JEAN-JACQUES & L'HISTOIRE DES DEUX INDES (IV): LA VOLONTÉ GÉNÉRALE
"It was a rift which extended to the role of legislation" — Jonathan Israel

AM | @HDI1780

La notion de "volonté générale" revient à plusieurs reprises dans l'Histoire des deux Indes. Raynal écrit, à propos des "sauvages qui habitoient le Canada": "La volonté générale n’y assujettissoit pas même la volonté particulière" (HDI 1780, xvi.6). Alexandre Deleyre reprend le terme dans le Tableau de l'Europe: "Le meilleur des princes, qui auroit fait le bien contre la volonté générale, seroit criminel, par la seule raison qu’il auroit outrepassé ses droits ... Peuples, ne permettez donc pas à vos prètendus maîtres de faire, même le bien, contre votre volonté générale" (HDI 1780, xix.2). Parmi les auteurs modernes qui ont écrit sur les différences entre les Lumières radicales et Rousseau à propos de la "volonté générale", je signalerai Colas Duflo (*) et Jonathan Israel.

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Malheureusement, je n'ai pas le livre de M. Duflo ici. Voici donc un extrait du chapitre "Rousseau, Spinoza and the General Will" du livre de Jonathan Israel, Democratic Democratic Enlightenment. Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights, 1750-1790 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 637-638 [info]:

If Rousseau's volonté générale shares with Diderot's and d'Holbach's 'general will' the property of grounding both the rights and duties of citizens, it differs from theirs in that, for Rousseau, each nation expresses its own particular will rather than embraces the universal 'general will' proclaimed by the Diderot circle. Rousseau's equality consequently has a localized, particular quality that helps us understand why it is that he nowhere speaks of the oneness of mankind or proclaims the equality of the black and brown peoples with the whites. It also helps us explain how the gender factor could differ so dramatically in the two cases, the status of men and women in Rousseau's schema diverging sharply from that in Diderot's.

The 'general will' of the Diderot circle, proclaiming justice and equality the sole basis of the 'general will', appeals to constant and absolute principles, and applies to all human society wherever it may be, laying down values supposedly no less valid in primitive than civilized societies. It was equally relevant as a basis for regulating relations between states and peoples and for organizing democracy within nations. At the same time, it fully acknowledged the inevitability of disagreement and clashes between individual and collective interest.

Thus, the Radical Enlightenment conception of general will lacked that emphasis on unanimity and absence of dissent, indeed pressure to eliminate dissent, typical of Rousseau's (and later Robespierre's) rival conception.

(*) Colas Duflo. Diderot philosophe. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2003 [recension].
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