Rousseau will accept neither Hobbes’s transference οf will, οf willing not to will, nor Locke’s giving οf it, on trust. Starting from the assumption that all nature is harmony, all men have a real will which is identical in all men.
This will which is common to all men is a general will. It is by definition good, and men are free only by conforming to it. Men should obey the state because the Sovereign is a moral person expressing general will. The only just social contract is that οf obeying general will.
However, in practice, people are not always aware οf their real will and must commission a wise legislator to interpret the general will for them. The wise legislator is declarer οf the law, not a maker οf the law, and therefore cannot be above the law. He forces them to be free. Rousseau came face to face with the paradox οf two truths οf his own creation – liberty and authority. Liberty he saw as a religious concept, identical with human personality. A man is free. If he is not free, he is not a man. Freedom cannot be bartered for security. There can be no freedom between authority and liberty. But men live in society. Society must have rules, and these rules are graven on the heart οf nature.
They are intrinsic laws. However, it was possible to obtain personal freedom, which was the same as complete authority. ‘Each man giving himself to all gives himself to nobody.’ Only those that know what they want are free. And as nature is a harmony (fundamental Rousseau), all rational men will want the same. Rousseau denounces not only the rich and the powerful but also the arts, the sciences, and sophistication. He is the first οf the militant philistines, the ancestor οf the petit-bourgeois revolutionaries. His is a violent vision expressed in apparent deductive reason. His concept οf general will is mystical.