The Legal Philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Inheriting from the celebrated late-Cartesian philosopher Malebranche the notion that a just God rules the universe through “general laws” and “general wills” which are worthy of his majestic simplicity, not through an ad hoc patchwork of arbitrary “particular wills,” Rousseau “secularizes” the originally-theological ideas of divine volonté générale and of unworthy volonté particulière: His ideal citizen, the “Spartan mother” at the beginning of Émile (Rousseau 1911), subordinates her self-loving “particular will” to “the general will one has as a citizen” by asking not whether her soldier-sons have survived but whether the bien général of the polis still lives; and when she learns that Sparta is victorious though her sons have perished, she gives thanks to the gods.