Glossary
The people as they could be if they came together around universal moral law and total freedom.
Topic brief
A Jiang Lens evidence brief for this topic, built from source tags, transcript matches, and linked source refs.
general will
The people as they could be if they came together around universal moral law and total freedom.
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Key Notes
Glossary
Rousseau's collective abstraction that Jiang presents as a substitute for God and the source of government legitimacy.
Glossary
Rousseau's collective mind of the people, served by government and implemented by the French Revolution as the nation-state.
Glossary
Rousseau's idea of what is in people's best interest, not necessarily what they vote for or say they want.
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model
He reads Rousseau's social contract as a theory in which people surrender individual freedom to society only in order to become more free through the general will.
definition
Jiang distinguishes common will as what the people already are from general will as what the people could become if they acted by universal moral law.
diagnosis
He treats the general will as the sovereign and says the French Revolution threatened monarchies because it made the people, rather than the monarch, the highest authority.
definition
He defines Rousseau's general will as a substitute for God: a collective abstraction that expresses the best of humanity and gives legitimacy to government and law.
model
Rousseau's social contract supplies the Enlightenment route to nationalism: individuals form a general will, government serves that will, and the French Revolution implements it as the nation-state.
model
Jiang summarizes the Enlightenment/Romanticism split as science versus nature, reason versus emotion, liberty versus will and struggle, and French general will versus German Geist.
model
The second and third differences are purpose and legal basis: Locke centers liberty and tradition, while Rousseau centers reason and the general will.
definition
Jiang defines the European general will as what is in everyone's best interest after reasoned reflection, not what the majority currently wants.
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Timestamped Evidence
Transcript
"...should strive for total freedom. And that's the idea of the general will. Okay?"
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"The common will is who we are. The general will is who we could be if we came together as a people. Okay? And..."
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"billion people in this world, and most of us are not very happy with the state affairs? And scientists will tell you it's because..."
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"...the category imperative is what gives us the theory of the general will so even though we all vote to eat ice cream we..."
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"...theory, especially monarchs, right? Because the idea here is that the general will, the people, are the sovereign. But in a monarchy, the monarch..."
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"...so we create a sort of social contract that creates the general will okay and the general will it's a substitute for God it..."
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"...concept that allows us to be truly and fully human the general will so what is the general will okay all right so think..."
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"...the idea of the category imperative the ethical basis for the general will okay now in practical terms how do you implement this in..."
Transcript
"...so the people come together and it creates something called the general will which is the collective mind of the people okay and from..."
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"...revolution right napoleon and the french french france okay and the general will becomes manifest in the nation state does that make sense okay..."
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"Let them be bleached and dried out by many centuries of storms, deluges, and blazing sun. The animating breath of the spiritual world has..."
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"...Germans, the nation is the church. The French believe in the general will. What's in the best interest of everyone? The Germans believe in..."
Relevant Lectures And Readings
Reading
A source-grounded reading of the nation-state as war machine: Rousseau turns liberty into sovereignty, Fichte turns language into blood, Bismarck turns welfare into war infrastructure, Mussolini turns myth into death, and 21st-century war turns...
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A source-grounded reading of Jiang's lecture on America as the world game: Britain invents the imperial board but cannot scale it, the dollar turns wealth into an idea, the Constitution keeps the game above...
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Britain becomes empire not because it begins powerful, but because it begins divided, poor, exposed, and forced to change.
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Robespierre is not read as a dictator who simply loses control.
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The French Revolution is not introduced as politics first.
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