, who was very enthusiastic about patriotism, but it was instrumental to justice, rather than identical to it.

Finally, Christopher Brooke takes advantage of the publication of John Rawls’s Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy (2000) to “interpret Rousseau in a more Rawlsian light” (p. 431). In passing Rousseau through Kant, Brooke argues, Rawls wrenched Rousseau out of his historical context and wrenched the General Will out of its historical context, but, in tracing this history, we can, Brooke shows, recover some of the “empirical assumptions about history and politics that are embedded in Rawls’s philosophical project” (p. 443).

Over the course of the General Will's many appropriations, its history has witnessed the excision of God (by Rousseau), of popular sovereignty (by Sieyès) and of justice itself (by Robespierre). It has been blamed for some of modern history’s most heinous crimes, and yet, as these books demonstrate, it remains an important resource for thinking through urgent and essential political questions.