The Anatomy of Democracy: Rousseau’s Body Politic and the General Will

Jeffery Zavadil, Ph.D.Arizona State University

February 2006

Abstract: I interpret the general will via Rousseau’s metaphor of the body politic. Older

examples of this metaphor were hierarchic due to crude anatomy, with the “head” of state

commanding the social body. Modern medical sophistication, e.g. discovery of the circulatory

and nervous systems, emphasized bodily interconnection and interdependence. This conceptual

shift transferred to Rousseau’s democratic body politic: in a healthy body politic the political

nervous system communicates with the administrative brain, conveying the general will of the

sovereign political body to the administration. The general will is a democratic diagnostic with

egalitarian social health as its substantive content.

Acknowledgements: An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2004 meeting of

the Northeastern Political Science Association in Boston, MA. I am grateful for the critical

comments of Terence Ball, Richard Dagger, David Guston, Timothy Ruback, Scott Roulier,

Efrat Waksman, and Ian Andrew MacRae Ward, which have improved this paper.

Rousseau’s general will still attracts attention after two-and-a-half centuries because it

seems to tap into something important: most of us, at times, think and talk about polities as if

they were persons with wills. It is also a complex, paradoxical, and controversial concept, and

some scholars have wisely warned that no single interpretation is likely to pin it down (e.g.

Thakurdas 1976, vii). In this paper I attempt to clarify the general will by using Rousseau’s

metaphor of the body politic as an interpretive guide. This seems a good place to seek

clarification, for the general will is the will of a political body just as an individual will is the will

of a natural body (Allen 1961, 264, 265; Kelly 1986, 17-18; Saccaro-Battisti 1983, 39).

Furthermore, a focus on bodily imagery seems appropriate, since Rousseau so clearly and

frequently availed himself of the vocabulary and logic of the body to describe his ideal republic.

The body politic appears prominently throughout Rousseau’s wider political philosophy and

gives it structure and form. An analysis of Rousseau’s distinctive use of it should interest both

democratic theorists and conceptual historians: wheras earlier political philosophers had usually

applied the body politic in elitist or authoritarian ways, Rousseau turned it in a more democratic

direction. While Rousseau was not a pure or unqualified democrat (his political thought might

best be characterized as democratic-republican; see OC 3.403-405; CW 4.173-4),1 I will argue

that his body politic is one of the more democratic features of his thought. Given Rousseau’s

influence on modern democratic theory and practice, his body metaphor is of considerable

theoretical and historical importance. 2

My focus on metaphor is also inspired and informed by new metaphor theories in

philosophy, cognitive science, and linguistics (e.g. Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999). In recent

decades, the conventional wisdom that metaphor is only epiphenomenal or heuristic has

undergone much critical scrutiny, and consequently metaphor is increasingly understood as

1

fundamental to the generation and construction of meaning.3 The human body, in particular,

frequently serves as a metaphoric resource for understanding complex phenomena such as states

and societies, something that Rousseau recognized: he once declared that humans “are for the

most part veritable anthropomorphites” in that we export our own self-image into the world

(Emile OC 4.552; Bloom trans., 256). Rousseau used other metaphors too, of course, but he

turned to the body politic often and it is especially pertinent to the general will, and so a

methodical analysis of Rousseau’s organic metaphors ought to help refine our interpretations of

it. Methodologically, I combine metaphor analysis with contextualist interpretive approaches in

order to keep in mind an historically sound idea of “body”: discourses about the body were

different in Rousseau’s time than in our own, and this affects his body politic.

Let me preface my analysis by challenging a common interpretation of the general will,

one which has, it seems to me, run into something of a dead end. Many readers of Rousseau

conceive of the general will in formal mathematical and/or procedural terms, as though it were a

problem in social choice theory rather than of moral philosophy. In this view, the general will is

thought to be the result of a special voting procedure that Rousseau unfortunately never

articulated satisfactorily, and so the main difficulty now is to formulate that procedure correctly.

Focusing excessively on Rousseau’s comment that the general will is the sum of the differences

of individual wills, “take away from those same wills the pluses and minuses that cancel each

other out,” interpreters keep looking for the right formula to quantify the general will as though it

were an economist’s preference function (OC 3.371; CW 4.147). The “Condorcetian

perspective” is one example of many (Grofman and Feld 1988, 567; see also Runciman and Sen

1965; Sreenivasan 2000, 554ff). Despite much effort, this abstract approach has yet to discover

what the “correct” voting procedure for the general will might be, if such a procedure even

2

exists. This failure has caused some to abandon the concept as irrational (Shapiro 2003, 10-15,

21, 146) – an injudicious conclusion, in my view. Other efforts to somehow tabulate votes into a

recognizable general will have misled some into treating it as a mere aggregation of particular

wills, despite Rousseau’s vigorous distinction between the general will and the will of all. One

interpreter observed that “Rousseau is particularly vague in discussing how the general will is to

be discovered,” and concluded that “It is a formal principle quite without material content” with

which Rousseau was trying to calculate the “greatest good of the greatest number” (Allen 1961,

264, 265, 272, 274). Formalism here has led to a utilitarian reading that Rousseau would

undoubtedly have rejected as a version of the will of all. The procedural approach is abetted by

the continuing temptation in some circles of political theory to engage in decontextualized

analysis. Without placing the general will in context, interpreters must resort to excess

abstraction and become absorbed in process, because without content all that is left is procedure.

The general will cannot, I think, be reduced to a formal process, for it involves much

more than quantification. Formal rules for voting can at best illuminate only part of the general

will’s meaning. To be sure, Rousseau had to discuss the counting of votes vis-à-vis collective

decision-making, but this does not mean that formal process is the central matter addressed by

the general will. Counting votes is, if you will, the punctuation mark at the end of the general

will, and while an exclamation or question mark can tell you something about the meaning of a

sentence, looking at punctuation alone is an exercise in futility. One must first understand the

content of the sentence. So it is with the general will: Rousseau had a definite content in mind for

it, which must be understood before quantifying votes. Since so much has been said in the

secondary literature about vote-counting without clarifying matters, I will take a different tack

and focus on the content of the general will rather than on procedures. 4 Accordingly, I will

3

attempt to reconstruct the general will in a qualitative rather than quantitative way using

Rousseau’s metaphor of the body politic as the main template for his reasoning. 5

Unfortunately, proceduralists have resisted using Rousseau’s organic metaphors to guide

their interpretations. One scholar wrote that “We fall into misunderstanding of Rousseau if we

attempt to identify the general will… if, for instance, we press his analogy of the body politic

and the human body too far…” (Allen 1961, 272). Another acknowledged Rousseau’s use of the

body politic and its relation to the general will but summarily dismissed it: “Whatever else it is,

the general will is the will of this moral body, that is, of the associates’ common self. I do not

take this to be especially informative…” (Sreenivasan 2000, 550). Yet since Rousseau himself

thought the body politic relevant enough to inform his theory, we ought not ignore it (c.f. Conroy

1979, 4,12). By tracing out the metaphoric mapping of the human body onto political society as

Rousseau himself would have understood it – and Rousseau had a sophisticated understanding of

anatomy – we will find some content for the general will that, I believe, is a prerequisite to

proper comprehension of it. We will also gain insight into how the general will can best be

discovered – whether through voting or perhaps some alternate method – that might help bypass

the aporia of proceduralist interpretations.

The Body Politic: Medical and Political

The metaphor of the body politic is arguably the West’s oldest and most ubiquitous

political metaphor. Bodily metaphors inform and organize entire schools of political theory, from

classical republicanism to medieval monarchism to modern realist international theory. Organic

language is also part and parcel of common political speech: consider terms such as head of

state, member of society, armed forces, organization, corporation, constitution, social disease,

economic growth, invisible hand, and so on, all of which have etymological roots in the body.

4

In the body politic, typically, different parts of society correspond to different parts of the

human body, and a healthy political body properly integrates these interdependent parts into a

hierarchy that mimics the anatomy of the body natural. These themes of hierarchy and

interdependence have usually been combined: the parts of both a body natural and a body politic

are interconnected and must cooperate together if the whole is to survive (Ball 1988, 27-32), yet

this interconnection traditionally implied that a healthy and unified body politic be governed by a

single head, just as a body natural is. This combination is clear in medieval political thought, as

can be seen in John of Salisbury’s picturesque body politic ([1159] 1990, V.2 and passim; c.f.

Christine de Pizan [1406] 1994; Kantorowicz [1957] 1997). For John, the prince was the head of

state who commanded from the top of the political body, while the senate was the heart;

provincial governors were the eyes, ears, and mouth; soldiers were the weapon-bearing hands

and arms; clerks and scribes were the stomach and intestines; and peasants were the feet. All the

parts of John’s social body depended upon one another, because disease or injury in any part

afflicted the whole. To John’s medieval mind, however, interdependence led not to equality

between the parts but only to the moral exhortation that kings should take care to rule in the

interest of all, while lower orders should obey and be content with their appointed stations. Thus

John’s body politic combined interdependence and hierarchy to justify a feudal monarch ruling

from the top just as a head rules a body.

If we leap ahead to Rousseau’s century, we find bodies politic that look very different

from this. Older versions like John’s had a relatively uncomplicated political anatomy of head,

hands, torso, and feet. Later versions needed a more sophisticated conceptual apparatus in order

to describe an increasingly complex modern society.6 Conceptual change generally occurs hand-

in-hand with “large-scale, and often gradual and unconscious, shifts in the models and metaphors

5

that dominate our discourse,” and for the body politic this has been especially true at the

intersection of medical and political discourse (Ball 1988, 23-26; q.v. Saccaro-Battisti 1983, 31

n.2, 33; Kelly 1986, 9, 22ff.). Bodies politic became more sophisticated in tandem with modern

anatomy, and advances in modern medical science were reflected in organic political

conceptions. Political thinkers began talking about flows of money as akin to blood circulation,

or of legal rewards and penalties as nerves which gave the body politic motion (OC 3.244; CW

3.142-3; Hobbes [1651] 1996, 9, 166-176, Chs. 23 and 24). These changes altered the balance of

hierarchy and interdependence in the body politic. Discovery of the circulatory and nervous

systems meant that life depended on systems stretching throughout the natural body and

connecting all its limbs and organs, a re-conceptualization that, when metaphorically transferred

to politics, led to a greater emphasis on interdependence over hierarchy. This change is essential

to understanding Rousseau’s body politic.

The medical advances in the centuries preceding Rousseau were immense. Western

medicine had, by Rousseau’s time, long overcome the prohibition against dissection that had

mired it in the mistaken theory of the four humors since antiquity (Lonrigg 1997, 35-37;

McVaugh 1997, 62-63). Vesalius’ highly influential sixteenth century treatise on anatomy, De

humani corporis fabrica (The Fabric of the Human Body), had contained detailed illustrations of

human anatomy sketched from countless dissections of human bodies (Vesalius, [1543] 1967).

Anatomy was further advanced by William Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of blood in

1628, and around the same time the followers of Paracelsus incorporated chemistry into

medicine. Anatomical knowledge was not only becoming more sophisticated but was reaching

wider audiences: numerous medical colleges and hospitals built dissection theaters to train

physicians, and the general populace was able to view public dissections of executed criminals –

6

Bologna even held dissections at its regular carnival (Cook 1997, 84-85). These dissections

demonstrated to the public the wonders of God’s craftsmanship in the human body, for they

believed his handiwork as the great artificer of nature to be on display. This vision of Deo

fabricator facilitated the introduction of mechanical metaphors to explain the physiology of the

natural body, which spread rapidly. Galileo’s follower Giovanni Borelli, for example, described

bodily functions with mechanical analogies, and Hermann Boerhaave’s 1703 lecture De usu

ratiocinii mechanici in medicina at the University of Leyden further promoted the metaphor of

man-as-machine (Borelli 1680-1681; Boerhaave 1703). This metaphor was common among

Rousseau’s contemporaries: it was, for example, the title and topic of La Mettrie’s L’homme

machine (La Mettrie [1748] 1996; see also Kelly 1986, 9-12; Cook 1997, 85). The introduction

of the metaphor of the machine to describe organic bodies was an important development which

rapidly transferred to the metaphor of the body politic. The first great sophisticated version of the

body politic to appear during this wave of modern medical advances was that of Thomas

Hobbes, who mixed anatomical complexity with the new mechanism in a recipe that supported

the absolute rule of a sovereign monarch. Rousseau’s later body politic contrasted with Hobbes’

in that it was mostly unmechanical and mainly democratic, and therefore it will be helpful to

proceed via comparison of the two. I will not offer a complete analysis of Hobbes’ complex

organic imagery here but will only touch on relevant points.

Hobbes was fully aware of the anatomical science of his day, and imported it into his

political theory. As a well-educated tutor of noble sons, Hobbes was scientifically literate and his

curriculum vitae included the study of anatomy. He knew William Harvey personally and

praised his work in print (Skinner 1996, 215-216). Furthermore, Hobbes read Vesalius’ treatise,

took a course in chemistry, and in fact personally participated in dissections with William Petty,

7

who later became Professor of Anatomy at Oxford and who eventually penned a book entitled

The Political Anatomy of Ireland (Skinner 1996, 328; Saccaro-Battisti 1983 40; Petty [1691]

1970). Hobbes’ mixture of body and machine is clear on the very first page of Leviathan, where

he famously depicted the commonwealth as an artificial automaton that emulated the shape and

form of a human body, with the sovereign as the head:

For what is the Heart, but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and the Joynts,

but so many Wheeles, giving motion to the whole Body, such as was intended by the

Artificer. Art goes yet further, imitating that Rationall and most excellent worke of

Nature, Man. For by Art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMON-WEALTH, or

STATE, (in latine CIVITAS) which is but an Artificiall Man; though of greater stature and

strength than the Naturall…in which, the Soveraignty is an Artificiall Soul, as giving life

and motion to the whole body; The Magistrates, and other Officers of Judicature and

Execution, artificiall Joynts; Reward and Punishment… are the Nerves…the Wealth and

Riches of all the particular members, are the Strength; Salus Populi (the people’s safety)

its Businesse; Counsellors… are the Memory; Equity and Lawes, an artificiall Reason and

Will; Concord, Health; Sedition, Sicknesse; and Civill war, Death (Hobbes [1651] 1996,

9).

This description is complemented by the image on the frontispiece: the Leviathan towers over

the commonwealth like a colossus, a gigantic social body made up of all the citizens that

combines their strength under a single sovereign will. This awe-inspiring, even terrifying, image

is perhaps the most memorable feature of Hobbes’ political thought, and was designed to impress

upon the reader a framework for understanding the political: the sovereign is the singular head of

the commonwealth, and social union will be compelled through fear of his unsurpassed political

8

power. Hobbes’ sophisticated political anatomy did not lead him to democratic conclusions, as

would later be the case for Rousseau.

Rousseau too was anatomically literate. While Hobbes’ medical sophistication was a

result of his superior education, by the eighteenth century medical science had been popularized

enough that even an autodidact like Rousseau could familiarize himself with human anatomy

(Park 1997, 71-78; Cook 1997, 82-86). Printed medical texts were widely available, many in the

vernacular, and short courses in anatomy or chemistry were not uncommon (Cook 1997, 84, 86).

Rousseau first used the body politic in his 1755 contribution to Diderot’s Encyclopédie, the

Discours sur l’économie politique, and we know that he had acquired a familiarity with medicine

and anatomy before then. This knowledge was acquired partly as a result of the maladies, both

real and imagined, that he suffered throughout his life (OC 3.244-45; CW 3.142-3; Janata 2001).

His most significant illness was a chronic urinary tract infection that made urination difficult and

caused him constant and often intense pain until his death. This disorder prevented Rousseau

from completely emptying his bladder, and after 1751 he often used catheters to do so (Janata

2001, 431ff.). In addition to this very real illness, Rousseau was a hypochondriac who obsessed

about his health and who used imaginary ailments to win the sympathy of others.

What degree of medical knowledge did Rousseau possess? As a young man, his lover

Françoise-Louise de Warens suggested that he pursue a career in medicine, an idea he rejected;

nonetheless he experimented in chemistry and read books of physiology and anatomy as a

layman (OC 1.218; CW 5.183; Cranston 1982, 122-123). The year 1737 appears seminal. In that

year, Rousseau attempted a chemistry experiment that blew up in his face; he was blinded for

more than six weeks and so frightened that he drew up a will (OC 1.218; CW 5.183; Cranston

1982, 123). Besides learning chemistry, Rousseau also recounts in Les confessions that in 1737

9

an illness drove him to undertake a study of medical texts (OC 1. 247-8; CW 5.207-208;

Cranston 1982, 127). This new knowledge of the body, however, only fueled his hypochondria

as he discovered more diseases that he might be afflicted with: “To finish me off, having made a

little physiology enter into my readings, I began to study anatomy, and passing in review the

multitude and the action of the pieces that made up my machine, I expected to feel all of it

become unhinged twenty times a day…” (OC 1.247-8; CW 5.207-208). Furthermore, more than

once before writing l’économie politique Rousseau was attended by professional physicians

(which was not the ordinary experience then that it is today), and he likely acquired some

medical knowledge that way (Cranston 1982,130).7 The long and the short of it: Rousseau was

exposed to enough modern medical knowledge to understand the complexity of the body and the

interdependence of its parts, and this set the stage for an anatomically sophisticated version of

the body politic.

Rousseau’s Body Politic

While the body politic permeates Rousseau’s entire political philosophy, his clearest and

most concise statement appears in l’économie politique. The image is then repeated and

developed in Du contrat social. In l’économie politique, Rousseau prefaces his remarks with a

straightforward acknowledgement that he is using a metaphor: “Allow me to use for a moment a

common comparison, imprecise in many ways, but suited to making myself better understood”

(OC 3.244; CW 3.142). He then describes his political body in vivid detail:

The body politic, taken individually, can be considered to be like a body that is

organized, living, and similar to that of a man. The sovereign power represents the head;

the laws and customs are the brain, source of the nerves and seat of the understanding,

will and senses, of which the judges and magistrates are the organs; commerce, industry,

10

and agriculture are the mouth and stomach that prepare the common subsistence; public

finances are the blood that a wise economy, performing the functions of the heart, sends

out to distribute nourishment and life throughout the body; the citizens are the body and

members that make the machine move, live, and work, and that cannot be harmed in

any part without promptly sending a painful response to the brain if the animal is in

a state of health.

The life of both [body and brain] is the self common to the whole, the reciprocal

sensitivity and the internal correlation of all the parts. What happens if this

communication ceases, if formal unity disappears and contiguous parts are related to one

another only by their proximity? The man is dead or the state is dissolved.

The body politic is thus also a moral being that has a will; and this general will, which

always tends towards the preservation and welfare of the whole and of each part, and

which is the source of the laws, is – for all the members of the state in their relations to

themselves and to it – the rule of what is just and what is unjust (OC 3.244-45; CW 3,

142-3; italic emphasis Rousseau’s, bold emphasis added).

The clarity and detail of this passage shed light on Rousseau’s political thought. Rousseau

displayed his anatomical sophistication when he described the political economy of the social

body as sensorimotor, digestive, and circulatory systems that extended throughout the body:

commerce, industry, agriculture, and finance were systems of interconnection, a point also

evident in his comments on “the reciprocal sensibility and internal coordination of all the parts”

and on communication via the nervous system, which I have emphasized in bold. Keep in mind

that the “life” and “self” of the body politic depend on this intercommunication. The emphasis on

systems indicates that interdependence, not hierarchy, was the most important feature of the

11

organic image for Rousseau: it was the characteristic common to bodies and republican

communities, served as the common ground of the bodily and the political, and set the reader up

for the democratic conclusions that were to follow. Also noteworthy is the fact that this was the

first explicit statement of the general will in any of Rousseau’s political works.8 This indicates

his conceptual association of it with the body politic, a point further supported by the rapidity

with which Rousseau moved from one concept to the other in the same sentence (“The body

politic is thus also a moral being that has a will; and this general will… always tends towards the

preservation and welfare of the whole and of each part…”). This rapid-fire association confirms

that Rousseau thought the general will was to a society, analogically if not literally, what the

individual will was to a body.

While Rousseau’s body politic was anatomically sophisticated, this alone does not

explain why it supports democratic sovereignty rather than hierarchy, because Hobbes’

authoritarian body politic was also complex. It is conspicuous that Rousseau emphasized the life-

functions of the political body rather than its mechanical aspects to a far greater degree than

Hobbes (above, p. 10-11). Mechanical imagery thoroughly permeated Hobbes’ image but not

Rousseau’s, who seldom resorted to the vocabulary of the machine to describe the political body.

Admittedly, he did describe the body natural mechanically in the Discours sur l’inegalité (OC

3.178; CW 3.44) and in Les confessions (above, p. 10). As for the body politic, he referred to it as

a machine only once in the organic-laden excerpt from l’économie politique (above, p. 10-11),

and the vocabulary of the machine appears in Du contrat social only seven times (OC 3. 364,

381, 385, 408, 421, 446, 459; CW 4.141, 155, 158, 176, 187, 205, 215). In contrast, organic

references – body, strength, illness, birth, death – appear over one hundred times (OC 3.354,

359, 360-4, 368, 372-3, 378, 385, 386, 388, 395-400, 408, 414, 420, 424, 427, 432, 434, 437;

12

CW 4.134, 137, 139-41, 145, 148, 152, 157-8, 159, 160, 166-9, 176, 181, 186, 188, 191, 194,

195, 198, and passim).9 Aside from this vast numerical disparity, the richness and sophistication

of Rousseau’s organic imagery leaves little doubt that he wished to emphasize the organic in the

political organism. Note that I say this is a matter of emphasis, not opposition; we are not talking

about mutually exclusive logical categories, but about metaphors, which have indeterminate

boundaries and are often mixed. Rousseau’s organic emphasis did lead, however, in a direction

not taken by Hobbes: while Hobbes maintained a hierarchy in his body politic by concentrating

sovereignty in the head, Rousseau used organic systems of interconnection, especially the

nervous system, to disperse sovereignty throughout the whole of the body, thereby facilitating

his democratic stance. It was this political nervous system that turned Rousseau’s body politic in

a democratic and egalitarian direction, more fully carrying out the political implications of

modern anatomy’s stress on interdependent bodily systems.

Hobbes’ complex body politic had contained a primitive nervous system of sorts,

consisting of strings and cords, but it did not lead to democratic conclusions; quite the contrary.

In the long quotation from Leviathan above (p. 8), Hobbes called the sovereign the soul of the

body politic: “the Soveraignty is an Artificiall Soul….” (Hobbes [1651] 1996, 9). But this

sovereign soul was located in the head and did not permeate the whole of the body. Early in

Leviathan, Hobbes acknowledged that the operations of the nervous system were reciprocal:

sense organs cause a “pressure” which “by the mediation of Nerves, and other strings, and

membranes of the body, continued inwards to the Brain, and Heart, causeth there a resistance, or

counter-pressure” which stimulated the organism to take action to meet its desires (Hobbes

[1651] 1996, 13). Indeed, “the motion from the brain to the inner parts, and from the inner parts

to the Brain being reciprocall,” body and brain were interconnected (Hobbes [1651] 1996, 17).

13

However, Hobbes’ understanding of reciprocity was limited to the transfer of stimuli, and so did

not analogize to anything resembling mutually respectful discourse between citizens. Body parts

(the people, officials, etc.) sent sensory stimuli to the brain (the sovereign), providing

information for its consideration, but then the brain decided and simply issued commands back

to the parts. Reciprocity did not involve the body as a united whole in sovereign decision-

making, but was only a two-way transfer of information: stimulus and command.

Social unity for Hobbes thus meant conformity to one will. A body politic governed by

more than one head would suffer the convulsions of civil disunion, because the parts would no

longer act interdependently but independently of the rest of the body. Therefore factional conflict

was akin to an epileptic seizure:

And this is a Disease which not unfitly may be compared to the Epilepsie, or Falling-

sicknesse (which the Jewes took to be one kind of possession by Spirits), in the body

naturall. For as in this Disease, there is an unnaturall spirit, or wind in the head that

obstructeth the roots of the Nerves, and moving them violently, taketh away the motion

which naturally they should have from the power of the Soule in the Brain, and thereby

causeth violent, and irregular motions (which men call Convulsions) in the parts… so

also in the Body Politique… [factionalism] must needs thereby Distract the people, and

either Overwhelm the Common-wealth with Oppression, or cast it into the Fire of a civill

warre (Hobbes [1651] 1996, 227-228).

Crisis could be prevented only by uniting under the will of a single sovereign. Although it might

be argued that the initial joint act of the social contract gave Hobbes’ sovereign a democratic

basis of legitimacy, from thence forward the wills of all are united under the single actual will of

14

a sovereign ruler; in order to prevent the convulsions of civil division, everyone must submit

their individual wills to the single will of the head of state: 10

The only way to erect such a Common Power… is to conferre all their power and

strength upon one Man, or upon one Assembly of men, to beare their Person… and

therein to submit their Wills, everyone to his Will, and their Judgments, to his Judgment.

This is more than Consent, or Concord; it is a reall Unitie of them all, in one and the

same Person made by Covenant of every man with every man… (Hobbes [1651] 1996,

120).

Hobbes preferred monarchy because he believed that organic unity required that the political will

of the body politic be identical to the will of an actual person; he did not develop anything like

the concept of a general will. His mechanism doubtless played a role in this authoritarian stance:

it was as if the king were sitting inside the tin head of the political body, receiving messages via

some nerve-strings from the parts, and then pulling other nerve-strings to make the whole works

run. Thus, Hobbes perpetuated the old medieval hierarchy in which the royal sovereignty was

situated in the head of the body politic, commanding the rest of the body to follow its will alone.

Rousseau, in contrast, had no central overseer operating the machinery of state, for his

emphasis on organic interconnection dispersed sovereignty throughout the body. In Du contrat

social, Rousseau (like Hobbes before him) mixed organic and contractual metaphors: “Through

the social compact we have given the body politic existence and life…” (OC 3.378; CW 4.152).11

The figurative signing of the social contract united individuals into political society by

establishing the moral person of the republic: “in place of the private person of each contracting

party, this act of association produces a moral and collective body, composed of as many

members as there are voices in the assembly, which receives from this same act its unity, its

15

common self, its life, and its will. This public person… formerly took the name City, now takes

that of Republic or body politic…” (OC 3.361-2; CW 4.139). Sovereignty in this republic was

only represented in the head, which was no longer a sovereign king. The brain was imagined not

as a command center, but as the nexus of a nervous system linked to the common people who

made up the body. In the long passage from l’économie politique quoted above (p. 10-11),

consider how the nerves of the body politic are communication conduits that transmit pain (and

presumably pleasure) from the body of the people to the head: “the citizens are the body and

members that make the machine move, live, and work, and that cannot be harmed in any part

without a painful impression immediately being transmitted to the brain, if the animal is in a

good state of health” (OC 3.245; CW 3.143; above, p. 11). Interdependence implies

intercommunication, and the body’s internal communication system was the key democratic

feature in Rousseau’s metaphor. “As soon as this multitude is thus united in a body, one cannot

harm one of the members without attacking the body, and it is even less possible to harm the

body without the members feeling the effects” (OC 3.363; CW 4.140). That Rousseau based his

conception of collective moral personhood on the political equivalent of the body’s nervous

system is more explicit in comments in the Geneva Manuscript that did not make it into the final

version of Du contrat social: “There would be a kind of central nervous system which would

connect all the parts. The public good or ill would not merely be the sum of private goods and

ills as in a simple aggregation, but would lie in the liaison uniting them” (OC 3.284; CW 4.78).

Here the general good is not found in a procedure, but in the structure of communication within

the body politic.

This scheme of interconnected body and brain maps neatly onto Rousseau’s distinction

between the sovereign and the government in Du contrat social (OC 3 & CW 4, Bk. III, Ch.1).

16

The sovereign is no king but consists of all the people assembled, who express their will in law.

The government is merely an administrative department that executes the law as the people’s

agent, but sovereignty always resides in the whole body of the people. The administration should

always remain subordinate to the sovereign, morally speaking, for it gives the body politic only

motion but not life (c.f. Coker 1967, 16):

The principle of political life lies in the sovereign authority. The legislative power is the

heart of the state; the executive power is its brain, giving movement to all its parts. The

brain can become paralyzed yet the individual is still alive. A man may remain an

imbecile and live. But as soon as the heart has ceased to function, the animal is dead (OC

3.424; CW 4.188).

Here it is the assembly of the people, symbolized as the heart, that is sovereign. The self for

Rousseau is not a rational self located in the thinking head, but a self that must encompass all the

body’s feelings, desires, aches, pains, emotional and sensual impulses, etc. The self consists of

the body and brain together: “The life of both is the self common to the whole…” (OC 3.245;

CW 3.143; above, p. 11). For Rousseau, bodily interconnection analogously led to real

communicative reciprocity in the civil state, not just stimulus and command and from there to a

conception of governing officials as serving and preserving the rest of the body rather than ruling

over it. The brain must feel and respond to the pains of the body.

Communication between the sovereign body and administrative brain occurs when the

assembly gathers. In a properly constituted republic, distress among the people will be

transmitted to the government, just as pain in a healthy body is transmitted to the brain. That

Rousseau used pain as the analogue of democratic communication is perhaps the most intriguing

aspect of his body politic. Pain is the way that the body communicates to the brain when

17

something is wrong – those rare persons who cannot feel pain (analgia) have difficulty

remaining whole and healthy, as they do not recoil from injury and do not know when to treat

illness. Thus the general will is a sort of diagnostic for a healthy body politic, as pain is for a

healthy body natural. This also means that pain is the analogue of the voting or decision-making

procedure. The citizens’ first concern when assembled is to communicate to the government any

ailment or pain in the political body, just as the parts of a natural body communicate pain when

afflicted by an illness. But in a natural body pain is not only communicative. Since pain hurts, it

also commands the attention and action of the organism – it makes the body recoil from harm.

Transfer this dispersed power of command throughout a body politic, and now no king rules: in

the assembly, the lower orders of common people command the attention and action of the

administration in order to keep the political body healthy. The people must be able to

communicate effectively with the administration, but stimulus-and-response alone will not

suffice as it did for Hobbes; instead, the people must also have the power of command. Hence

the questions that Rousseau specifies to open the assembly: should we keep this form of

government? Should we keep the current governors? (OC 3.436; CW 4.197). The power to

determine these matters amounts to sovereignty: the administrative head is ultimately

accountable to the lower, democratic orders of the body on pain of removal, and therefore must

respond to their pain. Thus Rousseau prioritized interdependence over hierarchy in the metaphor.

Using pain as the analogue of democratic communication, Rousseau dispersed sovereignty

throughout the political body, standing Hobbes’ monarchical body politic on its head.

Aim of the General Will: Health as Equality

Bodily interdependence had long entailed the belief that, in politics as in nature, the parts

of a body must cooperate if the organism is to survive. The concept of the general will freed

18

Rousseau from having to unify his republic under the will of a single monarch, but he still saw

disunity as a threat, to the point of stressing unity over what many later theorists would consider

to be healthy pluralism. This comes out clearly when he speaks of the governing administration

or intermediary associations as small bodies that inhabit the larger political body and that

sometimes exert wills contrary to its general will (OC 3.372, 395-400; CW 4.147-8, 166-70). The

danger was that partial wills can lead to tyranny, either through usurpation by an ambitious

administration or through the chronic disease of factional corruption. Partial associations had

wills partial to themselves, and their presence could mislead deliberations about the general will

– it was the danger of collusion by factions that worried Rousseau about some, but not all, kinds

of political deliberation (OC 3.372, 399, 439; CW 4.147-8, 169, 199). Thus, predating the French

Revolution and the reactions of Burke, Tocqueville, and other early theorists of civil society,

Rousseau distrusted secondary associations; they were factions that divided and destroyed the

body politic, not healthy deliberative organs that inhibited tyranny (see Ball 1988).12 Rousseau

sought to specially mark out the general will as the will of the entire political community, a

community which must treat its individual members as equals, and he saw partial associations as

a threat to this equality (OC 3.372; CW 4.147-8). The conceptual problem – of which Rousseau

was fully aware – is that the body metaphor is not exact: while bodies natural are unified

naturally, bodies politic must be unified artificially, for the members of a political body are

themselves conscious, while the members of a natural body are not. “What [the citizen] ought to

want is the common good; what he ought to avoid is the public ill. But since the State has only

an ideal and conventional existence, its members have no natural, common sensitivity of which

they are promptly alerted to receive a pleasant impression from what is useful to it and a painful

impression as soon as it is harmed” (OC 3.309; CW 4.98). Hence the will of a political person

19

was not a precise replica of the will of a natural person, for the political equivalent of the natural

body’s nervous system was absent and had to be created artificially.

This problem is what compels Rousseau to adopt the conceptual apparatus of the general

will. The solution may have had its seed in an illuminating passage from Pascal’s Pensées, which

Rousseau may have read during an immersion in Jansenist readings (again in 1737; Rousseau

OC 1. 232; CW 5.194 n. 14; Cranston 1982 120; Riley 1986, 18). Pascal envisaged a body in

which the parts became conscious, overcame narcissism, and yielded their particular wills to that

of the whole: “Imagine a body full of thinking members…If the feet and the hands had a volonté

particulière, they would never be in order except by submitting this volonté particulière to the

volonté première which governs the whole body. Outside of it, they are in disorder and

unhappiness, but in willing the good of the body, they will their own good…” (quoted in Riley

1986, 487). Much of Rousseau’s political theory – the social contract, being “forced to be free,”

and particularly the distinction between the will of all and the general will – can be said to be

attempts to surmount this tension: bodies natural do not have conscious parts that work against

the will of the whole (at least not when the body is healthy), but bodies politic do.

The will of all, the mere sum of individual wills acting from self-partiality, did not satisfy

Rousseau because it lacked the organic unity found in an intact, healthy body. In the body

metaphor, an aggregate of self-interested individual wills would imply that the appendages acted

independently rather than interdependently, flailing about as though the body suffered from

Hobbes’ political epilepsy. For Rousseau, as for Hobbes, such partiality led to the dissolution of

the body politic:

Indeed, each individual can, as a man, have a private will contrary to or differing from

the general will he has as a Citizen. His private interest can speak to him quite differently

20

from the common interest. His absolute and naturally independent existence can bring

him to view what he owes the common cause as a [gratuitous] contribution, the loss of

which will harm others less than its payment burdens him. And considering the moral

person of the State as a being produced by reason because it is not a man, he might wish

to enjoy the rights of a citizen without wanting to fulfill the duties of a subject, an

injustice whose spread would cause the ruin of the body politic (OC 3.363; CW 4. 140-

1).13

Such disconnectedness is not the mark of a healthy body natural, and so Rousseau concluded,

with Hobbes, that independent, self-interested action by the members of the state was

symptomatic of an ailing body politic. The unity and integrity of the association were definitive

of its health.

Here we can begin to see some of the content that the general will must have, content that

makes it more than a formal procedure, content which flows from the metaphor. Because the

body politic is prone to corrupting and potentially fatal diseases, the general will must seek the

health of the political body. Rousseau states that the general will is concerned in its content with

the “preservation and welfare of the whole and of each part” of the body, and he also states that

“so long as several men together consider themselves to be a single body, they have but a single

will, which relates to their common preservation and the general welfare” (OC 3.244-45; CW

3.142-3; OC 3.437; CW 4.198). But what is the preservation and welfare of a body, if not its

health? What body does not desire to be healthy, vital, and vigorous? The general will, as pain, is

analogous to the natural body’s aversion to illness and injury and its desire for overall health. It

therefore seeks the political health of the body politic, looking to preserve it and its members

from political illness and injury. The general will must discover and express to the government

21

any illness in the civil body, i.e. the people must convey whether the structure of society fails to

function beneficially for all members. Therefore, in order to sustain the unity and integrity of

their association, the interdependent body of citizens should always seek just, harmonious

relations in the civil state: “The engagements that bind us to the social body are obligatory only

because they are mutual, and their nature is such that in fulfilling them one cannot work for

someone else without also working for oneself” (OC 3.373; CW 4.148-9). “A healthy, strong

constitution is the first thing that must be sought…” because an ill-constituted body politic – a

monarchy or oligarchy – will ignore the pains of its citizens, as would a diseased and corrupted

republic (OC 3.388; CW 4.160).

“Health” in the political sense, for Rousseau, thus refers to the general welfare, but more

specifically it entails egalitarian rather than partial political, economic, and social arrangements.

The most dangerous political disease is that of selfish partiality, “For the private will tends by its

nature toward preferences, and the general will toward equality,” so sustaining the health and

integrity of the body requires citizens to set aside self-preference for the equal consideration of

all the members of the body generally (OC 3.368; CW 4.145). This equal consideration is what

rules out pluralism, because pluralism is predicated on partiality and preference towards sub-

groups smaller than the whole. A healthy constitution must involve the effective democratic

communication of all members of the political body equally to the governing head: “every act of

sovereignty… obligates or favors all Citizens equally, so that the Sovereign knows only the

nation as a body and makes no distinctions between any of those who compose it. What really is

an act of sovereignty then? It is not a convention between a superior and an inferior, but a

convention between the body and each of its members” (OC 3.374; CW 4.149-50). Making “no

distinctions” between individuals means that the general will is not partial to any of them in its

22

legislation. One is reminded of Dewey’s contention that equality is “the inapplicability of

considerations of greater and less, superior and inferior” and is therefore a qualitative and not

quantitative concept: “In moral and social matters, equality does not mean mathematical

equivalence” (Dewey [1919] 1998, 77). Rousseau’s concern with equality is evident in much of

his social critique. He argued against slavery and privilege and for limits on wealth inequality:

“no citizen should be so opulent that he can buy another, and none so poor that he is constrained

to sell himself” (OC 3.358, 365-7, 349-80, 391-2; CW 4.137, 142-3, 153, 162).14 Political health

therefore means that partiality is set aside in favor of equality for all members, any of whom may

feel pains that afflict the whole. Decisions by the assembly must ideally be consistent with this

egalitarian political health, ruling out, for example, policies that permit slavery or wealth

concentration.

Thus, the metaphor of the body politic provides content for the general will that

constrains any collective decision procedure. The mental imagery supplies a logic, a pattern for

drawing inferences, according to which Rousseau configured the general will, which is not

merely a formal procedure but has substantive content: whatever else citizens discuss, whatever

laws that they might choose to adopt for their common good, their decisions must be consistent

with just and equal civic relationships in order to maintain the health of the republic. The content

of the general will is not simply and only whatever may result from the “correct” voting

procedure, if such a procedure could be found. Every proposal before the assembly, ideally, must

be constrained by the requirements of equality, lest partiality corrupt and dissolve the political

body, the existence of which is itself a condition for self-government. This content for the

general will is only loosely determined, however, because Rousseau leaves the specifics of

maintaining health for the people to decide: “Through the social compact we have given the

23

body politic existence and life; the issue now is to give it movement and will through legislation.

For the original act which forms and unites this body does not thereby determine anything about

what it should do to preserve itself” (OC 3.378; CW 4.152). But preserve itself it must, and so

equality must be the aim, because partiality is a potentially fatal political illness.

These constraints limit the assembly such that it cannot decide whatever it wishes;

Rousseau constructs a republic that is democratic, but not absolutely so. The assembly will not

always get things right: “the people always wants the good, but by itself does not always see it.

The general will is always right, but the judgment that guides it is not always enlightened” (OC

3.371-2, 380; CW 4.147-8, 154). That is, sometimes citizens will fail to understand what social

health entails, or they will succumb to partiality – just as patients sometimes ignore the advice of

their doctors to eat well or to quit smoking. The assembly needs advice and guidance, which

leads us to Rousseau’s concept of the “legislator,” the exceptional civic founder and sage

statesman – whom Rousseau sometimes describes as a civic physician (OC 3 & CW 4, Bk. II.

Chs. VI, VII, VIII, esp. OC 3.385; CW 4.157-8).

The Legislator as Civic Physician

The metaphor of statesman-as-physician goes hand-in-hand with the metaphor of state-

as-body, and has a history going back to Plato’s use of techne metaphors for his philosopher-

king; these included carpenter, shoemaker, and ship captain, but the physician was one of his

favorites. Rousseau too drew on expertise in the arts as a source domain for his ideal statesman:

he described his legislator as an expert trail-guide who led the sovereign on the right path, as an

architect who designed an upright constitution, as an engineer who constructed it, and as a

physician (OC 3.379-80, 384; CW 4.153-4, 157).15 For instance, Rousseau observed that it is

nearly impossible for a founder to establish good laws where bad habits had become entrenched,

24

for then “The people cannot even tolerate having their ills touched for the purpose of destroying

them, like those stupid and cowardly patients who tremble at the sight of a doctor” (OC 3.385;

CW 4.157). He then states that the legislator can best do his work during (certain kinds of )

political revolution, which are akin to the crisis period of an illness: only when fever erases a

people’s memory of their old ways can a state avoid death and experience rebirth, delivered and

nurtured by the legislator (OC 3.385; CW 4.157-8).

Rousseau’s legislator and the related concept of civil religion are often thought to be

illiberal and/or undemocratic elements in his thought: the legislator is superior to the people, and

his political medicine involves secrecy and deceit, especially at the birth of the republic when he

institutes a mandatory state religion. The similarity of the legislator’s methods to propaganda and

manipulation alarms liberal critics, and Rousseau’s civil religion has also caused much

interpretive perplexity among conceptual historians because of its incongruity with the wider

democratic tendencies of his thought (Ball 1995, 112 ff.). These ideas do genuinely show

Rousseau’s illiberal and undemocratic side, at least in the sense that they seem to reflect a

perceptibly republican desire to reign in a sometimes ignorant and impulsive demos. My view is

that these features of Rousseau’s political thought reflect an implicit split in his constitutional

design into two levels. At the first level, recognizably democratic practices are the order of the

day: this is where the assembly meets, where laws are made, and where the general will is

specified in reference to particular problems and issues. This is the level of the organs and

systems of the body politic, and it is the level that I have discussed so far. The second level exists

outside and above this level, and does admittedly involve illiberal features – but they are features

intended to sustain democracy in the first level by creating the conditions for it (cf. Kelly 1987,

333). From this level, the legislator constructs the body politic and maintains its health, first

25

instituting the constitution and advising the assembly thereafter. All the activities that occur in

this level are necessary to maintain the conditions for democracy in the first level. In short, for

Rousseau the legislator and civil religion were not violations of democratic-republican self-

government but were necessary conditions for it. Let us examine these issues in more detail.

Medico-political metaphors are sometimes suspected of harboring anti-democratic

implications: civic physicians have an expertise not possessed by all, and policy-wise their social

surgery can be coldly authoritarian as they purge, cut, and cauterize the political body. But we

must avoid letting contemporary medical experiences vilify earlier metaphors through

anachronism. The prototypical image of the doctor-as-surgeon is a relatively recent metonymy

that does not correspond well to the kind of medical practice familiar to Rousseau. Before the

discovery of antisepsis and anesthesia in the nineteenth century surgery was a last resort, for

obvious reasons, and doctors emphasized other forms of medicine: a typical doctor’s visit, then

as now, involved discussion, a back-and-forth about the patient’s symptoms, with the doctor then

prescribing a therapeutic regimen of rest, baths, diet, and medication (if available), with surgery

performed only if absolutely necessary. The kind of physician that Rousseau evoked as a model

for the legislator was not the surgeon but what we would today call the general practitioner, a

kind of family doctor charged with the regular care of the civic body’s health.

Any assertion that the legislator poses a threat to Rousseau’s democratic republic must

therefore be properly qualified. The legislator admittedly does know better than the assembly

what is good for it (at least on constitutional questions), just as a doctor knows better than a

patient how to treat illness. To some, this smacks of paternalism. Rousseau is explicit and clear,

however, that the legislator cannot have any formal power but must rely on words alone to

educate and inform the people’s morals, customs, and opinion (OC, 3.1394; CW 4.164-5): “it is

26

not magistracy, it is not sovereignty. This function, which constitutes the republic, does not enter

into its constitution. It is a particular and superior activity that has nothing in common with

human dominion. For if one who commands men should not command laws, one who commands

laws should also not command men” (Rousseau OC 3.316, 3.382-3; CW 4.103, 4.155-6). Just as

a doctor’s prescriptions are advice and guidance to the patient, so the legislator advises and

guides the assembly. Compliance in both cases depends on deference to expert authority, not

coercion; we should think of Socrates the gadfly of Athens here, not Dionysius the tyrant of

Syracuse. Rousseau’s own example was Lycurgus, who abdicated the throne before crafting

Sparta’s constitution (OC, 3.382; CW 4.155). The civic physician can prescribe cures, can

propose laws, but cannot force the patient to follow them: “He who drafts the laws, therefore,

does not or should not have any legislative right” (OC, 3.156; CW 3.382). Only the sovereign

assembly, expressing its general will, can create law, and to become law the legislator’s

proposals must be “submitted to the free vote of the people” (OC 3.156; CW 3.382). The

expertise of the legislator, when carefully limited in power in this way, does not seem

inconsistent with democracy. Given that not everyone can be an expert in political things, why

should the assembly not avail itself of the advice of the community’s historians, philosophers,

etc.? Is it paternalism for the wise to have a voice? By excluding the legislator from political

power (metaphorically setting him outside the body politic, just as doctors are literally outside

the bodies for which they care), Rousseau treats all members of the republic as political equals,

even though they are not equals in knowledge and virtue. Thus Rousseau paints a deliberative or

educative picture of his legislator, not a tyrannical one.

This still leaves two difficulties, according to Rousseau (OC, 3.382; CW 4.156). First, the

legislator is in an impossible position: he is responsible for founding and preserving the republic,

27

but has no power to do so. Furthermore, the superior reasoning capacity of the legislator leads to

communication problems: “Wise men who want to use their own language, rather than that of the

common people, cannot be understood by the people” (OC 3.382; CW 4.156). Christopher Kelly

argues that the legislator is the chief moral educator of the republic, but must educate with means

other than reason (Kelly 1987). The legislator must “persuade without convincing” the people

with his normal tools of abstract, rational argument, because “overly general views and overly

remote objects are beyond its grasp” (OC 3.382; CW 4.156). The people’s sentiments must be

turned away from their self-interest and towards the general good by a means other than reason.

The legislator’s difficulties force him to use rhetorical manipulation that takes the form of the

myths and narratives of a contrived civil religion.

Civil Religion

Rousseau’s proposal for a civil religion has always been one of his most controversial,

coming under fire from secular and religious critics alike (Ball 1995, 101-118). It has been

particularly susceptible to accusations of totalitarianism, such that even Rousseau’s defenders

find themselves conceding the point: this is propaganda and indoctrination, and so is patently

illiberal and tyrannical (for a summary of critical views, see Ball 1995, 108-112). Others criticize

it from the other direction, pointing out that Rousseau’s “watered-down quasi-religion” was so

insipid as to be useless to both tyrants and republicans (Beiner 1993, 620-21). Even sympathetic

readers find its inclusion at the end of Du contrat social puzzling: the chapter on civil religion is

tacked on as an apparent afterthought and is so incongruous with the democratic thrust of the rest

of the work that many interpreters cannot accept the totalitarian thesis, but as of yet they have

been able to do little but throw up their hands and accept the seeming paradox or resort to

circumstantial evidence and conjecture to explain it (Ball 1995). Rousseau’s translators have

28

rightly reminded us to be careful to look at the issue from “Rousseau’s frame of reference,”

noting that other political thinkers, including Rousseau’s republican influences Machiavelli and

Montesquieu, had commented on the political uses of religion (Kelly’s and Master’s notes to

Rousseau (1995), 264 n. 130). This admonition should remind us that our interpretations of

Rousseau’s civil religion have surely been colored by two-and-a-half centuries of liberal

argument that church-state separation is essential to liberty (a position with which I agree). But

as a matter of interpretive practice we cannot assume that Rousseau started from this premise,

and I believe that he framed the issues very differently in his own mind.

Rousseau’s body politic metaphor can help clarify this matter too, albeit only indirectly.

Rousseau referred to the body politic a few times in his discussion of civil religion, but only in

passing. Organic metaphors do not directly constitute the concept: if they did, we would expect

Rousseau to refer to civil religion as the medicine of the body politic, or as the sinews which

hold it together, or something similar, but nowhere does he do so. On the other hand, as I have

argued, Rousseau did think that organic integrity was essential to the health and survival of the

political body. The function of civil religion was to maintain the organic unity and integrity of

the body politic, preventing its dissolution and death from factional infighting.

If we start with this “unity imperative” in mind, then closely follow Rousseau’s argument

about civil religion (Bk. IV Ch. VIII of Du contrat social), and finally add a bit of historical

context, we can arrive at a reasonable explanation. This section of my interpretation will require

many readers to set aside, for analytical purposes, their own mindsets about freedom and

religion. Rousseau, in essence, argues that it is not a separation of religion and politics that

brings an end to religious factionalism, but a unity of the two – exactly the opposite of the liberal

position. In Bk. IV Ch. VIII, he begins by observing that religious wars did not occur under the

29

polytheistic paganism of antiquity (OC 3.460-62; CW 4.216-17). Rousseau offers varied

explanations which I will not repeat, but the crux is that pagans did not separate religion from

government but maintained a unity of civic and religious authority in each city. Rousseau then

observes that Christianity brought an end to this, dividing the spiritual from the earthly and

thereby causing religious conflict: “By separating the theological system from the political

system, this brought about the end of the unity of the State, and caused the internal divisions that

have never ceased to stir up christian peoples” (OC 3.462; CW 4.217-18). We must recall that the

religious struggles of the Middle Ages were between priests and princes over who should have

political authority. The Investiture Controversy of the eleventh century saw kings remove popes

and popes excommunicate kings; the conflict between King Henry II and Thomas á Becket,

Archbishop of Canterbury, infamously led to latter’s assassination; the Thirty Years War, fought

by princes supporting a politically ambitious papacy against other princes jealously guarding

their power – these seemed to be uppermost in Rousseau’s mind. Priests and popes, asserting a

“plenitude of power,” had made claims to supreme political control (Marsilius of Padua [1324]

1956, I.XIX), but Rousseau says that “since there has always been a Prince and civil laws, this

double power has resulted in a perpetual conflict of jurisdiction that has made any good polity

impossible in Christian States, and no people has ever been able to figure out whom it was

obligated to obey, the master or the priest” (OC 3.462; CW 4.218; emphasis added). The body

politic could not be governed by two heads, one religious, one secular (the metaphor of the body

politic was widely used by both sides during these medieval debates; see Barkan 1975, 74-75).

The key to understanding Rousseau here is to realize that he did not frame the problem as later

liberals did, as a conflict between a multitude of religious sects; rather, he framed it as a conflict

between two sets of elite authorities, one religious and the other secular. Hence his solution has

30

nothing to do with freedom of conscience or separation of church and state and everything to do

with resolving this “conflict of jurisdiction.” In other words, the problem that Rousseau was

trying to solve was this: the Christian separation of religion and politics had led to war and

despotism, which were conditions detrimental to republican self-government.

The solution, for Rousseau, was therefore not separation of church and state, but their

reunification. If we turn back to the chapter on civil religion, we see that after Rousseau laid this

out as his problem (OC 3.460-464; CW 4.216-219), the middle of the chapter is devoted to an

examination and rejection of several potential religious solutions (OC 3.462-467; CW 4.218-222;

I will not detail them, but see Beiner 1993, 617-19, 631-2 for a summary). At the very end of the

chapter, Rousseau then settles on the solution of a “civil religion” which performs this

reunification. This religion is not doctrinaire and all-encompassing, but a limited religion of

limited purposes. Because “The right that the social compact gives the Sovereign over subjects

does not exceed, as I have said, the limits of public utility,” most theological controversies were

beyond the purview of the state (OC 3.467; CW 4.222). But when it comes to religious beliefs

that served a public purpose (or rather, that Rousseau thought self-evidently served a public

purpose) the republic could exert the force of law:

Now it matters greatly to the State that each Citizen have a Religion that causes him to

love his duties; but the dogmas of that Religion are of no interest either to the State or to

its members; except insofar as these dogmas relate to morality, and to the duties that

anyone who professes it is obliged to fulfill towards others. Everyone can have whatever

opinions he pleases beyond that, without the Sovereign having to know what they are.

For since the Sovereign has no competence in the other world, whatever the fate of

31

subjects in the life hereafter, it is none of its business, as long as they are good citizens in

this one (OC 3.468; CW 4.222).

Hence for Rousseau most religious beliefs were beyond the legitimate reach of civic authority,

but there were some of public concern (the real inconsistency here is that Rousseau relies on

Christian dualism to divide these spheres while having earlier criticized it). For example,

Rousseau believed that a person could be neither moral nor civic-spirited without believing in

god, the hereafter, and the threat of eternal punishment (Kelly 1997, 1238, 1242).16 He said that

the dogmas of the civil religion should include “The existence of a powerful, intelligent,

beneficent, foresighted, and providential Divinity; the afterlife; the happiness of the just; the

punishment of the wicked; the sanctity of the social Contract and the Laws” (OC 3.468; CW

4.223). It is also noteworthy that he forbade intolerance: “one should tolerate all those religions

that tolerate others insofar as their dogmas are in no way contrary to the duties of the Citizen”

(OC 3.469; CW 4.223). These beliefs, Rousseau said, were the minimum needed to be a good

citizen. They were not, however, to be understood as rigid, doctrinaire tenets: “There is,

therefore, a purely civil profession of faith, the articles of which are for the Sovereign to

establish, not exactly as Religious dogmas, but as sentiments of sociability without which it is

impossible to be a good Citizen or faithful subject” (OC 3.462; CW 4.218). Rousseau suggested

that these sentiments could be inculcated mainly through public ritual (Kelly 1995, 1241), but as

a public matter they did fall under the purview of the assembly and were enforceable by law –

and for Rousseau the punishments could be severe, to include banishment for disbelief and

execution for apostasy (OC 3.468; CW 4.223). But these harsh penalties were invoked because

Rousseau saw civil religion as preventing the death of the body politic, a catastrophe that would,

to his mind, provide a rationale for strict discipline. Rousseau’s argument that the civil religion

32

would inspire military courage underscores his desire to use it in defense of the political body

(OC 3.467-8; CW 4.221-23).

And so for Rousseau a healthy political constitution must include a civil religion as a

social bonding agent, one capable of overcoming self-preference and inducing self-sacrifice and

thereby preventing fatal division in the body politic. If what I have said is correct, then the

chapter on civil religion is no longer a curiosity but makes perfect sense: Rousseau included civil

religion not out of muddled or totalitarian thinking, not out of intentional paradox, but because

he thought that a civil religion helped provide the necessary conditions for liberty in the body

politic. The legislator’s civil religion creates and maintains the civic spirit of the common people

by using religious myth as a substitute for the rational argument that was beyond their grasp,

thereby preserving popular self-government. The legislator and civil religion are not

authoritarian (much less totalitarian) ideas that Rousseau smuggled into his political philosophy,

but were intended to establish the conditions for the existence of the democratic general will.

Therefore the legislator and civil religion might be un-democratic themselves, but they cannot

rightly be called anti-democratic. Liberals today might find these aspects of Rousseau’s political

thought to be wrong-headed, and I would agree; but at worst they were well-intentioned mistakes

by a political philosopher creatively experimenting to solve the conflicts of his day.

The Mortality of the Body Politic

The claim that the general will must be committed to egalitarian social relations is further

supported by Rousseau’s statements regarding the political death of the civic body, which must

be delayed as long as possible. Whereas broken parts in a machine can be repaired and the

machine be made as good as new, Rousseau’s republic is as mortal as any organism:

33

The body politic, like the human body, begins to die from the very moment of its birth,

and carries within itself the causes of its destruction…The constitution of a man is the

work of nature; the constitution of the state is a work of art. It is not within men’s power

to prolong their lives; it is within their power to prolong the life of the state as far as

possible, by giving it the best constitution it can have (OC 3.424; CW 4.188).

The life-prolonging health of a republic is a moral health, and so the death of the body politic is a

moral death – a death that occurs when popular sovereignty is lost. Rousseau believed that any

non-democratic condition ceased to be a true political society, because a body politic lacking

communication between the head and the body was a body divided against itself: “if the people

promises simply to obey, it dissolves itself by that act; it loses the status of a people. The

moment there is a master, there is no longer a Sovereign, and from then on the body politic is

destroyed” (OC 3.369; CW 4.145). A government may persist after it no longer consults the

people, but the republic is dead as a self-governing moral community:

The dissolution of the State can come about… when the Prince no longer administers the

State in accordance with the laws and usurps the sovereign power… the large State

dissolves and another is formed within it that is composed solely of the members of the

Government and is no longer anything for the rest of the People except its master and

tyrant (OC 3.422, CW 4.187).

Thus Rousseau defined tyranny as the appropriation of sovereign power by the administrative

brain. It would cease to serve the body, and instead make the body serve it. Hence, a true civil

state disintegrated and died when the political nervous system reciprocally linking the people and

the government was badly impaired or severed. 17

34

The emphasis on interdependence and equality in Rousseau’s body politic also undercuts

the idea that he was a supporter of totalitarianism, democratic or otherwise (e.g. Nisbet 1943, 93-

114; Berlin [1958] 2002, 179-180, 187, 194, 204-205, 208-209). Isaiah Berlin, for example,

complained that Rousseau and others who used organic imagery were unwitting advocates of the

tyranny of the majority: “the sovereignty of the people could easily destroy the sovereignty of

individuals” (Berlin [1958] 2002, 208). But this fails to understand the degree to which all the

parts of the social body were organically, that is mutually, interdependent, for Rousseau:

It is not credible that an arm can be harmed or cut off without pain being transmitted to

the head. And it is no more credible that the general will would allow any member of the

state, whoever he might be, to injure or destroy another, than it is that the fingers of a

man using his reason would put out his own eyes. Private safety is so closely connected

to the public confederation that were it not for the consideration owed to human

weakness, this convention would be dissolved by right if a single citizen perished who

could not be saved; if a single one were wrongly held in prison; and if a single suit were

lost due to evident injustice. For when the fundamental conventions are violated, one can

no longer see what right or what interest could maintain the people in the social union,

unless it is restrained by force alone, in which case the civil state is dissolved.

Indeed, isn’t the body of a nation under an engagement to provide for the

preservation of the humblest of its members with as much care as for all the others? And

is the safety of a citizen any less the common cause than that of the whole state? (OC

3.255-6; CW 3.152).

Rousseau did not think that part of a healthy social body could harm another any more than a

person could willingly amputate an limb, an act which is possible only when life itself is

35

threatened, “as a wounded man has his arm cut off to save the rest of his Body” (OC 3.178; CW

3.54). Thus a nation might draft and sacrifice some of its members only when its existence was

threatened by war, but such a policy would be illegitimate under less dire circumstances: “the

Sovereign, for its part, cannot impose on the subjects any burden that is useless to the

community. It cannot even will to do so…” (OC 3.373; CW 4.148). In a healthy democratic

republic, the people will not will their own oppression or destruction, except in error. Given

Rousseau’s emphasis on interconnected bodily systems, interdependence integrates the political

body and morally forecloses the dominance of any one part; as Conroy stresses, harmony and not

tyranny is the operative feature of Rousseau’s organic imagery (Conroy 1979, 6). It is only when

the democratic nervous system fails that the republic dies and tyranny arises. Rousseau did not

advocate the disease of tyranny; he sought to prevent it.

In sum, democratic interdependence, for Rousseau, does require a political unity

analogous to the unity of a body natural, that is, healthy integration of the interdependent parts;

this does not imply tyranny but the equal valuation of all citizens, since all members of the

political body can transmit pain that afflicts the whole. Social division, whether from corruption

or design, is like a misshapen, diseased monstrosity, “a fantastic being formed of bits and

pieces… a man [made] out of several bodies, one of which would have eyes, another arms,

another feet, and nothing more. Japanese charlatans are said to cut up a child right in front of the

audience; then, tossing all the parts into the air one after another, they make the child come back

down alive and in one piece” (OC 3.369; CW 4.146). In his depiction of the body politic in

l’économie politique (above, p. 10-11), Rousseau wrote that a constitutional failure of the

democratic nervous system, that is, the loss of healthy connections between the people and the

government, was the death of the body politic: “What happens if this communication ceases, if

36

formal unity disappears and contiguous parts are related to one another only by their proximity?

The man is dead or the state is dissolved” (OC 3.245; CW 3.143).

Conclusion: Examining the Patient

Let us now return to the topic with which we began: how do we determine the general

will? The general will, a product of the political nervous system, is concerned with the self-

preservation of the political body, and so must maintain healthy egalitarian relations between

members of the body politic and between members and the whole. Only after this qualitative

premise is understood can we begin to think about procedures for quantifying votes. Rousseau

hints at this: “what generalizes the will is not so much the number of votes as the common

interest that unites them…” (OC 3.374; CW 4.149). So when we talk about voting procedures,

we must remember the aim of the general will: the democratic health of the republic.

Still, a point is reached where the question must be asked, just how are the votes to be

counted? – and this is precisely the point where both Rousseau and his interpreters break down.

Allen had a sense of this: “Rousseau’s failure lay in his neglecting to work out clearly the means

whereby the formal principle of the general will acquired content” (Allen 1961, 272). I have

argued that the general will does have content, of at least a broad and indeterminate kind. But the

point still has some force: in politics, determining collective decisions normally requires the

quantification of a vote. Yet here we might pause. Since this is repeatedly where interpreters get

into trouble, it might be best to finally conclude that the general will is resistant to quantification:

it is at root a qualitative entity, found metaphorically in the health of a body. Quantifying it is as

difficult as quantifying “health” in a natural organism. Shall we measure health by pulse?

Cholesterol level? Blood pressure? Or in some other way? Of course, individually none of these

adequately assesses the health of a natural body, and they probably do not do so even together.

37

But determining the general will by voting is asking to do exactly that, to quantify the health of

the body politic by some single measure. The analogue that Rousseau wanted to measure was

pain, which itself is not quantifiable beyond “more” or “less,” and furthermore pains differ in

quality as well as intensity: a burn feels different than a toothache. Attempting to measure the

quality of the general will by counting votes is therefore confusing, misleading, and problematic

– Rousseau’s own comments on the intricacies of the voting procedure are infamously

contradictory (Thakurdas 1976, 83-84). The metaphor is stretched here to its breaking point.

I will therefore suggest that Rousseau and his interpreters may have been better off trying

to avoid quantification altogether – better to diagnose the patient directly, by observing

symptoms and asking the patient where it hurts, just like the family doctor; that is, perhaps the

emphasis should be on discourse, not counting. I can only suggest here that my reconstruction of

the general will as diagnostic seems to support deliberative conceptions of democracy over

formal proceduralism, despite Rousseau’s own reservations about deliberation (Manin 1987,

338-368, 345ff.).18 Qualitative states of being such as health and sickness are best expressed in

words, not numbers. Rousseau’s political anatomy, with its democratic nervous system,

emphasizes communication, so perhaps anything that might look like the general will must be

arrived at in practice by consensus-building deliberation rather than through voting procedures.

Devising complicated mathematical formulae for voting procedures will likely not get us

closer to understanding the general will, for proceduralist approaches neglect its qualitative

content: the general will is concerned with maintaining an egalitarian political society, a point

that becomes clear when we understand the general will as the workings of the political nervous

system extending throughout Rousseau’s body politic. I do not claim that this interpretation of

the general will as democratic diagnostic is the last word on the matter, for it is a complex

38

concept that resists interpretive closure. But an awareness of Rousseau’s metaphor of the body

politic, properly placed in context, adds content to the general will that enhances our

understanding of it and prevents us from becoming mired in quantitative analysis over something

that is qualitative in character, the health of political society. One thing seems clear: Rousseau

had a significant influence on the politics of the eighteenth century and after, and if his general

will is based on a body metaphor, then his body politic is an image of historical importance to

modern democracy.

__________________________________________________________________________

1 Note on citation: unless otherwise indicated, references to Rousseau’s writings are to the

Ouvres complètes (abbreviated OC) followed by the Collected Writings (abbreviated CW), in

both cases cited by volume and page.

2 For a discussion of Rousseau’s later influence, see (Coker 1967, 27, 28, 29).

3 New metaphor theories observe that metaphors are normal and ubiquitous in language, that

so-called “dead” metaphors teem with living meaning, and that metaphors are cognitive and not

only linguistic. While there are differences over specifics, the general thrust of these theories is

that metaphors involve using one part of experience to understand another, and so supply

patterns of inference by which human beings routinely constitute meaning. These quick

assertions about metaphor may go against conventional wisdom, but to try and prove them would

be far beyond the scope of this paper as would any attempt to summarize the extensive, multi-

disciplinary literature on metaphor (for relevant discussions see Nietzsche [1873] 1971; Pepper

1928, 1935; Richards 1936; Black [1962] 1976; and Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999). Currently,

the leading metaphor scholar within linguistics and cognitive science is George Lakoff, whose

39

recent work on political metaphor has received empirical support from within political science

(Barker and Tinnick 2006).

4 Some scholars have recognized that the general will is not merely formal; e.g. Robert Paul

Wolff (Wolff 1971, 48). But Wolff only makes the vague claim that the general will must aim

for the common good, which merely agrees with Rousseau’s explicit statement to that effect (OC

3.368; CW 4.145). I will attempt to further specify the general will’s content as we proceed.

5 Although I will discuss discourses which resort heavily to the vocabulary of the body, readers

should not confuse my analysis with feminist and postmodern scholarship that focuses on the

interplay of the bodily and the political (e.g. Bordo 1993; Foucault [1977] 1995). I agree with

those who argue that political and other forms of power dispose and constitute human bodies and

identities, and/or that differences between bodies, gender-based or otherwise, are worthy of

recognition. These important issues are not my concern here, however. Feminists and

postmodernists are concerned with political effects on actual, natural bodies; I am studying how

images of the natural body have historically served as structural models for conceptions of the

polity, which is quite a different matter.

Unfortunately, it is safe to say that throughout Western history the body politic was almost

universally imagined to be that of a war-fighting male – even when women authors such as

Christine de Pizan used the imagery (Pizan [1406] 1994). The degree to which historical

conceptions of the body politic were feminine is an interesting question that I cannot explore

here, except to say that there is little to indicate that Rousseau – who was no feminist – thought

of his body politic as female.

6 I am indebted to Andreas Musolff for this point, which he raised at the Reasearching and

Applying Metaphor 6 conference, 2006, University of Leeds, UK.

40

7 For example, Rousseau’s illness in 1737 drove him to seek treatment from one Dr. Fizes in

Montpellier, where he spent time or perhaps even lodged in the home of an Irish doctor named

Fitzmorris (OC 1.248; CW 5.208). Fitzmorris provided room and board to medical students, who

gave Rousseau free medical advice (Cranston 1982, 127-132).

8 Rousseau alludes to but does not name the general will in the Discours sur l’inegalité, where

he discusses the unification of individual wills under a social compact: “The people having, on

the subject of Social relations, united all their wills into a single one…” (OC 3.184-5; CW 3.60).

9 I thus concur with both Peter Conroy and George Armstrong Kelly (Conroy 1979, 2-3, 10-12;

Kelly 1986, 16). Kelly argued that the “traces of mechanistic imagery in Rousseau… are

generally decorative” and secondary to organic processes of “birth, growth, decrepitude and

death” (Kelly 1986, 16). In the first chapter of an early version of Du contrat social, Rousseau

mixed the metaphors of machine and body, but this was omitted from the final, published version

(OC 3.282; CW 4.76).

10 Hobbes allows for government either by a monarch or a small council, but his clear

preference is for monarchy rather than oligarchy, and certainly not democracy (see Hobbes

[1651] 1996, 131). For simplicity, I use the word “sovereign” to refer to the head of state,

whether a single man or council.

11Rousseau originally considered subtitling Du contrat social as the Essai sur la formation du

corps politique, suggesting the close association of contract and body metaphors in his political

thought (Masters & Kelly’s notes to the Complete Writings, CW 4.233 n. 1).

12 Rousseau did say that if factions could not be eliminated then they ought to be multiplied and

made equal (OC 3.372; CW 4.147-8; Cf. Boyd 2001).

41

13 The Collected Works translates the word “gratuite” [sic] from the Ouvres complètes as

“free.”

14 I call Rousseau egalitarian only in regards to economic and political class; like most men of

his age, his commitment to equality did not extend to matters of gender.

15 One of Rousseau’s few significant mechanistic images (see p. 12) describes the legislator’s

role in giving birth to the republic (and so is mixed with an organic natal metaphor): “But if it is

true that a great Prince is a rare man, what about a great Legislator? The former only has to

follow the model that the latter should propose. The latter is the mechanic who invents the

machine; the former is only the workman who puts it together and starts it running. At the birth

of societies, says Montesquieu, the leaders of republics create the institutions; thereafter, it is the

institutions that form the leaders of republics” (OC 3.381; CW 4.154-5).

16 To clarify: the assertion that religion is necessary for civic spirit is Rousseau’s, not mine.

17 See also (Conroy 1979, 7) for a discussion of the mortality of the body politic.

18 One question that puzzles deliberative democrats involves Rousseau’s declaration in Book II,

Ch. 3 of Du contrat social that deliberations about public matters must forbid discussions

between citizens before the vote – a declaration that seems at odds with the democratic tenor of

Rousseau’s thought (Rousseau OC 3.371-2; CW 4.147-8). My interpretation of the general will

helps to explain this curiosity: the nervous system that serves as the pattern for Rousseau’s

model of democratic communication consists of interconnections between the body’s

appendages and the brain, but not between the appendages. Rousseau says that the administration

or government is like a small body inside the larger body, mediating the “mutual

communication” of the citizens (Rousseau 3.397-400; CW 4.167-70). That is, body parts

communicate pain to the brain, but not to each other; a pain in one hand is felt in the brain, but

42

not in the other hand or in the feet, etc. This particular anatomical model would explain why

Rousseau channeled communication to the administration (as head) and prohibited it between the

parts. The constraints on voting, communication amongst different parts, etc. that Rousseau

imposes thus all seem to simulate the organic action of a natural body in which the parts

communicate to the brain via a nervous system (Rousseau OC 3.371-2; CW 4.147-8).

References

Allen, Glen O. 1961. “Le Volonté de Tous and Le Volonté General [sic]: A Distinction and Its

Significance.” Ethics 71 (4): 263-275.

Ball, Terence. 1988. “The Prehistory of Party.” In Transforming Political Discourse. New York:

Basil Blackwell.

___________. 1995. “Rousseau’s Civil Religion Reconsidered.” In Reappraising Political

Theory: Revisionist Studies in the History of Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon

Press).

Barkan, Leonard. 1975. Nature’s Work of Art: The Human Body as Image of the World. New

haven: Yale University Press.

Barker, David C. and James D. Tinnick III. 2006. “Competing Visions of Parental Roles and

Ideological Constraint.” American Political Science Review 100 (2): 249-263.

Beiner, Ronald. 1993. “Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Rousseau on Civil Religion.” The Review of

Politics 55 (4): 617-638

Berlin, Isaiah. [1958] 2002. “Two Concepts of Liberty.” In Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford:

Oxford University Press.

Black, Max. [1962] 1976. “Metaphor.” In Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and

43

Philosophy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Boerhaave, Hermann. 1703. De usu ratiocinii mechanici in medicina. Lecture, University of

Leyden.

Bordo, Susan. 1993. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body. Berkeley:

University of California Press.

Borelli, Giovanni Alfonso. 1680-1681. De motu animalium. Rome: Ex typographia Angeli

Bernabò.

Boyd, Richard. 2001. “Thomas Hobbes and the Perils of Pluralism.” Journal of Politics 63 (2):

392-413.

Christine de Pizan. [1406] 1994. The Book of the Body Politic. Kate Langdon Forhan, trans. New

York: Cambridge University Press.

Conroy, Peter. “Rousseau’s Organic State.” South Atlantic Bulletin 44 (2): 1-13.

Coker, F. W. 1967. Organismic Theories of the State: Nineteenth Century Interpretations of the

State as Organism or Person. New York: AMS Press.

Cook, Harold. 1997. “From the Scientific Revolution to the Germ Theory.” In Western

Medicine: An Illustrated History, Louden, Irvine, ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cranston, Maurice. 1982. Jean-Jacques: The Early Life and Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau

1712-1754. W.W. Norton & Company.

Dewey, John. [1919] 1998. “Philosophy and Democracy.” In The Essential Dewey, Vol. 1:

Pragmatism, Education, Democracy. Larry A. Hickman and Thomas M. Alexander, eds.

Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Foucault, Michel. [1977] 1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, New York:

Vintage.

44

Grofman, Bernard and Scott L. Feld. 1988. “Rousseau’s General Will: A Condorcetian

Perspective.” American Political Science Review 82 (2): 567-576.

Hobbes, Thomas. [1651] 1996. Leviathan. Richard Tuck, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

Janata, Jaromír. 2001. Masochism: The Mystery of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Danbury, CT:

Rutledge.

John of Salisbury. [1159] 1990. Policraticus. Cary J. Nederman, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Kantorowicz, Ernst H. [1957] 1997. The King's Two Bodies. Princeton: Princeton University

Press.

Kelly, Christopher. 1987. “’To Persuade Without Convincing’: The Language of Rousseau’s

Legislator.” American Journal of Political Science 31 (2): 321-335.

_______________.1997. Rousseau and the Case for (and against) Censorship.” The Journal of

Politics 59 (4): 1232-1251.

Kelly, George Armstrong. 1986. “Mortal Man, Immortal Society?: Political Metaphors in

Eighteenth-Century France.” Political Theory 14 (1): 5-29.

de La Mettrie, Julien Offray. [1748] 1996. L’homme machine. In Machine Man and Other

Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press.

____________________________. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh. New York: Basic Books.

Lonrigg, James. 1997. “Medicine in the Classical World.” In Western Medicine: An Illustrated

History, Louden, Irvine, ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

45

Manin, Bernard. 1987. “On Legitimacy and Political Deliberation.” Political Theory 15 (3): 338-

368.

Marsilius of Padua. [1324] 1956. The Defensor pacis, Alan Gerwirth, trans. New York: Harper

and Row.

McVaugh, Michael R. 1997. “Medicine in the Latin Middle Ages.” In Western Medicine: An

Illustrated History, Louden, Irvine, ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. [1873] 1971. “On Truth and Falsity in their Extramoral Sense.” In Essays

on Metaphor, Warren Shibles, ed. Whitewater, Wisconsin, USA: The Language Press.

Nisbet, Robert A. 1943. “Rousseau and Totalitarianism.” Journal of Politics 5 (2): 93-114.

Park, Katharine. 1997. “Medicine and the Renaissance.” In Western Medicine: An Illustrated

History, Louden, Irvine, ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pepper, Stephen C. 1928. “Philosophy and Metaphor.” Journal of Philosophy 25 (5): 130-132.

_______________. 1935. “The Root Metaphor Theory of Metaphysics.” Journal of Philosophy

32 (14): 365-374.

Petty, William. [1691] 1970. The Political Anatomy of Ireland. Shannon, Ireland: Irish

University Press.

Richards, I.A. 1936. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Riley, Patrick. 1978. “The General Will Before Rousseau.” Political Theory 6 (4): 485-516.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1964. Ouvres completes. B. Gagnebin and M. Raymond eds.

Bibliothèque de la Pléiade: Paris.

___________________. 1979. Emile. Allan Bloom, trans. New York: Basic Books.

___________________. 1995. The Collected Writings of Rousseau. Christopher Kelly, Roger D.

Masters, and Peter G. Stillman, eds; Judith R. Bush, Roger D. Masters, and Christopher

46

Kelly, trans. Hanover and London: University Press of New England.

Runciman,W. G. and Amartya K. Sen. 1965. “Games, Justice and the General Will.”Mind 74

(296): 554-562.

Shapiro, Ian. 2003. The State of Democratic Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Skinner, Quentin. 1996. Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Saccaro-Battisti, Giuseppe. 1983. “Changing Metaphors of Political Structures.” Journal of the

History of Ideas 44 (1): 31-54.

Sreenivasan, Gopal. 2000. “What Is the General Will?” The Philosophical Review 109 (4): 545-

581.

Thakurdas, Frank. 1976. Rousseau and the Concept of the General Will: The Pursuit of an

Elusive Concept. Calcutta : Minerva Associates.

Vesalius, Andreas. [1543] 1967. De humani corporis fabrica libri septem. Basileæ : ex officina

Ioannis Oporini.

Wolff, Robert Paul. 1971. In Defense of Anarchism. New York, Harper & Row.

Jeffery Zavadil is a faculty associate at Arizona State University.

47