¹ Textual citations are provided for Rousseau's collected works in English and French: first to The Collected Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. Christopher Kelly and Roger D. Masters (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1990–2009); and then, for the central texts, to Œuvres complètes (OC), ed. B. Gagnebin and M. Raymond (Paris: Pléiade, 1959–1995). Abbreviations for the most cited works are as follows: PE = Discourse on Political Economy; GM = “Geneva Manuscript”; SC = On the Social Contract; E = Émile; LM = Letters Written from the Mountain.

² Though its dates are disputed, the “Manuscript” was likely begun soon after Political Economy; the direct refutation of Diderot is suggestive. See Robert Derathé's notes in OC 3:lxxxii–lxxxix.

³ John P. McCormick, Reading Machiavelli: Scandalous Books, Suspect Engagements, and the Virtue of Populist Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018).

⁴ “At the present time, Hitler is an outcome of Rousseau; Roosevelt and Churchill, of Locke,” writes Bertrand Russell in A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1945), 685. See also Nisbet, Robert A., “Rousseau and Totalitarianism,” Journal of Politics 5, no. 2 (1943): 93–114CrossRefGoogle Scholar; J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Secker & Warburg, 1952); John W. Chapman, Rousseau, Totalitarian or Liberal? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956).

⁵ Richard Tuck, “Rousseau and Hobbes: The Hobbesianism of Rousseau,” in Thinking with Rousseau: From Machiavelli to Schmitt, ed. Helena Rosenblatt and Paul Schweigert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 37–62. See also Kevin Inston, Rousseau and Radical Democracy (New York: Continuum, 2010); Matthew Simpson, Rousseau's Theory of Freedom (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2006); James Miller, Rousseau: Dreamer of Democracy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984).

⁶ Joshua Cohen, Rousseau: A Free Community of Equals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). See also Zev M. Trachtenberg, “Rousseau's Platonic Rejection of Politics,” in Rousseau and the Ancients, Pensée Libre 8 (North American Association for the Study of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 2001), and David M. Estlund, Democratic Authority: A Philosophical Framework (Princeton: Princeton, 2009). Céline Spector connects this approach to a personal general will in Rousseau: Les paradoxes de l'autonomie démocratique (Paris: Michalon, 2015).

⁷ For a full survey of this interpretive divide, see David Lay Williams, “The Substantive Elements of Rousseau's General Will,” in The General Will: The Evolution of a Concept, ed. David Lay Williams and James Farr (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 219–46. I adapt Williams's distinction between formal and “substantive” accounts by incorporating Christopher Bertram's “transcendent” framing from “Rousseau's Legacy in Two Conceptions of the General Will: Democratic and Transcendent,” Review of Politics 74, no. 3 (2012): 403–19.

⁸ I follow Melissa Schwartzberg, who has identified a “double-generality” constraint of object and source, though I have found it profitable to further divide Schwartzberg's object generality into generality of subject and of application. See Schwartzberg, Melissa, “Rousseau on Fundamental Law,” Political Studies 51, no. 2 (2003): 387–403CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Other helpful descriptions of formal constraints include Sreenivasan, Gopal, “What Is the General Will?,” Philosophical Review 109, no. 4 (2000): 545–81Google Scholar; Boyd, Richard, “Rousseau and the Vanishing Concept of the Political?,” European Journal of Political Theory 12, no. 1 (Jan. 2013): 74–83Google Scholar.

⁹ SC 149; 3:373. See also SC 201; 3:441.

¹⁰ SC 149; 3:373–74. See also SC 152–54; 3:378–79 and LM 232; 3:808

¹¹ SC 145; 3:368

¹² Masters, Political Philosophy of Rousseau, 327–28.

¹³ John T. Scott, “Politics as the Imitation of the Divine in Rousseau's Social Contract,” Polity 26, no. 3 (March 1994): 490–91. Emphasis in original.

¹⁴ Leo Strauss, An Introduction to Political Philosophy, ed. Hilail Gildin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1975), 53.

¹⁵ Most notably in “Active and Passive Citizens” (YTL lecture, King's College London, London, Jan. 23, 2019). But see also his The Sleeping Sovereign: The Invention of Modern Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

¹⁶ Bertram, “Rousseau's Legacy,” 406.

¹⁷ Talmon, Origins of Totalitarian Democracy; Mandle, Jon, “Rousseauian Constructivism,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 35, no. 4 (1997): 545–62Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Shklar, Men and Citizens, 184.

¹⁹ Williams, “Substantive Elements,” 227.

²⁰ See also LM 232.

²¹ Williams, “Substantive Elements,” 227.

²² Patrick Riley, “Rousseau's General Will,” in The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau, ed. Patrick Riley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

²³ Denis Diderot, “Natural Right,” in Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (Second Discourse), Polemics, and Political Economy, ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 1993), 138.

²⁴ Ibid.

²⁵ Editor's introduction, OC 3:lxxiv–lxxvii.

²⁶ Assemblies are fallible in the Social Contract too, but there Rousseau advances the possibility that a deliberative body can, on its own, identify and express its general will. Put simply, where Political Economy notes only insufficiency, the Social Contract describes a qualified sufficiency discussed below.

²⁷ Shklar rightly calls Political Economy Rousseau's “most rigorously Spartan utopia” (Men and Citizens, 16). See also Alexandra Oprea, “Pluralism and the General Will: The Roman and Spartan Models in Rousseau's Social Contract,” Review of Politics 81, no. 4 (2019): 573–96.

²⁸ Masters, editor's introduction, in SC, xxi.

²⁹ See Vaughan's introduction in The Political Writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau, ed. Charles Edwyn Vaughan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915), 20; Robert Wokler, “The Influence of Diderot on the Political Theory of Rousseau: Two Aspects of a Friendship,” in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 132 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1975), 21. Elsewhere, Charles Hendel and Patrick Riley both offer useful comparisons but identify no distinctions among conceptions in Charles William Hendel, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Moralist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934) and Riley, “Rousseau's General Will.” See also Michel Launay, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Écrivain politique (1712–1762) (Paris: Éditions Slatkine, 1989), and Robin Douglass, Rousseau and Hobbes: Nature, Free Will, and the Passions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

³⁰ As I have noted, nowhere in the “Manuscript” does Rousseau name moral freedom (on which see part 4 below), but the notion of binding one's will to one's highest good is clearly operative here and in Political Economy.

³¹ The term is David Estlund's and denotes “rule by the wise.” See Estlund, Democratic Authority, 29. It captures well the thrust of Rousseau's position in the “Manuscript.”

³² The eighth through eleventh paragraphs were excised for publication; much of the chapter's conclusion is scratched out in the document itself (SC 100n26).

³³ Here and below I amend the translation of volonté particulier so that “particular will” replaces the less precise “private will” used in the Collected Writings edition.

³⁴ Compare GM 83 (3:290) with SC 138 (3:360) and GM 83 (3:290) with SC 139 (3:360).

³⁵ “It is the best and most natural order for the wisest to govern the multitude, as long as it is certain that they govern for its benefit and not for their own” (SC 175; 3:407).

³⁶ Compare GM 101 (3:313) with the final text which reads “alter [altérer] man's constitution” (SC 155; 3:381).

³⁷ See also the line carried over from the “Manuscript” describing a “general will he has as a Citizen” (SC 141; 3:363); Rousseau's tripartite division of the will of magistrates in III.2 and III.5; and his observation that the general will is also “the steady will of all the members of the State” (SC 200; 3:440).

³⁸ SC 147–48; 3:371. Translation amended (see note 33 above). Among the panoply of interpretations of this passage, a compelling alternate reading can be found in Hilail Gildin, Rousseau's “Social Contract”: The Design of the Argument (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).

³⁹ Here Rousseau uses “the will of all” in a technical sense. Later in book IV he will note that the general will itself is held by all.

⁴⁰ See Gerald Gaus's treatment of Arrovian impossibility in “Does Democracy Reveal the Voice of the People? Four Takes on Rousseau,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 75, no. 2 (June 1997): 141–62.

⁴¹ E 480; 4:633. Translation amended (see note 33 above).

⁴² Similar uses can be found across his works. In the Discourse on the Virtue Most Necessary for a Hero Rousseau claims that “everything is great and generous in a strong soul, because it knows how to distinguish [discerner] the beautiful from the specious, reality from appearance, and to fasten on its object with that firmness that removes illusions” (10), and in Julie we are told that God has “given us reason to discern what is good, conscience to love it, and freedom to choose it” (561).

⁴³ See, e.g., Abizadeh, Arash, “Banishing the Particular: Rousseau on Rhetoric, Patrie, and the Passions,” Political Theory 29, no. 4 (Aug. 2001): 556–82Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ Even on the strictest reading of the clause, citizens would be left with a range of other inputs for inner deliberation: ministerial reports, expert testimony, votes on subsidiary motions, and so on. Whatever else Rousseau had in mind, the assembly must remain a site of what Robert Goodin has called “deliberation within,” whereby interpersonal discussion “is replaced by an emphasis on our internal reflections upon the perspectives of one another.” See Goodin, Reflective Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

⁴⁵ Cohen, Rousseau, 170–71.

⁴⁶ Ibid., 76.

⁴⁷ Translation amended (see note 33 above).

⁴⁸ Christopher Bertram correctly notes a problem with Rousseau's phrasing: “if my particular opinion had prevailed in the assembly, this would have shown it to be in accordance with the general will!” Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Rousseau and “The Social Contract” (New York: Routledge, 2003), 120. On the role of participation in constituting moral freedom, see Frederick Neuhouser, “Freedom, Dependence, and the General Will,” Philosophical Review 102, no. 3 (1993): 363–95.

⁴⁹ See Ethan Putterman, Rousseau, Law and the Sovereignty of the People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

⁵⁰ Arthur Melzer, The Natural Goodness of Man: On the System of Rousseau's Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 162.

⁵¹ “Thus by the very nature of the compact, every act of sovereignty, which is to say every authentic act of the general will, obligates or favors all Citizens equally” (SC 149; 3:374).

⁵² Strauss, Introduction to Political Philosophy, 52–53. In “The Three Waves of Modernity,” Strauss elaborates that the goodness in the general will comes from its generality, by which he evidently means something like “the characteristic of applying equally to all.” This leads him to conclude that “it is not necessary to have recourse to any substantive consideration.” Introduction to Political Philosophy, 91–92.

⁵³ On the prohibition of harm to citizens, see PE 152 (3:256) and SC 222 (3:467). For an application of these principles, see Corey Brettschneider, “Rights within the Social Contract: Rousseau on Punishment,” in Law as Punishment/Law as Regulation, ed. Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas, and Martha Merrill Umphrey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012).

⁵⁴ Williams, “Substantive Elements,” 227.

⁵⁵ Williams, David Lay, Rousseau's Platonic Enlightenment (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), 115Google Scholar.

⁵⁶ Ibid., 114.

⁵⁷ Rousseau, Origins of Inequality, 54 (3:178).

⁵⁸ From the 1782 edition of Political Economy. See note at 2:1390.

⁵⁹ Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). The expansiveness of democracy in this context is well captured in Arlen, Gordon, “Aristotle and the Problem of Oligarchic Harm: Insights for Democracy,” European Journal of Political Theory 18, no. 3 (2019): 393–414Google Scholar.