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What would an ideal set of conventions, impartially respecting each individual’s autonomy in this sense, look like? Rousseau left his own

16 _{Rousseau (1987), p. 143.} 17

Rousseau (1987), p. 158. In this, Rousseau anticipates Kant’s imperative that we always treat ourselves and others as ‘‘ends in themselves’’ and never merely as means to our own ends. To be an ‘‘end in oneself ’’ in Kant’s sense is to be a self-determining, autonomous, agent.

answer to this question tantalizingly vague, but its outlines are clear enough to have exerted a continuing influence on political philosophy down to the present. According to Rousseau, conventional allocations of rights and obligations can be legitimate only if two conditions are met: first, the rules and principles governing their allocation must actually be approved by the full assembly of citizens to whom they apply; and second, the decision procedure by which this assembly endorses those rules must itself be of a very particular kind. In Rousseau’s language, the ‘‘social contract’’ (or sometimes: ‘‘social compact’’) refers, not to an exchange of natural rights by which agents leave a state of nature, but to the design of this ideal legitimacy-conferring decision procedure in which all citizens participate. The purpose of this decision procedure is to reveal the authentic will of the political community as a whole, what Rousseau called the ‘‘General Will.’’ Rousseau distinguished the General Will from the particular wills of partial associations and specific individuals. These private groups and individuals are oriented toward their narrowly sectional interests and so cannot claim to embody the will of society as a whole.

The terms of the ‘‘social compact’’ that defines Rousseau’s favored decision procedure are roughly as follows. All citizens agree to submit to the General Will and in return receive equal privileges as colegislators of the laws and constitutional principles in their society. In this capacity, citizens are expected to vote on the basis of a sincere consideration of what the General Will ought to be, rather than on the basis of their own personal preferences. They are also to make up their minds on their own, and not to vote in organized blocs, parties, or coalitions. Citizens must also understand that, if this General Will is to emerge at all, it must be articulated in the form of general laws (as opposed to particular executive decisions, edicts, declarations, and actions) that apply impartially and equally to all members of the relevant political community. The General Will is revealed only in rules that apply to all those who enact them.

This last provision was particularly important for Rousseau, for it implies that, in participating in the process by which the General Will is articulated, individuals enact rules that will apply equally to themselves as to others. Rousseau supposed that as long as this is true, citizens would impose on each other only those requirements they would be prepared to endorse for themselves, since ‘‘in this institution each person necessarily submits

himself to the conditions he imposes on others.’’18_{Under these conditions,}

Rousseau hoped that political institutions might genuinely embody a ‘‘form of association which defends and protects with all common forces the person and goods of each associate, and by means of which each one, while uniting himself with all, nevertheless obeys only himself and remains as free as before.’’19

This, at any rate, was Rousseau’s general thought. Unfortunately, Rousseau’s discussion is mired in obscurity and it is extremely difficult to extract from his texts a detailed account of what, once properly articulated, the General Will would actually require in practice. Still, it is important to notice that, under this Rousseauan revision, the aims of the social- contract approach have broadened. As we saw, Hobbes and Locke deployed social-contract arguments primarily in order to justify the authority of the state. Rousseau shared this goal, but he also described the General Will as an independent ‘‘rule of what is just and what is unjust.’’20As well as telling us when political institutions can command citizens’ obedience, then, Rousseau’s General Will also defines the terms on which individuals justly enjoy legal rights, civil liberties, private property, and other economic entitlements and opportunities.

There is a sense, then, in which our discussion has come full circle and we find ourselves addressing once again questions that resemble those that Plato faced in the Republic questions about what rules, roles, rights, and other social arrangements we ought to recognize as ideally just. But whereas Plato and the philosophical tradition we considered in chapter 2 tried to answer these questions in terms of elaborate theories of well-being, Rousseau proposed to do so by asking what social principles free and equal individuals who are concerned to maintain their autonomy could rationally impose upon themselves. It is important, therefore, not to exaggerate the contrast between the social-contract approach and the common-good arguments we looked at in the previous chapter. Rousseau helps us to see that contractualism is not so much an abandonment of the ideal of the common good as an alternative way of identifying and conceiving it. Rather than justifying claims about the common good by

18 _{Rousseau (1987).} 19

Rousseau (1987), p. 148.

reference to fully fleshed out (and often controversial) conceptions of human flourishing or welfare, contractualists seek to do so on an inde- pendent, and less controversial, basis, by considering what free and equal agents would be prepared to impose upon themselves in some appropriately defined choice situation.