Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper asks some basic but difficult questions about the general will in an attempt to elicit a better understanding of how Rousseau understood the concept and what he sought to do with it. My working definition is that the general will is the will of the people as it is directed towards the common interest. I suggest that it has not always been adequately appreciated that the general will is a form of will. The general will, then, is not just a statement about the good of the people but an aspiration toward that good. It is because the general will seeks the common interest that Rousseau takes the position that it is “toujours droite.” There is a division in the recent literature on the general will between those who believe that Rousseau conceives it as an intention to promote the common good and those who think that Rousseau conceives it as a decision of the community that promotes the common good. The two interpretations are sometimes presented as incompatible alternatives. I read the general will as a form of desire for the common good, but, that said there is some evidence in support of both approaches. I will suggest that they are complementary rather than incompatible. I consider the way in which the general will is a desire conditioned by a process of reasoning. I further explore its status as a form of desire, and suggest that Rousseau sees the general will as both a desire and a desire about desire, that is, as a will to will. In a final section I explore the general will as a faculty or power of willing.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".