I

“The phrase ‘general will,’” says the eminent Rousseau scholar Judith Shklar, “is ineluctably the property of one man, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He did not invent it, but he made its history.”¹ And he made that history by giving the notion of volonté générale a central place in his political and moral philosophy: Rousseau himself insists that “the general will is always right,”² that it is “the will that one has as a citizen”³ when one thinks of the common good and not of one’s own “particular will” (volonté particulière) as a “private person.”⁴ Even virtue, he says, is nothing but a “conforming” of one’s personal volonté particulière to the public volonté générale, a conforming that “leads us out of ourselves,” out of egoism and self-love, and toward “the public happiness.”⁵ If this is well-known, it is perhaps only slightly less well-known that, at roughly the same time as Rousseau, Diderot used the notions of volonté générale and volonté particulière in his Encyclopédie article, “Droit Naturel” (1755), saying that the “general will” is “the rule of conduct” that arises from a “pure act of the understanding”: an understanding that “reasons in the silence of the passions about what a man can demand of his fellow-man and what his fellow-man has a right to demand of him.”⁶ It is “to the general will that the individual man must address himself,” Diderot adds, “in order to know how far he must be a man, a citizen, a subject, a father, a child”; and that volonté générale, which “never errs,” is “the tie of all societies.”⁷

But if, as Shklar correctly insists, Rousseau “made the history” of the general will without “inventing” it, who then should be credited with the invention? Not Diderot: for, as Shklar shows, Montesquieu had already used the terms volonté générale and volonté particulière in the most famous chapter (XI) of De l’Esprit des Lois (1748).⁸ But then where did Montesquieu find those ideas? And how could he count on their being immediately understood, since he used them without explaining them?

The mystery is solved when one realizes that the term volonté générale was well established in the seventeenth century, though not primarily as a political idea. In fact the notion of “general will” was originally a theological one and referred to the kind of will that God (supposedly) had in deciding who would be granted grace sufficient for salvation and who would be consigned to hell. The question at issue was this: if “God wills that all men be saved” – as St. Paul asserts in a letter to his disciple Timothy⁹ – does he have a general will that produces universal salvation? And if he does not, why does he will particularly that some men not be saved? There was a further question as well, namely whether God can justly save some and condemn others, particularly if (as St. Augustine asserted) those whom God saves are rescued not through their own merit but through unmerited grace conferred by the will of God.¹⁰From the beginning, then, the notions of divine volonté générale and volonté particulière were parts of a larger question about the justice of God; they were always “political” notions, in the largest possible sense of the world “political” – in the sense that even theology is part of what Leibniz called “universal jurisprudence.”¹¹ The whole controversy over God’s “general will” to save “all” men – and how this is to be reconciled with the (equally scriptural) notion that “many are called but few are chosen”¹² – was very precisely summed up in a few words from the last work (Entretiens de Maxime et de Thémiste, 1706) of Leibniz’ contemporary and correspondent, Pierre Bayle: “The God of the Christians wills that all men be saved; he had the power necessary to save them all; he lacks neither power [or] good will, and nonetheless almost all men are damned.”¹³ The effort to justify this state of affairs led directly to the original theory of volonté générale.

The controversy about the nature of divine justice is nearly as old as Christian philosophy itself; it was fully aired in the struggles between St. Augustine and the Pelagians, and resurfaced in seventeenth-century disputes about grace between the Jansenists and the Jesuits.¹⁴ The actual terms “general will” and “particular will,” however, are not to be found in Augustine or Pelagius, or, for that matter, in Jansenius’ Augustinus or in the Jesuit Molina – though Jansenius once uses the phrase volonté particulière, in passing, in his last extant letter to St. Cyran.¹⁵ Those terms, in fact, are the modern successors to the Scholastic distinction between the “antecedent” and the “consequent” will of God: according to this doctrine, God willed “antecedently” (or generally) that all men be saved, but after the Fall of Adam he willed “consequently” (or particularly) that only some be saved.¹⁶ The distinction between “antecedent” and “consequent” divine will is to be found in Scholastic philosophy as late as Suarez;¹⁷ and even Leibniz used the terms “general” and “particular” will interchangeably with the older words,¹⁸as did writers such as Antoine Arnauld, the great Port-Royal logician.¹⁹

So far as diligent inquiry will reveal, the first work of consequence to use the actual term “general will” was Antoine Arnauld’s Première Apologie pour M. Jansénius (1644), which was written to refute a series of anti-Jansenist sermons that had been preached by the theologian Isaac Habert in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame (1642–1643) at the express order of Cardinal Richelieu.²⁰ (Quite early on, then, volonté générale figured in high politics: it didn’t have to wait for Robespierre’s transmogrified Rousseaueanism, for the claim that the Committee of Public Safety constituted the general will.)²¹Richelieu may well have ordered Habert’s anti-Jansenist sermons for the “wrong reasons” – he thought that Jansenius had definitely written a famous anti-French libel called Mars Gallicus, accusing Richelieu of aiding German Protestants during the Thirty Years War, an attribution that is by no means certain;²² but this uncertainty does not make it any less true that Habert preached publicly against Jansenius at Richelieu’s command and that Arnauld, in refuting Habert, developed the notion of volonté générale. Even a mistake can give rise to consequential doctrines: Richelieu may have aimed to strike Mars Gallicus obliquely, by hitting Augustinus directly; but what he produced mainly was an occasion for the idea of “general will” to be thrust forward in a conspicuously public way.

(Before Arnauld’s Première Apologie, certainly, one does not find the term “volonté générale” in the place or at the time that one might reasonably expect to find it. It does not appear, for example, in the protracted exchange of letters between Descartes’ associate Père Mersenne and the Calvinist theologian André Rivet, though the most interesting of these letters date from 1640 [the year of Augustinus’ publication] and deal precisely with the universality or non-universality of salvation – Père Mersenne asserting that in order to avoid “horror” and “desperation,” one must believe that “God does not will the damnation of anyone, but [wills] that each be saved, if he wills to cooperate in his salvation,”²³ Rivet replying that, since many are damned, Mersenne’s alleged universal salvation imputes to God “des désirs vains, et des volontés frustratoires” and tries to re-establish “the paradise of Origen,” in which even the devils are included.²⁴But if the exchange of letters between Mersenne and Rivet provided a perfect occasion to assert or deny a divine volonté générale to save “all,” the term did not actually appear; and this omission is probably an indication that before 1644 the expression was not current, even in the writing of a man like Mersenne who corresponded with every great figure of the age.)²⁵

How “Jansenism” should (or indeed can) be defined is beyond the scope of this work: whether it was an orthodox (though severe) “Augustinianism,” or a kind of heterodox “semi-Calvinism,” need not be settled here.²⁶What does matter for present purposes is that it was the conflict between “Jansenism” and its critics – Jesuit and otherwise – that served as the occasional cause of a revived dispute over the meaning of the scriptural assertion that “God wills that all men be saved.” Whether justly or not, Jansenius’ Augustinus was accused – first by Habert’s Richelieu-inspired sermons, then by Nicolas Cornet, syndic of the Sorbonne,²⁷ then by a letter to the pope drafted by Habert using Cornet’s charges,²⁸ finally by several papal bulls including Cum Occasione and (much later) Unigenitus²⁹ – of having maintained “five propositions” judged “heretical” and “scandalous”; indeed, the last of the five propositions imputed to Jansenius asserted that “it is a semi-Pelagian error to say that Jesus Christ died or spilled his blood for all men without exception.”³⁰ Whether the five propositions were, in fact or in effect, contained in the Augustinus (as the Jesuits maintained) or were malicious fabrications of Cornet and Habert designed to ruin the reputation of St. Augustine as the “doctor of grace” (as the Jansenists insisted),³¹ it is indisputable that when Jansenists such as Arnauld and Pascal tried to defend Jansenius, they had to show that the bishop of Ypres had correctly (i.e., in the manner of St. Augustine) understood the notion that Deus vult omnes homines salvos fieri: that a truly general will to save “all” was fully reconcilable with the Jansenist notion that only the “elect” (rather than “all”) actually enter the kingdom of Heaven. In short, had Jansenius and his principal apologists not tried to restrict, radically, the meaning of St. Paul’s letter to Timothy, the question of just and justifiable “general will” might never have become one of the great disputes of the seventeenth century. The whole tradition of volonté générale thus began life as a mere gloss on a passing phrase in a letter of St. Paul.³²

Antoine Arnauld, then, invented, or at least first made visible, the notion of “general will,” but he did this, ironically enough, as part of a Jansenist effort to minimize (without annihilating) the notion that “all” are saved and that salvation is “general.” In Antoine Arnauld, the “general” will is as little general as possible. In the Première Apologie pour M. Jansénius, Arnauld acknowledges the nominal existence of a “general will of God to save all men,” but he immediately narrows this “generality” by insisting (with Jansenius) that it is “semi-Pelagian” to construe St. Paul’s letter to Timothy au pied de la lettre, to understand divine volonté générale as requiring salvation “generally for all men in particular, without excepting any of them.”³³ God’s saving will is “general,” Arnauld argues, only in the sense that it applies “to all sorts of conditions, of ages, of sexes, of countries”; but it does not rescue every last single man “en particulier.”³⁴Indeed he insists – and here Jansenist rigorism is at its clearest – that:

It is certain that the source of all the errors of the semi-Pelagians is [their] not being able to endure the absolute and immutable doctrine of God, who … chose, from all eternity, without any regard for merit, a certain number of men, whom he destined for glory; leaving the others in the common mass of perdition, from which he is not obliged to pull them.³⁵

Since God is “not obliged” to pull all men from “perdition,” his “general will” to save them “all” is attenuated, to put it mildly. And in slightly later works, such as his Apologie pour les Saints Pères (1651) – Arnauld carries this attenuation farther still. God’s “antecedent” will for “the salvation of all men,” he insists, “is only a simple velléité and a simple wish, which involves no preparation of means” to effect this wish; his volonté générale “is based only on a consideration of human nature in itself, which was created for salvation,” but which, since the Fall, has richly deserved perdition.³⁶ Actually, Arnauld goes on, one could even say that God had a volonté générale to save “the devils,” who were once angels; but fallen angels, like fallen men, are now damned. All this is clearer, in Arnauld’s view, if one sees that God’s judgments, which are “very just” though “very secret,” are like decisions of an earthly judge, who condemns a thief or a murderer to death, but who nonetheless “at the same time wills and wishes, by an antecedent will,” that the life of this criminal, considered simply “as a man and as a citizen,” be “saved.”³⁷

Obviously Antoine Arnauld tries to weaken the force of the phrase “God wills that all men be saved” in two main ways: sometimes by diminishing the compass of “all,” sometimes by shrinking the meaning of “will.” As Jean La Porte has shown in his brilliant pro-Jansenist La Doctrine de Port-Royal, it is characteristic of St. Augustine and the Augustinians (including, usually, the Jansenists) to attempt to pare down the term “all,” while it is typical of St. Thomas and the Thomists to deflate divine “will.”³⁸ St. Augustine, in De Correctione et Gratia and in the Enchiridion, glosses “all” to mean all kinds of persons (of all professions, ages, sexes, countries); and this equation of “all” with “some” (provided they are distributed over “all” categories) is most often favored by Arnauld. For the Augustinians, then, God wills to save not all men but all sorts of men; in the magnificent Latin of the Enchiridion (XXVII, 103) “omnes homines omne genus hominum intelligamus per quascumeque differentias distributum, reges, privatos, nobiles, ignobiles, sublimes, humiles, doctos, indoctos, integri corporis, debiles, ingeniosos, tardicordes, fatuos, divites, pauperes, mediocres, mares, feminas, infantes, pueros, adolescentes, juvenes, seniores, senes; in linguis omnibus, in moribus omnibus, in artibus omnibus, in professionibus omnibus.”³⁹And on this point, at least, the claim that Jansenius was a perfectly orthodox Augustinian seems warranted: for in the section of Augustinus entitled “De Gratia Christi Salvatoris,” Jansenius urges that if one wants to avoid Pelagian and semi-Pelagian heresy in interpreting the phrase “God wills that all men be saved,” one must understand “all” to refer, not to a divine salvific will “for each and every single man” (pro omnibus omnino singularibus hominibus), but rather to a will for the salvation of every kind of man (pro omni genere hominorum) – Jews and Gentiles, servants and free men, public and private persons, wise and unwise.⁴⁰ One should add, however, that in his effort to reduce “all” men to the “elect,” Jansenius also relies on other patristic writings, particularly on St. Prosper’s argument that Christ died for “all” men only in the sense that his sacrifice was sufficient to redeem all, but that the actual effect of his death was to redeem only a few – or as Jansenius paraphrases St. Prosper, “Christum omnes redimisse sufficienter, non efficienter.”⁴¹ Nonetheless, Jansenius relies mainly on St. Augustine, and on the notion that “all” really means “some.”

Aquinas’ method – occasionally followed by Arnauld, as in the Apologie pour les Saints Pères – is very different. He preserves what one is tempted to call the natural meaning of “all” – La Porte calls it the “unforced” meaning⁴² – and makes “will” the variable term, saying in De Veritate that “God wills by an antecedent [or general] will that all men be saved, by reason of human nature, which he has made for salvation; but he wills by consequent will that some be damned, because of the sins that are in them.”⁴³

In view of Arnauld’s diminishing of “general will,” whether by Augustinian or Thomistic means – a general will, which he calls “inefficacious” and a mere “wish” and which he compares with earthly death sentences for murder – it should come as no surprise that Arnauld particularly admired St. Augustine’s De Correctione et Gratia, the anti-Pelagian work that is hardest on the “general” salvation of “all” men. So much did Arnauld relish this work, indeed, that he published a French translation of it in 1644, to which he added a somber and powerful “Introduction.” In this Introduction he warns Christians against falling into the “criminal pride” of the “Pelagians” and of “the philosophers,” who through “unhappy presumptions” treat man as independent;⁴⁴ and he once again minimizes the “generality” of salvation, this time nearly to the vanishing point:

Here, of course, any “general” will to save “all” has (all but) disappeared. But even here what remains of volonté générale has political and moral implications: after all, it is “just” and “equitable” that God not act on his original general “wish” that all be saved, because all are “guilty” and hence cannot rightly complain of not receiving the grace that would save them. In Arnauld, God’s “equitable” operation, his “sovereign Empire,” begins with a general will, even if it rightfully ends with something radically different – though Arnauld would have felt no need to defend God’s cause had he not feared that giving grace to some (only) might be viewed as an inequitable and arbitrary “acceptation of persons.”⁴⁶ It is one of the great ironies of the history of ideas that volonté générale should be thrust into prominence by a thinker who thought that will very little “general” indeed; and a still greater irony that the greatest partisan of “general will,” Rousseau, should in his theological writings have denied flatly the “efficacious” grace and the predestination, which, for Arnauld, are the very things that reduce volonté générale to a mere “wish” that is “inefficacious.”⁴⁷

II

But if it was Antoine Arnauld who (apparently) invented the terms volonté générale and volonté particulière, it was a far greater Jansenist, Blaise Pascal, who was the first to use the notions of généralité and of particularité in works (the Pensées and the Écrites sur la Grâce) which are still read. (The works of Arnauld, in forty-five enormous volumes, are today almost unknown.)⁴⁸ And even in Pascal’s Écrites sur la Grâce (ca. 1656) the notion of volonté générale has political overtones, since he uses it in considering whether God can justly dispense sufficient grace for salvation only to those who merit it or whether by volonté absoluë he can simply damn some and save others. The notion of an arbitrary volonté absoluë he connects with Calvinism (which is, he says, “injurious to God and insupportable to men”;⁴⁹ while a notion of volonté générale he traces to “the disciples of St. Augustine,” who, according to Pascal, believed that before the Fall of Adam “God had a volonté générale et conditionnelle to save all men” (whereas after the Fall he willed, by a volonté absoluë arising from pity, that some men still be saved though none merited it).⁵⁰ And Pascal plainly favors this version of “Augustinianism”: the Calvinists, by denying that God ever (even before the Fall) had a volonté générale to save all men, fall into an “abominable opinion” that “injures” common sense;⁵¹ the Pelagians, at the other extreme, by holding that “God had a volonté générale, égale et conditionelle to save all men” and that this volonté générale remained constant even after the Fall, so that God sent Christ into the world to help all men merit salvation, fall into an opposite excess by depriving God wholly of any volonté absoluë, even after the sin of Adam.⁵² Only Augustinianism, in combining a pre-Fall volonté générale with a post-Fall volonté absoluë, Pascal says, strikes a proper balance between the polar errors of granting too much to God (Calvinism) or too much to men (Pelagianism).⁵³

Pascal uses the notion of volonté générale only a handful of times, and the corresponding notion of volonté particulière does not appear at all in the Écrites sur la Grâce. But in the Pensées Pascal uses the idea of volonté particulière in a striking way that reminds one of Rousseau. Beginning with the observation that volonté “will never be satisfied, even if it should be capable of everything it wills,” Pascal goes on to ask the reader to “imagine a body full of thinking members”:

To make it clear that he is thinking of “bodies” in general (including “bodies politic”), and not just natural bodies, Pascal goes on to say that “one must incline to what is general: and leaning toward oneself is the beginning of all disorder, in war, in economy, in the particular body of man. Thus the will is depraved.”⁵⁵ But that depravity can be overcome if we remember that “the members of [both] natural and civil communities incline toward the good of the body,” that the members can rise above the “injustice” of self-absorption.⁵⁶ To be sure, an inclination toward a ruling of volonté première is achieved in Pascal through unmerited grace, and in Rousseau through “education”; nonetheless the parallel is very striking. Thus almost a century before Rousseau, the reader of Pascal could have learned that volonté particulière involves disorder and self-love, and that not to “incline” toward le général is “unjust” and “depraved.”⁵⁷

One should be quite clear about what Pascal is doing – for it turns out to be absolutely decisive for the next century of French political and moral thought: for Malebranche, for Diderot, for Rousseau. In Pascal’s Écrites sur la Grâce, the notion of généralité begins with God’s pre-lapsarian “will” (recounted in 1 Timothy) that “all” men be saved; then this “general will,” viewed as something divine, is transferred to another strand of Pauline doctrine: namely the notion of a body and its members in 1 Corinthians 12. In Pascal’s reworking (or rather fusing) of Paul’s letters, the “members” of the “body” should avoid particularité and amour-propre, and should incline toward le général (the good of the body).⁵⁸ Just what Pascal has done becomes clear only if one looks at St. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians; then compares Pascal’s “reading” of it with a more “orthodox” and cautious one – such as John Locke’s in his Paraphrase and Notes on I Corinthians; and then (finally) looks at a representative “reflection” or echo of Pascal’s operation in the century that comes after him.

Saint Paul’s letter, in the standard seventeenth-century English version, argued that:

Locke, with characteristic sobriety and caution, takes care to read St. Paul’s letter as applying only to the church, and never extends the Pauline distinction between a “body” and its “members” to “bodies politic” (à la Pascal). “God – Locke carefully argues – hath fitted several persons, as it were so many distinct members, to several offices and functions in the Church … if any one have not that function, or dignity, in the Church, which he desires … he does not thereby cease to be a member of the Church.”⁶⁰ The almost obsessive repetition of “Church,” together with the phrase “as it were” – which makes being a “member” metaphorical – clearly restricts St. Paul. Pascal, by contrast, brilliantly expands and politicizes St. Paul’s letter with the superb imagination (“imagine a body full of thinking members”) that Locke soberly and designedly avoids. (But, after all, given the doctrine of the Second Treatise, one would not expect Locke to view a body politic in the way that Pascal does: in that Treatise, members stand in a contractual, not an “organic” relationship.)⁶¹

For all those French moralistes who come after Pascal, and who are struck by his reading of 1 Corinthians 12 – in the light, one might say, of 1 Timothy 2 – men would do well to will as God first willed: generally. Here, to be sure, there is a large irony: men after the Fall must try to will generally, though their inability to will generally (à la Dieu) is what led to their Fall. They failed to imitate God when they were pure, and must now strive to do so while corrupt. No wonder Pascal hopes for (unmerited) grace.⁶²

That 1 Corinthians 12, read in a more or less Pascalian way, continued to have great weight in the works of Pascal’s successors is evident: Rousseau, for example, insists on the importance of this passage in his Letter to Archbishop Beaumont.⁶³ But sometimes, even in Pascal himself, Rousseau’s secularization of généralité and body-membership is anticipated; in the Penseé numbered 480 in the Brunschvicg edition, Pascal had reworked 1 Corinthians 12 into the claim that “to make the members happy, they must have one will, and submit it to the body.”⁶⁴ And in his fragment called “Le Bonheur Public,” Rousseau further transmutes and secularizes language originally traceable to St. Paul and then socialized by Pascal: “Make man one, and you will make him as happy as he can be… . For being nothing except by [the body politic], he will be nothing without it. To the force of constraint you have added that of will.”⁶⁵

To be sure, in Penseé 480 Pascal is thinking of any “body full of thinking members,” while in “Le Bonheur Public” Rousseau is thinking (more particularly) of the city. Nonetheless the lineal descent of Rousseau from St. Paul, read à la Pascal, is plain enough. (This strand of Pascal’s thought was certainly available to Rousseau: though the so-called Port-Royal edition of the Penseés offered a truncated and rewritten version of Pascal’s manuscripts, the 1678 enlarged edition contained Pascal’s insistence that “tous les hommes sont membres de ce corps [de membres pensants]” and that “pour être heureux il faut qu’ils conforment leur volonté particulière à la volonté universelle qui gouverne le corps entier.”)⁶⁶

Despite the importance of Pascal’s linking up of généralité with the good of le corps entier – a collective good to which members must subordinate their volonté particulière – it remains true that the fullest and best-known seventeenth-century exposition of the notions of “general will” and “particular will” was certainly Malebranche’s Traité de la Nature et de la Grâce (1680). This work, which Leibniz called “admirable,”⁶⁷ was one of the most celebrated (and controversial) writings of its day: it was popularized and defended by Bayle in his journal, Nouvelles de la République des Lettres;⁶⁸it was attacked by the long-lived and boundlessly productive Arnauld in his Réflexions Philosophiques et Théologiques sur le Nouveau Système de la Nature et de la Grâce (Reference Arnauld1685 – forty years after the Première Apologie pour M. Jansénius);⁶⁹ it was criticized by Fontenelle in his Doutes sur le Système Physique des Causes Occasionnelles (1686)⁷⁰ and (above all) by Bossuet in his Oraison Funèbre de Marie-Therèse d’Autriche (1683).⁷¹ And if Fénelon’s highly critical Réfutation du Système du Père Malebranche sur la Nature et la Grâce (ca. 1687–1688) remained unpublished until 1829, his opinion of Malebranchian volonté générale was tolerably clear in the fourth (1709) of his Lettres sur la Grâce et la Prédestination, written for François Lami.⁷² Malebranche, for his part, defended his work in an endless running polemic with Arnauld (terminated only by the latter’s death in 1694);⁷³ and as late as 1710 Leibniz devoted several large sections of his Theodicée to a spirited defense of Malebranche’s “general will.”⁷⁴

If, then, the notions of volonté générale and volonté particulière were elaborately treated in published writings of figures as eminent as Pascal, Malebranche, Arnauld, Bayle, Fénelon, Bossuet, Fontenelle, and Leibniz, over a seventy-year period (ca. 1644–1715), they can scarcely said to arise – at least as terms – only with Diderot and Rousseau; the only question is whether the original (mainly Malebranchian) formulation of the notions has any political content or, at least, any political implications.

III

In the “Premier éclaircissement” of the Traité de la nature et de la grâce, one sees at once that Malebranche is not going to treat divine volonté générale as something confined (particularly) to theology, to questions of grace and merit; one sees that he intends to treat “general will” as something which is manifested in all of God’s operations – as much in the realm of “nature” as in the realm of “grace.”⁷⁵ Malebranche argues that “God acts by volontés générales when he acts as a consequence of general laws which he has established”;⁷⁶ and nature, he adds “is nothing but the general laws which God has established in order to construct or to preserve his work by the simplest means, by an action [which is] always uniform, constant, perfectly worthy of an infinite wisdom and of a universal cause.”⁷⁷ God, on this view, “does not act at all” by volontés particulières, by lawless ad hoc volitions, as do “limited intelligences” whose thought is not “infinite”:⁷⁸ thus for Malebranche “to establish general laws, and to choose the simplest ones which are at the same time the most fruitful, is a way of acting worthy of him whose wisdom has no limits.”⁷⁹On the other hand, he insists “to act by volontés particulières shows a limited intelligence which cannot judge the consequences or the effects of less fruitful causes.”⁸⁰

Now even at this point Malebranche’s argument, though mainly a theological one, contains some points that could be read “politically”: the “general will” manifests itself in general laws that are “fruitful” and “worthy” of infinite wisdom, whereas “particular will” is “limited,” comparatively unintelligent, and lawless; but these terms are not very different from Rousseau’s characterizations of volonté générale and particulière in Du Contrat Social (above all when Rousseau argues that volonté générale, in the form of general laws, never deals with particular cases).⁸¹ One need not jump to any premature conclusions, however, since Malebranche himself occasionally “politicizes” his argument – particularly in his effort to justify God’s acting (exclusively) through volontés générales. If, he says, “rain falls on certain lands, and if the sun roasts others … if a child comes into the world with a malformed and useless hand … this is not at all because God wanted to produce those effects by volontés particulières; it is because he has established [general] laws for the communication of motion, whose effects are necessary consequences.”⁸² Thus, according to Malebranche, “one cannot say that God acts through caprice or ignorance” in permitting malformed children to be born or unripe fruit to fall: “he has not established the laws of the communication of motion for the purpose of producing monsters, or of making fruits fall before their maturity”; he has willed these laws “because of their fruitfulness, and not because of their sterility.”⁸³ Those who claim (says Malebranche) that God ought, through special, ad hoc volontés particulières, to suspend natural laws if their operation will harm the virtuous (or the innocent) – or that he ought to confer grace only on those who will actually be saved by it – fail to understand that it is not worthy of an infinitely wise being to abandon general rules in order to find a suppositious perfect “fit” between the particular case of each finite being and a volonté particulière suited to the case alone.⁸⁴

By this point, evidently, the theological notion of volonté générale is becoming “politicized”: volonté générale originally manifested itself in general laws that were wise and fruitful; now that will, expressed in those laws, is just as well, and it is quite wrong to say that God ought to contrive a volonté particulière suited to each “case” (even though the “generality” of his will and of his laws will mean that grace will occasionally fall on a “hardened” heart incapable of receiving it).⁸⁵ God, Malebranche urges, loves his wisdom more than he loves mankind (“c’est que Dieu aime davantage sa sagesse que son ouvrage”):⁸⁶ and his wisdom is expressed in general laws whose operation may have consequences (monstrous children, unripened fruit), which are not themselves willed and which cannot therefore give rise to charges of divine “caprice” or “ignorance.”

If Malebranche, in pleading the “cause” of God (to use Leibniz’ phrase),⁸⁷ views divine volonté générale as issuing in wise and just laws, the Traité de la nature et de la grâce is further (and quite explicitly) “politicized” by an analogy that Malebranche himself draws between a well-governed earthly kingdom and a well-governed Creation. He begins with an argument about enlightened and unenlightened “will”: “The more enlightened an agent is, the more extensive his volontés. A very limited mind undertakes new schemes at every moment; and when he wants to execute one of them, he uses several means, of which some are always useless.” But a “broad and penetrating mind,” he goes on, “compares and weighs all things: he never forms plans except with the knowledge that he has the means to execute them.”⁸⁸ Malebranche then moves to his political “analogy”: “A number of laws in a state” – presumably a mere concatenation of many volontés particulières – “often shows little penetration and breadth of mind in those who have established them: it is often the mere experience of need, rather than wise foresight, which has ordained them.” God qua legislator has none of these defects, Malebranche claims: “he need not multiply his volontés, which are executive laws of his plans, any further than necessity obliges.” He must, Malebranche repeats, act through volontés générales “and thus establish a constant and regulated order” by “the simplest means”: those who want God to act, not through “les loix ou les volontés générales” but through volontés particulières, simply “imagine that God at every moment is performing miracles in their favor.”⁸⁹ This partisanship for the particular, he says – in an astonishingly Rousseauean vein – ”flatters the self-love which relates everything to itself,” and “accommodates itself quite well to ignorance.”⁹⁰

Malebranche certainly believed that those who imagine a God thick with volontés particulières will use that alleged divine particularism to rationalize their own failure to embrace general principles. Indeed, he appeals to the notion of particularisme in attempting to explain the (lamentable) diversity of the world’s moral opinions and practices. In the Traité de Morale (1684), Malebranche argues that although “universal reason is always the same” and “order is immutable,” nonetheless “morality changes according to countries and according to the times.” Germans think it “virtuous” to drink to excess; European nobles think it “generous” to fight duels in defense of their honor.⁹¹ Such people “even imagine that God approves their conduct”; that, in the case of an aristocratic duel, he “presides at the judgment and … awards the palm to him who is right.” To be sure, according to Malebranche, one can only “imagine” this if one thinks that “God acts by volontés particulières.” And if even he is thought to operate particularly, why should not men as well? The man who imputes particular wills to God by “letting himself be led by imagination, his enemy” will also have his own “morale particulière, his own devotion, his favorite virtue.”⁹² What is essential is that one abandon particularisme, whether as something ascribed to God or as something merely derived from human “inclinations” and “humors.” It is “immutable order” that must serve as our “inviolable and natural law” and “imagination” that must be suppressed. For order is general, while imagination is all too particular.⁹³

IV

For Malebranche’s orthodox and conservative critics – most notably Bossuet, whose anti-Malebranchism will be treated shortly – perhaps the most distressing aspect of Malebranche’s theory of divine volonté générale was the much-diminished weight and value given to (literally read) Scripture. In Nature et Grâce Malebranche urges that “those who claim that God has particular plans and wills for all the particular effects that are produced in consequence of general laws” ordinarily rely (not on philosophy but) on “the authority of Scripture” to “shore up” their “feeling.”⁹⁴ (The verb and noun are sufficiently revealing.) But, Malebranche argues that “since Scripture was made for everybody, for the simple as well as for the learned, it is full of anthropologies.” (The italicizing is Malebranche’s own.) Thus Scripture, he goes on, endows God with “a body, a throne, a chariot, a retinue, the passions of joy, of sadness, of anger, of remorse, and other movements of the soul”; it even goes beyond this and attributes to him “ordinary human ways of acting, in order to speak to the simple in a more sensible way.” St. Paul, Malebranche continues, in order to “accommodate himself to everyone,” speaks of “sanctification and predestination “as if God acted ceaselessly” through volontés particulières to produce those particular effects; and even Christ himself, he adds, “speaks of his Father as if he applied himself, through comparable volontés, to clothe the lilies of the field and to preserve the least hair on his disciples’ heads.”⁹⁵ Despite all these “anthropologies” and “as ifs,” introduced solely to make God “lovable” to “even the coarsest minds,” Malebranche concludes, one must use the “idea” of God (qua perfect being), coupled with those nonanthropological scriptural passages that are in “conformity” to this “idea,” in order to “correct” the sense of some other passages, which attribute “parts” to God or “passions like our own.”⁹⁶ (To make his own nonreliance on Scripture quite plain, Malebranche omitted any reference at all to the Bible in the original [1680] edition of Nature et Grâce. And when, later, out of prudence, he interpolated a number of scriptural passages in the Traité, he took care to set them off from the 1680 text by labeling the new parts “additions,” and by having them set in a different typeface. Even in the Scripture-laden version of 1684, then, the “authority of Scripture” is separated – physically separated – from the idea of an être infiniment parfait.)⁹⁷

The notion that Scripture “represents” God” as a “man” who has “passions of the soul” and volontés particulières – merely to “accommodate” the “weakness” of “even the coarsest minds” – leads to a difficulty that an Augustinian (or at least a Jansenist) would find distressing. Pascal had argued that, in “Augustinianism,” God’s prelapsarian volonté générale to save all men is replaced, after the Fall, by the election of a few for salvation through miséricorde or “pity” (though it is not merited);⁹⁸ Arnauld, in the preface to his translation of De Correctione et Gratia, had equally stressed an undeserved divine miséricorde, which God might with perfect justice have withheld.⁹⁹ Now “pity,” of course, on a Malebranchian view, is a “passion of the soul”; but it is only through “weakness” and “anthropomorphism” that we imagine these passions as animating God. If, for Malebranche, an être parfait does not “really” have these passions, it cannot be the case that – as in Pascal – a volonté générale to save all is “replaced” by a pitiful volonté absoluë to save a few. Indeed, while in Pascal volonté générale comes “first” and gets replaced (by miséricorde), in Malebranche “general will” governs the realms of nature and grace from the outset, once the world has been created by a volonté particulière.¹⁰⁰ (Even Malebranche treats the Creation as the product of a volonté particulière, arguing – in part II of Nature et Grâce – that until there are created things that can serve as the “occasional” or “second” causes of general laws, those general laws cannot operate.)¹⁰¹

Far from abandoning his position when he was accused of “ruining” Providence – in a work such as Jurieu’s Esprit de M. Arnauld¹⁰² – Malebranche maintained it stoutly in the Dernier éclaircissement of Nature et Grâce, which he added to the fourth edition in 1684, and which was provocatively entitled, “The frequent miracles of the Old Testament do not show at all that God acts often by particular wills.” The “proofs” which he has drawn “from the idea of an infinitely perfect being,” Malebranche insists, make it clear that “God executes his designs by general laws.” On the other hand, it is “not easy” to demonstrate that god operates ordinarily through volontés particulières, “though Holy Scripture, which accommodates itself to our weakness, sometimes represents God as a man, and often has him act as men act.”¹⁰³ Here, as in the main text of Nature et Grâce, the key notion is weakness: and any notion of divine volonté particulière simply accommodates that faiblesse. This is why Malebranche can maintain – this time in the Troisième éclaircissement of 1683 – that “there are ways of acting [that are] simple, fruitful, general, uniform and constant” and that manifest “wisdom, goodness, steadiness [and] immutability in those who use them”; whereas there are ways that are “complex, sterile, particular, lawless and inconstant,” and that reveal “lack of intelligence, malignity, unsteadiness [and] levity in those who use them.”¹⁰⁴ Thus a very effective heap of execrations is mounded around any volonté particulière that turns out to be complex, sterile, lawless, inconstant, unintelligent, malignant, and frivolous.

Indeed, for Malebranche, it is precisely volonté particulière, and not at all volonté générale, which “ruins” Providence. In his Réponse à une Dissertation de M. Arnauld contre un éclaircissement de la Nature et de la Grâce (1685), he argues that if Arnauld’s insistence on miracles and constant divine volonté particulière does not “overturn” Providence, it at least “degrades it, humanizes it, and makes it either blind, or perverse”:¹⁰⁵

It is Malebranche’s view, in fact, that the classical “theodicy problems” – in reconciling a morally and physically imperfect world with God’s “power,” “goodness,” and “wisdom” – can only be solved by insisting that God wills generally. These problems Malebranche states starkly in Nature et Grâce:

“Generality” and “simplicity” of divine will, according to Malebranche, clears up these “great difficulties,” and explains how a being who loves order can permit disorder. “God loves men, he wills to save them all,” Malebranche begins by saying, “for order is his law.” Nonetheless, Malebranche insists, God “does not will to do what is necessary in order that all [men] know him and love him infallibly.” And this is simply because “order does not permit that he have practical volontés proper to the execution of this design… . He must not disturb the simplicity of his ways.”¹⁰⁸ Or, as Malebranche puts it in his Réponse to Arnauld’s Réflexions on Nature et Grâce:

(As Ginette Dreyfus has correctly said in her helpful La Volonté selon Malebranche, “God wills to save all men, but wisdom forbids him to act in such a way that they would actually be saved.”¹¹⁰ Generality, then, “saves” God, though it fails to save all men.)

The theodicy problems that “generality” and “simplicity” are meant to solve must have a resolution, according to Malebranche, because the radical imperfection and evil in the universe are all too real, not at all merely “apparent.” If they were merely apparent, one could perhaps appeal to the notion of a mysterious dieu caché whose inscrutable ways discover real good in seeming evil. But this is not Malebranche’s view. “A monster” he declares, “is an imperfect work, whatever may have been God’s purpose in creating it”:

Those who reason along these lines, in Malebranche’s view, are trying to resolve moral dilemmas by appealing to aesthetic similes; but the method will not serve. “Shadows are necessary in a painting and dissonances in music. Thus it is necessary that women abort and produce an infinity of monsters. What a conclusion.” And he ends by insisting that “I do not agree that there is evil only in appearance.”¹¹² Hence volonté générale alone, which wills (positively) the good and only permits evil (as the unavoidable consequence of general and simple laws), is the sole avenue of escape from theodicy problems if one calls evil real. For Malebranche, as for Rousseau in the following century, only généralité is positively good, truly justifiable.¹¹³

Another of the aspects of volonté générale that Malebranche’s critics found distressing was the possibility that it had been “derived” or extracted from a Cartesian notion of general laws of uniform motion (in physics), and simply grafted onto, or inflicted on, the realm of grace.¹¹⁴ And this suspicion was borne out by a careful reading of some passages from Nature et Grâce. In the Premier Discours of the Traité, Malebranche finds a “parallel” between “generality” in nature and in grace: but he begins with nature, and finds in grace no more than a kind of analogue to nature. “Just as one has no right to be annoyed by the fact that rain falls in the sea, where it is useless,” Malebranche argues, so “also” one has no right “to complain of the apparent irregularity according to which grace is given to men.” Useless rain and useless grace both derive from “the regularity with which God acts” from “the simplicity of the laws that he follows.” And Malebranche reinforces the nature-grace parallel, in which nature seems to be the “model” for grace, by calling grace a “heavenly rain that sometimes falls on hardened hearts, as well as on prepared souls.”¹¹⁵ This horticultural language, of course, which Malebranche himself said he used to persuade (mainly) Cartesians, not scholastic theologians¹¹⁶ – did nothing to dispel the suspicion of traditionalists like Bossuet that Cartesian “generality” and “uniformity” might be used in radical ways, to the detriment of traditional teachings about grace based on Scripture and patristic writings. This kind of suspicion – best expressed by Bossuet himself when he says, in a letter dealing with Malbranchism, that he sees “a great struggle against the Church being prepared in the name of Cartesian philosophy”¹¹⁷ – was certainly not relieved by Malebranche’s insistence that “what Moses tells us in Genesis is so obscure” that the beginning of the world can be explained à la Descartes better than any other way.¹¹⁸ “Obscurity,” of course, is no more welcome than “anthropology” or “as if.”

The fear of orthodox Christian moralists that Malebranche had permitted a Cartesian “physics” to invade and infect the sphere of metaphysics (including ethics) was, of course, not wholly groundless: after all, in the Recherche de la Vérité Malebranche Cartesianises everything, not least human volition and action:

Here, of course, like Kant a century later, Malebranche is playing with the different senses of droit (meaning both “straight” and “right”) and of courbe (which can mean “crooked” in a moral sense).¹²⁰ And this same kind of playing can be found in Rousseau’s most famous single assertion about “general will”: “La volonté générale est toujours droite, mais le jugement qui la guide n’est pas toujours éclairé.”¹²¹ But the key point in connection with Malebranche is that the language of Cartesian physics has been imposed on morality and psychology: that (however briefly) Malebranche resembles Hobbes in accounting for everything in terms of “general” motion.¹²² And that généralité, in Malebranche as in Rousseau, always has supreme weight: if the God of Pascal and Arnauld permanently abandons a primitive volonté générale to save “all” in favor of (very particular) “pity” for the elect, Malebranche’s God moves as quickly as possible away from an embarrassingly particularistic Creation and toward the generality and simplicity that later shape Du Contrat Social.

V

In selecting representative contemporary criticisms of Malebranche’s theory of “general will,” one cannot do better than to choose the works of Bossuet and of Bayle. Both offer striking criticisms of Malebranchism, but from radically different perspectives: Bossuet was a pillar of the Catholic Church and a close ally of the French monarchy, while Bayle was a Calvinist émigré to Holland who was tolerated by neither French Church nor state. Bossuet represented an inspired and eloquent perfect orthodoxy, while Bayle was an independent intellectual frequently accused of undercutting all orthodoxy.¹²³ Despite these enormous differences, both developed influential critiques of Malebranchism during roughly the same period – from the early 1680s to their nearly-coinciding deaths (Bossuet in 1704, Bayle in 1706). To be sure, Bayle began as a strong Malebranchist, then moved slowly but steadily away; while Bossuet began with violent antipathy, and ended with slight and partial sympathy. Nonetheless Bossuet and Bayle almost certainly count as the most important antagonists of Malbranchian volonté générale at the end of the seventeenth century (together with Antoine Arnauld).

The most powerful and harmful opponents of Malebranche’s theory of “general will” – in his own day – were certainly Arnauld and Bossuet. And if Arnauld was influential enough that some of his partisans succeeded in having the Traité de la Nature et de la Grâce placed on the Index at Rome in 1690, the still more formidable opponent was Bossuet: bishop of Meaux, preacher to the Court at Versailles, tutor to the dauphin. Bossuet showed an unabating hostility to Malebranchian volonté générale: first in his Oraison Funèbre de Marie-Thérèse d’Autriche (1683), then in his correspondence with Malebranche’s disciple the marquis d’Allemans, finally in his commissioning of Fénelon’s Réfutation du Système du Père Malebranche sur la Nature et la Grâce (which Bossuet corrected and annotated in his own hand, but finally did not publish).¹²⁴ And, of course, Bossuet’s great Discours sur l’Histoire Universelle (1681) is built on the notion of a Providence particulière, which Malebranche had tried so hard to overturn, just as his Politique tirée des Propres Paroles de l’Écriture Sainte relied on the very “anthropologies” that Malebranche had scorned. It was only in 1697, when Malebranche published his Traité de l’Amour de Dieu, which argued against Fenelonian “quietism” and “disinterested” love, that Bossuet – now locked in combat with Fénelon – finally began to countenance a part of Malebranchism, and even to make some slight use of the term volonté générale in his magistral Défense de la Tradition et des Pères, which was left unfinished (with a massive fragment on grace in St. Augustine) at his death in 1704.¹²⁵

If Bossuet ended his career with a partial countenancing of “general will” – though within very narrow, nonpolitical limits – he also began that career with a view of the “general” and the “particular” that is not wholly unrelated to Malebranchism. In a sermon on “Providence,” preached at the Louvre in 1662, Bossuet argues that the “remarkable difference” between les causes particulières and la cause universelle (God) is that “particular causes” – such as heat and cold, human desires and counter-desires – oppose and cancel each other, while the “universal” cause “encloses both the whole and the parts within the same order.”¹²⁶ And he pursues the distinction between the “particulière” and the “universelle” in a moral tone rather like that of Malebranche’s Nature et Grâce:

While this is not exactly Malebranchism, the merely “particular” is cast in an unflattering light by being linked with “circuitousness,” “collision,” “breaking down,” “intrigue,” and “smoke,” while the universal is “providential.” And one cannot help noticing that the wish to be “benefited” by a “Prince” is lumped with smoke and intrigue.

By 1680, however, when Bossuet first read Nature et Grâce (still in manuscript), his thought had changed: he is said to have written pulchra, nova, falsa on his (published) copy; and by June 1683 he was expressing his “horror” of Malebranchian volonté générale in a letter to a fellow-bishop.¹²⁸ But the decisive (and very public) turn came in September 1638, with the rhetorically superb Oraison Funèbre de Marie-Thérèse d’Autriche, pronounced by Bossuet during the funeral of the queen of France at Saint Denis, in the presence of the dauphin and of the Court.¹²⁹ The central passage of this remarkable funeral oration (which was quickly published) is aimed clearly and obviously at Malebranche’s “general will”:

Bossuet – who has begun by equating the “general” with the “confused,” and by adroitly re-aiming the charge of anthropomorphism at Malebranche himself – loses no time in drawing a purely political moral from this particularism: God has “ordained,” he argues, in all nations, “les familles particulières” who ought to govern those nations; and, still more “en particulier,” he has ordained the precise persons within those families who will help a ruling house “to rise, to sustain itself, or to fall.” Since, Bossuet goes on “it is God who gives [the world] great births, great marriages, children and posterity,” it is certainly God who particularly gave Queen Marie-Thérèse to France. (This he supports with numerous Old Testament citations, most particularly Genesis 17:6, where God tells Abraham that “kings will issue from you.”)¹³¹

Nor does Bossuet hesitate at all to use the language of grace to reinforce this political particularism: God, he argues, has “predestined” from all “eternity: the world’s political “alliances and divisions”; by giving France a Hapsburg queen through “une grace particulière” he has drawn together Austrian “counsel” and French “courage” (which are the “caractères particuliers” of those nations), much as he earlier gave the virtue of “clemency” to the kings of Israel.¹³² But the theological notions are piled up to particularly striking effect in a passage that begins by lamenting the “rarity” of “purity” in men, but more especially in “the great”:

Here, of course, grace is “a miracle,” and therefore precisely not something “general”; the queen is particularly “predestined” to rule by God’s “choice.” Not, to be sure, that such “rule” was the queen’s chief attribute; what really mattered was her piety. “She tells you,” Bossuet insists, “through my mouth … that greatness is a dream, that joy is an error, that youth is a flower that withers, and that health is a deceiving name.”¹³⁴ Nonetheless he ends by admonishing the dauphin to “ask” God – “as Solomon did” – for the “wisdom” that will make him “worthy of the throne” of his “ancestors.”¹³⁵ And “asking,” of course, supposes a Providence particulière that can intervene in human affairs to give what is asked for.

(Bossuet’s notion that Malebranchian “generality” cannot account for anything as particular as “great births” re-appears, incidentally, but transmogrified, in the work of the French Spinozist Pierre-Valentine Faydit, who in his Remarques sur Virgile et Homère et sur le Style Poétique de l’Écriture Sainte [1705] offers a grotesque “dramatization” of Malebranche’s alleged contempt for everything “particular.” Imagining Malebranche attending a Te Deum for the birth of Louis XIV’s great-grandson, the duc de Brétagne, Faydit asks Malebranche: “What are you doing here, Father? You laugh in your soul and up your sleeve at our devotion, and you say to yourself that we are quite simple and great idiots to believe that it is God who, by a volonté particulière, has accorded health to the king, and has given a son to his grandson.”¹³⁶ Bossuet himself, of course, with his marmoreal splendor of style, would never have stooped to anything so outré; but the outré was Faydit’s specialty, whether in a nasty ad hominem attack on Fénelon (Télémacomanie),¹³⁷ or in the famous anti-Malebranchian couplet:

The present point is simply that Bossuet’s Oraison Funèbre – published in October 1683 – was widely known, and sometimes recast in base material.)

Bossuet actually sent a copy of this published version to Malebranche, who felt constrained to thank the bishop for his thoughtful gift.¹³⁹ But Bossuet’s criticism of volonté générale was not always quite so public; and, indeed, the lengthiest of his refutations of “general will” is to be found in a 1687 letter to the Malebranchian marquis d’Allemans, who had tried to represent (or re-present) Malebranche’s Nature et Grâce in a way that Bossuet could accept. Bossuet begins this very long letter by complaining that d’Allemans has not in the slightest succeeded in making Nature et Grâce more palatable; and he refers to Malebranche, with withering sarcasm, as “your infallible doctor” and “your master.”¹⁴⁰ “I notice in you,” Bossuet tells the Marquis, “nothing but an attachment, which grows every day more blind, to your patriarch,” though his “ridiculous” theory of nature and grace is “a perfect galimatias.”¹⁴¹

To be more exact, in Bossuet’s view, Malebranche does not really offer nature and grace at all: he offers just nature, and grace vanishes. (The “naturalization” of grace, which was later to delight Voltaire, only horrified Bossuet.)¹⁴² It is bad enough, Bossuet complains, that Malebranche “prides himself” on having “explained Noah’s Flood through the operation of natural causes”; but if d’Allemans continues to follow Malebranche, “he will lead you to find, those same causes,” the Israelites’ “passage through the Red Sea,” as well as all other scriptural “marvels of this kind.” If, Bossuet goes on, one means by “natural” causality the “effects which happen through the force of the first laws of movement,” then Malebranchian “generality” will finally “render everything natural, even to the resurrection of the dead and the healing of those born blind.”¹⁴³ (Bossuet turned out to be as prescient as he was conservative, for only eighty years later Rousseau was to argue in the Malebranche-colored Lettres écrites de la montagne that the “raising” of Lazarus was no “supernatural operation” but a misreported “live interment,” and that one should doubt “particular” changes in “the order of nature.”)¹⁴⁴

Much of this “heresy” (as Bossuet does not hesitate to call it) arises from “misunderstood” Cartesianism:

This, fairly clearly, refers to Malebranche’s notion that one must conceive God through the “idea” of an être parfait, and not through (allegedly historical) “anthropologies.” But this preference for “ideas,” this contempt for “tradition,” leaves Bossuet “terrified” and fearful of “great scandal”: heretics, he says, always “begin with novelty,” move on to “stubbornness,” and end with “open revolt.”¹⁴⁶

Bossuet concludes his letter – spoken, he says, “as one does to a friend” – with a final chilling remark about thinking that one can “do” theology because one “knows physics and algebra”; and he reminds Malebranche’s disciple that one cannot “favor” both Malebranchian volonté générale and Bossuet’s own Histoire Universelle (which d’Allemans had praised):

Bossuet was perfectly right, of course, in characterizing his own Histoire Universelle as a work built on Providence particulière, not on “general laws.” “Remember, Monseigneur,” Bossuet admonishes the dauphin at the end of the History, “that this long chain of particular causes, which make and unmake empires, depends on the secret degrees of Divine Providence.” It is God who “holds the reins of every kingdom and holds every heart in his hands.”¹⁴⁸ His action, moreover, in shaping universal history, is completely particular: “should he wish to see a conqueror, he will spread terror before him … should he wish to see legislators, he will send them his spirit of wisdom and foresight.”¹⁴⁹ And Bossuet – after virtually anticipating Hegel’s “cunning of history” by urging that, thanks to secret Providence, rules “achieve either more or less than they plan,” and that “their intentions have always led to unforeseen consequences” – concludes with an apotheosis of Providence particulière which (plainly) Montesquieu must have had in mind when he wrote Considerations on the Greatness and Decline of the Romans fifty years later:

It is precisely the Histoire Universelle that is cited at a crucial juncture in the work that Bossuet commissioned from the abbé Fénelon (as he then was) in 1686–1687; and this Réfutation du Système du Père Malebranche sur la Nature et la Grâce, corrected and (in some parts) rewritten or amplified by Bossuet himself, is perhaps the most important philosophical contribution that Bossuet made to anti-Malebranchism – even if Bossuet was only the occasional cause, and Fénelon the true cause, of the Réfutation.¹⁵¹ In this work, apparently commissioned after Bossuet became dissatisfied with his own attempted refutation of volonté générale, Fénelon begins with a reasonably fair resumé of Nature et Grâce, but thinks that he has found a fatal flaw in Malebranche’s admission that God acts only usually, but not invariably, through “general wills” and general laws; that he sometimes – though “rarely” – acts through volontés particulières:

(In his corrections, Bossuet complains at this point that Fénelon should not confuse God’s “simplicity” with his “perfection”: “multiplicity [of divine wills] may well not be contrary to perfection,” Bossuet urges, “but it is always [contrary] to simplicity.” This is logically unimpeachable: the “simple” is necessarily nonmultiple; the “perfect” may or may not involve multiplicity.)¹⁵³

Fénelon, still stressing “simplicity” rather than “perfection,” goes on to imagine a hypothetical case in which “order” has permitted God to have a hundred volontés particulières; and he then asks himself a rhetorical question: “What, then, is this ‘simplicity’ which is able to accommodate a hundred [particular] wills, which even requires them, but which invincibly rejects the hundred and first?” And Fénelon adds, in a passage that is extremely effective, though not perhaps wholly fair, that:

It is certainly not the case, Fénelon goes on, that the hundred and first volonté particulière is “of another nature” from the first one hundred; all are equally “exceptions to the general rule.” And he ends with the striking question: “Is there a fatal number of exceptions which God is obliged to use up, after which he can will nothing except according to general laws? Would one dare to say this?”¹⁵⁵ Even if, as Bossuet’s annotations argue, a multiplicity of volontés particulières would contradict only “simplicity,” but not (necessarily) “perfection,” this is an effective passage.

The political moral of all this is drawn by Fénelon several chapters later, in a section called “That which the author [Malebranche] says about volontés particulières destroys, through its consequences, all divine Providence.” Sometimes, Fénelon argues, Providence “acts against general rules, through miracles” (as in the parting of the Red Sea); and this particularism is obviously morally and politically important, since the Jews deserved to escape from the Egyptians. But sometimes – and this seems to matter more – Providence creates a parallel between general laws and “particular plans”: it “uses the wills of men, in which she inspires whatever pleases her, to cause even in matter itself movements that seem fortuitous, but that are related to events that God wills to draw from them.”¹⁵⁶ It was exactly in this way, Fénelon insists, that Alexander the Great “conceived the ambitious plan of conquering Asia: in that way he was able to fulfill the prophecy of Daniel.” If one examines “all the revolutions of great empires” – which are, Fénelon adds, “the greatest spectacle that can sustain our faith” – one sees that “Providence has raised or leveled them to prepare the way for the Messiah, and to establish his endless reign.” And in a footnote he indicates that, on this point, it is Bossuet’s Histoire Universelle that ought to be consulted.¹⁵⁷ (In this chapter, significantly, Bossuet found nothing at all to fault.)¹⁵⁸

By the 1690s Bossuet had lost his one-time disciple Fénelon to Mme. Guyon, “quietism,” and the “disinterested love of God,” and there was something of a rapprochement with Malebranche.¹⁵⁹Hence in his Défense de la Tradition et des Pères, which he began in 1693 as a refutation of Richard Simon’s Histoire Critique des Principaux Commentateurs du Noveau Testament,¹⁶⁰ he allowed himself to use the concept of “general will” – though mainly, it is true, in the thirteenth book, which he added to the manuscript in 1702. And even here Bossuet does not permit himself to use volonté générale in Malebranche’s expanded sense – as something coextensive with wisdom, constancy, even justice; he is careful to restrict “general will” to a narrowly circumscribed realm of grace. Indeed, he talks simply about St. Augustine’s interpretation of the Pauline assertion that “God wills that all men be saved” – the very claim that started the whole controversy over “general will.”

St. Augustine’s “difficulty,” Bossuet argues, was that of knowing why “the will to believe” was not given equally to all men, if God truly wills that “all men be saved.” And St. Augustine had two related “problems” as well: first, how one can say that God “wills” something that “does not happen” (since some are damned, not saved); and second, how one can reconcile God’s “general will” with human “free will.” But St. Augustine, in Bossuet’s view, overcomes all these difficulties quite admirably, by “saying that God truly wills to save all men, but that, since he wants to do this without depriving them of their natural liberty, it is also through the latter that they perish.”¹⁶¹ St. Augustine “supposes,” Bossuet argues, that if all men are not saved, the obstacle comes not at all from “the volonté of God, which is générale,” but from “the will of man” which “opposes” God. (This “opposition” firmly gets punished, to be sure: precisely through some men’s being damned.)¹⁶²

Bossuet grants that St. Augustine does not invariably maintain that God has a “general will” to save all men; indeed in De Correctione et Gratia, Bossuet concedes, Augustine seems to say that “all” men in St. Paul’s assertion refers simply to “the predestined.” But one must recall, Bossuet insists, that in late writings such as Correction and Grace St. Augustine was combating the Pelagians, who “amused the world by calling nature ‘grace,’” and who maintained that grace was given to all equally and indifferently. It was the aim of St. Augustine, Bossuet continues “to preach the grace by which we are Christians”; and he finally concludes that while God as “creator” willed generally that all men be saved, God as “redeemer” reduced this “all” to Christians particularly.¹⁶³ And this, of course, is fairly close to what Pascal says about a volonté générale to save “all” being replaced, after the Fall, by a will to save a smaller number – though Bossuet, no Jansenist, is careful not to speak of the “elect.”

Even when he is willing to employ volonté générale, then, Bossuet is careful to restrict it radically: he doesn’t extend it to cover “bodies politic,” as does Pascal, nor does it become coextensive with legality, as in Malebranche. Hence one can concluded that, with the exception of the purely theological Défense de la Tradition et des Pères, Bossuet adhered in the main to his providentialist particularism – which inter alia, saved Louis XIV from being a mere “consequence” of a “general law.” Of all those who use the term “general will” in the late seventeenth century, Bossuet uses it in the least general way.¹⁶⁴

VI

If Bossuet said a great deal – most of it negative – about volonté générale, he did little to secularize it: to “prepare” it (as it were) for Montesquieu’s extensive secularization and politicization in De l’Espirit des Lois. Indeed at first sight it looks as if there is some sort of missing link or term in the “translation” of general will from a (mainly) theological notion into a (mainly) political one – though one should recall that Pascal had used the notions of généralité and particularité with respect to bodies-politic. But that (apparent) missing link is supplied by an important writer who was completely familiar with the theological use of the notions volonté générale and volonté particulière, and who frequently used those notions in a purely political sense: Pierre Bayle, philosophe de Rotterdam.¹⁶⁵ It was Bayle, especially, who undertook this secular conversion, paving the way for Montesquieu’s further transformations, and then for Rousseau’s “making the history” of the general will.

(To be sure, one can find other “links” between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: if Bayle is the most important, one can still admit that Cardinal Polignac’s Anti-Lucrèce, written in the 1720s, stresses the notion that “if rain falls in the sea or in a wilderness,” that is because these natural facts are “particular effects of loix générales established for the governance of the universe.”¹⁶⁶ That purely Malebranchian thought is slightly politicized by being linked to the notion of “governance”; and it is interesting that Polignac read the Anti-Lucrèce to Montesquieu when the latter visited Rome in 1729.¹⁶⁷ But Bayle’s secularization of volonté générale is far more radical and thoroughgoing.)

Bayle, though a Calvinist, was briefly (ca. 1680–1685) a Malebranchist as well;¹⁶⁸ and indeed nothing did more to spread the European fame of Malebranche’s Nature et Grâce than Bayle’s glowing review of it (May 1684) in his universally diffused journal, Nouvelles de la république des lettres. The “hypothesis” that “God acts through a general will that prescribes only a small number of simple and uniform laws,” Bayle argues, is quite suitable for justifying “several things which cause pain to minds of the second rank.”¹⁶⁹ (Is this slightly left-handed compliment an intimation of hostility to come?) When these “minds” ask why “nature produces so many monstrous things,” or why “in the order of grace there are so many things which shock our reason,” a Malebranchian can reply that they are “consequences of the general laws which God has chosen,” and that God loves his own wisdom “infinitely more than all his works.” Though one may not agree with everything in Malebranche’s Nature et Grâce, Bayle insists, one is still “forced to admit that no one has ever, perhaps, formed so well-linked a system in so little time” – a system that manifests the “vast” and “penetrating” “genius” of its author.¹⁷⁰

But Bayle’s decisive work in this vein is the thoroughly Malebranchian Pensées Diverses sur la Comète (1682), whose general aim is to overturn “superstition” by demonstrating that the comet that alarmed Europe in December 1680 was produced by Malebranchian “general laws,” that it was not a “sign” of Providence particulière or a portent of doom. If God wants to instruct the world through something “miraculous,” Bayle argues, he sends “persons” (Christ, for example) who shine “with the brilliance of excellent virtues” that only the “voluntarily blind” can ignore; he does not merely send a flying rock, which signifies “at most the anger of heaven.” If all the martyrs and prophets have not overcome “idolatry,” Bayle observes tartly, why should one expect much from “a mute flame, which naturally inspires only a feeling of apprehension?”¹⁷¹

Those who have read Malebranche’s Nature et Grâce, Bayle goes on, will have understood that “the events which are born of the execution of general laws of nature, are not the object of a volonté particulière of God.” And this Malebranchian “generality,” in Bayle’s view, is usable in “resolving a thousand difficulties that are raised against divine Providence”:

So closely does Bayle adhere to Malebranche, at this point in his career, that he even copies Malebranche’s treatment of morality as a kind of analogue to law-governed nature: just as it would be “ridiculous” to claim that God ought to depart from laws of nature “when a rock falls on a fragile vase which is a delight of its owner,” Bayle argues, so “also: it is “ridiculous to claim” that God should abandon generality “to stop an evil man from enriching himself by despoiling an homme de bien.” Indeed Bayle outstrips Malebranche in the purity of his Malebranchism by urging that it is as “unjust” to wish that “an evil man become sick” through a divine volonté particulière as it is unreasonable to hope that “a rock which falls on a vase will not break it.”¹⁷³ And in the same chapter of the Pensées Diverses Bayle extracts a political moral from his tale of the fragile vase and the evil man by urging that if “a mere governor of a city will be laughed at, if he changes his rules and his orders as many times as it pleases anyone to murmur against him,” this is even more true of God, “whose laws concern so universal a good.” Can God “derogate from his laws, because today they fail to please someone, tomorrow someone else?” Can one, Bayle asks, “form falser ideas of a Providence générale?”¹⁷⁴

This hyper-Malebranchism Bayle carries over into a still more extended political analogy – located, appropriately enough, in a chapter of the Pensées Diverses called “That There Is Nothing Worthier of the Greatness of God than to Maintain General Laws.” Some people say, Bayle begins, that God ought to intervene particularly in nature to stop the birth of “monsters” that might later be worshipped by “idolators”; but these people do not reflect that “there could be nothing more unworthy of a cause générale, which sets all others in motion by a simple and uniform law, than to violate that law at every moment, in order to prevent murmurings and superstitions.” In just the same way, Bayle insists “there is nothing which gives us a higher idea of a monarch, than to see that he, having wisely established a law, maintains it in vigor for all and against all,” without “suffering” the “prejudice” of an individual (un particuler) or the “interested recommendations of a favorite” to “restrict” the law’s generality.¹⁷⁵ And he adds, as much à la Rousseau as à la Malebranche, that “of all the things which are capable of throwing the state into monstrous confusion,” the worst is “to derogate from the laws, to change them, to mutilate them, to stretch them, to abridge them” in proportion as des particuliers” have “domestic views” that “accommodate” these “alterations.”¹⁷⁶ It is true enough, Bayle grants, that human “limitation” seems to necessitate that les politiques correct their laws through “declarations” and “interpretations”; but it remains true that “the more a law is maintained without alteration, the more also it shows the great sense and the great vision of him who made it.”¹⁷⁷ In this assertion, Malebranche is recalled, and Rousseau is foreshadowed: it is a “monstrously confused” state in which des particuliers deprive law of its generality; statesmen should strive to imitate the constancy of the divine volonté générale. In the Pensées Diverses the politically rightful and the general are exactly equivalent.

(In the second edition of the Pensées Diverses, Bayle added a section arguing that even the Reformation had been brought about by the particularisme. Shortly before the Council of Trent, Bayle points out, a group of cardinals and bishops told Pope Paul III that the “readiness” of his predecessors to “derogate from the canon laws” and to “listen to counsels of flattery” constituted the “Trojan horse” that led to “all the abuses that have inundated the Church.” Centuries earlier, Bayle adds, Innocent IV had been told that papal particularism had “derogated from the laws,” leading to a “deluge of inconstancy, a lack of faith, and an obstacle to the tranquility of Christianity.”¹⁷⁸ Here, very effectively, particularity is linked with “flattery,” “abuse,” and “inconstancy,” while generality is associated with lawfulness, faith, and tranquility.)

To be sure, in the Nouvelles lettres critiques sur l’histoire du Calvinisme, written only slightly later (1684) than the Pensées diverses, Bayle shows as much affinity with a Hobbesian politics based on passion and fear as with a Rousseauean politics grounded in généralité; but this, for Bayle, arises simply from the fact that there is a regrettable (and very large) gap between what politics might be and what it actually is. He begins the political part of the Nouvelles lettres, indeed, in the familiar Malebranchian-Rousseauean tone of the Pensées diverses: “it is more glorious to be led by universal reasons, which relates all things to the general good of the universe, than by une raison particulière.”¹⁷⁹ Shortly afterward, however, Bayle reflects that la raison universelle has little efficacy, given the depressing facts of human psychology; and this leads him to a more careful (and quasi-Hobbesian) passage in which a general-particular distinction is still present, but has lost some of the color of Nature et Grâce and has assumed some of the hues of Leviathan. And in this passage Bayle argues that while pure reason (alone) is not the motive of human actions, a (purely instrumental) reason can help to achieve ends dictated by passion (above all avoiding death and gaining security).

“It is necessary” Bayle begins “to distinguish the reason that precedes the passions” from the reason “that follows in their train.” The reason that precedes the passions is “a certain faculty of the soul that judges things by general principles, and by universal ideas of honor, of justice, of perfection.” But the purely instrumental reason that is preceded by “feelings and instincts” judges everything only by “relation” to “the particular condition [l’état particulier] in which one finds himself.”¹⁸⁰ In that (more or less Hobbesian) “condition,” Bayle argues, reason has “willed” that men “confederate” in order to be delivered from “perpetual disquiet”; but this reason is one that “accommodates itself to fear,” and that “consults” only what “is useful in our present condition” (rather than “the general ideas of the good, the beautiful, the great, and the honorable.”)¹⁸¹

Of course it would be better, Bayle grants, if men had “formed societies through considerations worthy of a reasonable creature” – if they had been willing to “perfect” themselves, and not live like “beasts.” But it has proven necessary in human politics, he adds, “to use a more efficacious means, namely fear, the love of repose, and some other similar passions.”¹⁸² Despite these concessions to Hobbism, nonetheless, Bayle’s groupings of terms show plainly what would be better: “universal” reason is “glorious” and points out “the general good,” while la raison particulière is forced by necessity to accommodate itself to “passion,” above all fear. Thus in Bayle there is a tension between a Malebranchian-Rousseauean ideal of généralité, and an awareness that Hobbes may have been more nearly right than either Malebranche or Rousseau would ever admit.¹⁸³

After the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, followed by the death of his brother (a Calvinist pastor) in a French prison,¹⁸⁴ Bayle published an uncharacteristically violent anti-Catholic polemic entitled Ce que c’est la France toute Catholique sous le Règne de Louis le Grand; and, as a commentator has noted, one of the most interesting features of La France toute Catholique is “the bitter use Bayle makes of Malebranche’s theology,” particularly his generalism.¹⁸⁵ (Perhaps Bayle had begun to feel that some “particular” evils – including his own personal disasters of 1685 – could not be explained away as “consequences” of “uniform” laws.) The revocation of the Edict, followed by fresh persecution of non-Catholics, Bayle argues, is

“Let us say, then” Bayle concludes savagely “with this Oratorian Father, that God, loving his wisdom better than anything else, prefers that his conduct bear the character of a wise agent … than that it remedy … the evils that happen in the world.”¹⁸⁷ Bayle does not yet, despite his ferocious sarcasm, call Malebranchism a “pious fraud” – one of the favorite epithets of his Dictionnaire Historique et Critique; but he is clearly moving toward his later view that “general will” does not really explain the evils of the world.¹⁸⁸

Even so, that later view is not yet wholly realized in La France toute Catholique; for in other parts of the work there are remnants of Malebranchian “generality” that Bayle gives a plainly political turn. To be sure, Bayle begins in a sarcastic vein, saying that if Louis XIV really always intended to revoke the Edict of Nantes (“as he assures us in the preface to the Edict”), then he ought to have revoked it by “the shortest way, which is always that of an able worker,” and not by “act after act, some of which destroyed each other.”¹⁸⁹ Here, of course, the Malebranchian idea of an “able” God working “simply” has been ironically grafted onto the vacillations of Louis XIV. But slightly later one cannot be sure that the tone is still ironic, for Bayle complains that, just before the revocation, Louis’s council first permitted Huguenot ministers to baptize the children, then (afterwards) permitted them to celebrate marriages (“it is as if the judges who had condemned a criminal to be hanged in three days ordained that he change prisons ever two months”),¹⁹⁰ and finally avows that:

After this – and one cannot be quite sure just how far Malebranchism is being used, how far abused – Bayle concludes that Louis’s inconsistencies are “unworthy of a good and wise politics.” Given his view in the Pensées Diverses that good politics should be as “general” as possible, one can’t be certain whether Bayle is attacking Louis XIV for his inconsistency or for the sheer wrongness of his Huguenot policy. In any case, Louis’ particularism proves that a really perfect rule must operate very differently.

Whatever may have been Bayle’s doubts about the adequacy of Malebranchism by the time he wrote La France toute Catholique, he continued to use Malebranche’s distinction between le particulier (as something bad) and le général (as something good) in an important work from around 1686, the Commentaire philosophique sur ces paroles de l’Évangile selon S. Luc, Chap. XIV, Vers 23, ‘Et le Maître dit au serviteur:“Va par les chemins et par les hayes, et contrains-les d’entrer, afin que ma maison soit remplie.”‘ The central point of the Commentaire was to show that Scripture should be interpreted, not through “literal sense” but through “natural light”; that if a literal reading seemed to make Scripture advocate crimes (such as “constraining” French Protestants to “enter” the Catholic Church), then the literal interpretation must be rejected in favor of an “equitable” reading.¹⁹²

Now it is precisely in connection with “equity” and lumière naturelle that Bayle takes up the familiar general-particular distinction. “Without exception” he begins, “one must submit all moral laws to this natural idea of equity” which “enlightens every man coming into the world.” But, Bayle goes on, in the language of Recherche de la Vérité, “since passion and prejudices only too often obscure the ideas of natural equity,” he could wish that a man who wants to know those ideas well “consider them en général, and leaving his interêt particulier out of account, as well as the customs of his country.” For it may happen that “a sharp passion” will persuade a man that something “very useful” and “very pleasant” to himself is “in conformity to reason,” or that he may be swayed by “the force of custom.” To avoid this, Bayle argues, he could wish that a man “who wants to know natural light distinctly” in its “relation” to morality be able to “raise himself above his personal interest, and the custom of his country, and ask himself en général, ‘Is such-and-such a thing just? And, if it is a question of introducing it into a country where it is not in use … would one see, if one examined it coldly, that it is just enough to merit being adopted?’”¹⁹³ This last part, which anticipates Rousseau’s Du Contrat Social, Book IV, Chapter 2 (“when a law is proposed in the assembly of the people, what the voters are being asked is … whether or not it is in conformity with the general will”),¹⁹⁴ ends by praising “that universal and original light that emanates from God in order to show all men the general principles of equity” – general principles that are the “touchstone” of all loix particulières (“not even excepting those that God has revealed to us in an extraordinary way”).¹⁹⁵

If, then, Bayle insists, a “casuist” tells us that Scripture has particularly revealed to him that “it is good and holy to curse one’s enemies” or to persecute the faithful, we must shun him and turn our eyes toward “natural religion fortified and perfected by the Gospel.” Then we shall hear “the interior truth that speaks to our spirit without saying a word, but that speaks quite intelligibly to those who pay attention,” while the “pretended” Scripture of the casuist will be unmasked as a “bilious vapor of temperament.” Even a “particular fact” produced by God through “special Providence” is not “the light that leads us,” and does not derogate from “the positive law that is universally promulgated for all men in the Gospel,” which requires all men to be meek and forgiving; still less, Bayle continues, does “particular” Providence derogate from “the natural and eternal law that supplies all men with the idea of honorability.” And Bayle ends the opening part of the Commentaire philosophique with the wholly Malebranchian thought that “universal reason, which illuminates all minds,” will never be denied to those who are “attentive” and who do not permit “corporeal objects to fill up the capacity of their soul” nor “passions” to “excite” their hearts.¹⁹⁶

By the 1690s Bayle’s doubts about Malebranchism had begun to overcome his vestigial respect for the doctrine; and in the Réponse aux Questions d’un Provincial he indicates exactly why his views have changed, and who did the changing. At the time of his review of Nature et Grâce and of the Pensées Diverses sur la Comète, Bayle relates, he had been “among those who believed” that Malebranche had resolved many difficulties through “general will” and “general law.” Without now denying that “the system of Père Malebranche is the work of a superior genius, and one of the greatest efforts of the human spirit,” Bayle avows that he can no longer embrace Malebranchian generality, “after having read the books of M. Arnauld against this system, and after having considered well the vast and immense idea of the sovereignly perfect being.”¹⁹⁷ The “idea” of an être parfait no longer conveys to Bayle what it seemed to convey to Malebranche: the true “idea” of God “teaches,” Bayle argues, that “there is nothing easier for God than to follow a simple, fecund and regular plan, which is, at the same time, suitable for all creatures.” It is only “a limited intelligence” – Malebranche’s own phrase, now turned against him – which takes more pride in its own “ability” than in its “love for the public good.”¹⁹⁸ All of this Bayle quickly turns in a purely political direction:

From this architectural fable – which is not sufficiently well-designed to be fatal to Malebranche – Bayle concludes that however “well-intentioned” may be “our legislators” on earth, they can still never “invent rules which are convenient for all individuals [particuliers]”; the “limitation” of these legislators’ “enlightenment” forces them to fall back on general laws that, “everything considered,” are “more useful than damaging.”²⁰⁰ Here generality is something settled for, but which (as in Aristotle) is not invariably “equitable.”²⁰¹ But God does not suffer from this problem, since he is “infinite in power and in intelligence.”²⁰²Why he does not “suffer,” why the theodicy-problems that drive Malebranche to the “general will” vanish simply by noticing divine power and intelligence, is not made clear, at least in this work; the probable answer is that, for Bayle, philosophy finally cannot solve the theodicy-problems satisfactorily, so that in the end one must rely on faith, not reason, in explaining (or rather believing in) the justice of God’s operation. As Bayle himself says in the Dictionnaire Historique et Critique, a man is “happily disposed toward faith when he knows how defective reason is. This is why Pascal and others have said that in order to convert the libertines they should make them realize the weakness of reason and teach them to distrust it.”²⁰³ This fideism, Bayle’s final (and apparently sincere) position, is radically at variance with Malebranche’s insistence in the Traité de Morale that “faith passes away, but intelligence exists eternally.”²⁰⁴ In the end, a fideism like Bayle’s cannot co-exist with a rationalism like Malebranche’s. Nor can it hope to find in divine volonté générale a model of justice that can be approximately realized on earth.

Despite the fideism of the Dictionnaire, and Bayle’s increasing doubts about a link between “generality” and justice, there is one important passage in this work – the article dealing with Sarah, wife of the prophet Abraham – in which that Malebranchian link is precisely maintained. In “Sarah,” Bayle considers the ways in which various Christian theologians have tried either to excuse or to condemn Sarah’s conduct (recounted in Genesis) in countenancing Abraham’s impregnation of her servant Agar after Sarah’s sterility led to the impossibility of her bearing a child for Abraham. Bayle argues that St. Augustine’s effort to justify Abraham’s adultery (and Sarah’s connivance) in The City of God is not “une bonne apologie,” and that the attempts of St. Ambrose are no better. All of the efforts of the early fathers of the church to excuse Abraham and Sarah, Bayle goes on, are implausible and even unworthy: “The liberty that Calvin took in strongly censuring this action of Sarah and of her husband, is incomparably more useful to Christian morality, than the care which the fathers took to justify Abraham and his wife.”²⁰⁵ Bayle then, using a Malebranchian general-particular distinction, indicates just what is unjustifiable, not only in the conduct of Abraham and Sarah, but still more in the efforts of Augustine and Ambrose. Those fathers, through their apologies, sacrificed “les interêts généraux de la moralité” to “the reputation of a particular person [un particulier].”²⁰⁶ And to show more plainly that morality is a “general interest,” while an individual reputation is only particular, Bayle goes on to remark that even the patriarch Abraham, yielding to lust, was as susceptible to “the snares of Satan” as are “manifestly criminal persons” and that Augustine’s justificatory efforts involve a morality “more lax” than that of the Jesuits Banui and Escobar – those accommodating latitudinarians so ferociously attacked by Pascal in the Lettres Provinciales.²⁰⁷ (It was surely no accident that Bayle pitched upon the very figures that Pascal – whether justly or not – had saddled with permanently horrible reputations.)²⁰⁸ In Bayle’s “Sarah,” then, the interêt général de la moralité is pitted against Satanic snares, manifest criminality, and Jesuitical laxity; and these should not be admitted, according to Bayle, just to justify un particulier, even one who happened to be a prophet.

The article “Sarah” is exceptional, in Bayle’s late work, for its vestigial Malebranchism; more characteristic of his doubts about the worth of généralité is the piece on which he was working at the time of his death (1706), the Entretiens de Maxime et de Thémiste. The Entretiens are nominally a refutation of Isaac Jaquelot’s Examen de la Théologie de Mr. Bayle (1705); but Jaquelot’s Examen is itself a doctrinaire restatement of Malebranche, gratuitously coupled with some non-Malebranchian ideas. Bayle’s final work, then, is an oblique commentary, not on Malebranche en soi, but on comparatively unintelligent, second-hand Malebranchisme. Even so, Jaquelot’s Examen serves as the occasional cause of a more general inquiry into the worth of generality.²⁰⁹

If in early works such as the Pensées Diverses Bayle had linked generality with justice and wisdom, in the Entretiens he was concerned to show that always operating generally might (wrongly) keep wise agents from departing from general laws and volontés générales even when goodness itself dictated such a departure. Jaquelot imagines, Bayle argues, that “God could not have prevented the Fall of Adam without performing a miracle unworthy of his wisdom,” without “derogating” from general laws. But here, Bayle complains, “the least philosopher” will properly point out that according to Scripture “God performed a great number of miracles [which were] incomparably less useful and less necessary” than impeding the Fall of Adam – though it remains true that generality is worth something and that God therefore will not “derogate from general laws unless it is a question of stopping a dreadful corruption of morals,” and unless “an infinity of miseries is going to inundate the human race.”²¹⁰ If this “corruption” and “inundation” will take place, however, without a particular divine intervention, Bayle is clear that généralité must yield:

And one “wills” to derogate from “general” laws, obviously, by a volonté particulière.

In later sections of the Entretiens, Bayle goes on to say that an insistence on the constant operation of general laws places (merely) aesthetic standards above moral ones. If a “pagan philosopher” were to examine Jaquelot’s notion of généralité, Bayle argues, he would be told that God “only created the world in order to show his power and his infinite knowledge of architecture and of mechanics,” that his attribute of being “good” and “the friend of virtue” had “no part in the construction of his great work.” Bayle then imagines what the “pagan philosopher” might have said:

Bayle goes on to argue that lumière naturelle supplies men with a very different notion of God: “goodness” is his chief attribute, and if he had to choose “between a physical irregularity and a moral irregularity, he would choose the former.” If the “architecture of the universe” has some “defect,” Bayle says, that harms no creature; but “if moral evil is introduced among men,” that is an “injury” which spreads over “an infinity of subjects.” If Jaquelot places the uniform operation of general laws above human “safety” – if he gives greater weight to the aesthetic than to the moral – Bayle insists, then he makes God’s rule “resemble extremely the project of an enemy.”²¹³

To drive home this last point Bayle compares Jaquelot’s God (who “ne se pique que de science”) to Alexander the Great and Caesar, and contrasts this God with a better one who more nearly resembles Titus and Marcus Aurelius:

Jaquelot’s God, to be sure, “prides himself” on science générale, not on science militaire; but, like Caesar, he would be the people’s “enemy” if he loved his own knowledge more than “the public good.” But this, for Bayle, is just what Jaquelot’s God actually does: his refusal to depart from généralité, even to save the human race, means:

To be more exact, Bayle argues, “goodness” could not even have occupied the third rank, since God’s preferring of constancy and uniformity to moral good “bears all the characters of hatred or of indifference to the human race.”²¹⁶ Bayle’s suggestion that one can learn this by letting the “tumult” of “imagination” subside and by consulting “reason” is perfectly Malebranchian;²¹⁷ but his attack on generality is perfectly anti-Malebranchian. And so Bayle finally sets Jaquelot, his Malebranche surrogate, to one side, and confronts the Oratorian himself one last time. Even Père Malebranche himself, “the inventor of the system of general laws,” Bayle says, allows that God sometimes departs from generality and acts “through volontés particulières”; thus it is absurd for either Malebranche or Jaquelot to assert that God could not have saved all men without harming his own attributes. Here Bayle puts a final speech into the mouth of his imagined “pagan philosopher”:

And near the end of that portion of the Entretiens which bears on Malebranchism and généralité, Bayle concludes that a Malebranchian God would, through love of his own “wisdom,” have “subjected himself to the slavery of letting vice rule”: general laws would have “prevailed over goodness and over the love of moral good.” The Malebranchian God has found his own loix générales to be “so fine, so admirable, so worthy of him” that even though they generate “all the crimes, all the heresies, in a word all the disorders of the human race,” he nonetheless “has undertaken the continual and perpetual execution of these laws.”²¹⁹ And Bayle adds, with characteristic bravery, that a “superior” – even a divine one – can become “criminal” not just by ordaining evil, but also through mere permission, through what he calls “connivance”: just as (to use his own analogy), a parent who foresees that his virgin daughters will be seduced at a ball, and who nonetheless lets them go, is as guilty as the seducer.²²⁰

What matters in Bayle – despite his vacillation between Malebranchian generality and particularism – is that he did more to politicize volonté générale (and general law) than anyone between Malebranche and Montesquieu. By always insisting on the rightness (or the wrongness) of “general will,” and by talking about généralité in connection with (say) the religious policies of Louis XIV – the very policies that drove Bayle himself into permanent Dutch exile – Bayle began to shift the emphasis from theodicy to human justice. This he achieved by always relating “generality” and “particularity” to some example of human conduct: the irresponsible negligence of parents who fail to take the particular steps that will save their children from seduction; the cowardice of the governor of a city who abandons general laws whenever anyone “murmurs” against him; the wisdom of a monarch who refuses to let general laws be abridged by the interests “des particuliers.” The obvious vacillation between generality and particularity matters less than the fact that Bayle is consistent in one thing: namely always operating with political and moral examples. And for this reason his is the most important step between Malebranche and Montesquieu in the gradual secularization of a “general will” whose history was finally “made” by Rousseau. In a series of tiny incremental changes, Bayle is a leap.²²¹

VII

Did Rousseau, then – who tells us in the Confessions of his reading of the great seventeenth-century theologians of “general will”²²² – use the notions of volonté générale and volonté particulière simply out of historical piety, simply because the notions were “there” (as he is sometimes said to use social contract theory simply because it was a “venerable fiction” in his time)?²²³ Is it simply a question of the “influence” of Pascal, Malebranche, Bayle, and Montesquieu “on” Rousseau? By no means. Judith Shklar has argued persuasively that the notion of “general will” “conveys everything he most wanted to say,” that it is “a transposition of the most essential individual moral faculty to the realm of public experience.”²²⁴ What this means is that Rousseau’s reasons for using volonté générale were essentially philosophical – however “ready-made” for his purposes the old theological notion may have been. After all, the two “terms” of volonté générale – “will” and “generality” – represent two of the main strands in Rousseau’s thought. “Generality” stands, inter alia, for the rule of law, for “civic” education that draws us “out of ourselves” and toward the general (or common good), for the nonparticularist citizen-virtues of Sparta and republican Rome.²²⁵ And the notion of “will” stands for his conviction that “civil association is the most voluntary act in the world,” that “to deprive your will of all freedom is to deprive your actions of all morality.”²²⁶ And if one could “generalize” the will, so that it “elects” only law, citizenship, and the common good, and avoids “willful” self-love, then one would have a general will in Rousseau’s special sense. Now it happened that the volonté générale and volonté particulière of Pascal, Malebranche, and Leibniz corresponded substantially to these moral aims: hence why not employ terms already rendered politically usable by writers as important as Bayle and Montesquieu?

One could see plainly, even without considering the Confessions, that Rousseau had read the most important seventeenth-century French theologians of “general will” – above all Malebranche and Fénelon – simply by looking at the “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar” (from Émile), at the Letter to Voltaire on Providence, at the third and fifth of the Lettres écrites de la montagne (Reference Rousseau1764), and (above all) at Book VI of La nouvelle Héloïse. All of these are replete with Malebranchian reminiscences.

Here the most important evidence is to be found in letters 6 and 7 from Book VI of Rousseau’s novel. In the sixth letter Julie de Wolmar, advising her former lover St. Preux on religious matters, warns him to “take care” that “human pride” not “mix” any “low ideas” of God with “the sublime ideas of the great being which you formulate for yourself.” Stressing human dependence on a divine father – “slaves by our weakness, we are free through prayer” – she makes it clear that the “low ideas” which she fears are precisely Malebranchian, and cautions St. Preux against believing that the simple “means which help our weakness” are also “suitable to the divine power,” and that God “has need of art, like us, to generalize things in order to treat them more easily.”²²⁷ It seems to St. Preux, Julie goes on, that “it would be an embarrassment” for God to have to “look after” each particular person; perhaps St. Preux fears that a “divided and continual attention” would “fatigue” God, and that this is the reason for his believing it “finer” that God “do everything by general laws,” doubtless because these would “cost” him less “care.” “O great philosophers!” Julie ends mockingly, “how obliged God is to you for having furnished him with these convenient methods and to have saved him so much work!”²²⁸

To this “raillery” (as Émile Bréhier has called it), St. Preux responds “en bon Malebranchiste”²²⁹: all “analogies” he tells Julie “are in favor of these general laws that you seem to reject.” Reason itself, he continues, together with “the soundest ideas” we can form of the “supreme being,” are “very favorable” to (Malebranchian) generality: for while God’s omnipotence, indeed, “has no need of method to abridge work,” nonetheless it is “worthy of his wisdom” to prefer “the simplest means.”²³⁰

Following an eloquent anti-Spinozist excursus on freedom – “a reasoner proves to me in vain that I am not free, because an inner feeling, stronger than all his arguments, refutes them ceaselessly”²³¹ – St. Preux returns to Malebranchian themes in connection with a discussion of grace. And on this subject, his generalism is more rigorous than Malebranche’s own: precisely on Malebranchian grounds, for St. Preux, one must deny the reality of any particular, special grace. “I do not believe,” St. Preux insists “that God gives to one [person] sooner than to another” any “extraordinary help” at all. Grace conferred particularly and unequally would constitute “acceptation of persons,” and would be “injurious to divine justice.”²³² (Here, as is evident, the principles of Du Contrat Social are divinized: what is not permissible in earthly law cannot be right in God’s governance either. That this was Rousseau’s view as early as 1756 is clear in the “Letter to Voltaire on Providence,” in which he urges that just as “a wise king” who wills that “everyone live happily within his estates” need not concern himself to discover “whether the taverns are good,” so too “particular events are nothing in the eyes of the master of the universe,” whose providence is universelle.)²³³

Even if the “hard and discouraging doctrine” of particularly-conferred grace were “deduced from Scripture itself,” St. Preux goes on to say, “is it not my first duty to honor God.”²³⁴ (On this point, exactly as in Malebranche, the idea of what God would do takes precedence over “Scripture”: justice matters more than anthropology.) Whatever “respect” one owes to the “sacred text,” St. Preux insists, one owes still more to its “author”: “I would rather believe the Bible falsified or unintelligible, than God unjust or evil-doing.” If the notion of “grace” means anything, for St. Preux, it refers simply to the nonsupernatural gifts that God has given equally to all: “He has given us reason to know the good, conscience to love it, and liberty to choose it. It is in these sublime gifts that divine grace consists.” And he adds, pointedly, that “we have all received them.”²³⁵

At this point Rousseau may well be arguing against Fénelon – whom, generally, he greatly admired.²³⁶In one of his 1708 letters on grace and predestination to the Benedictine Father François Lami – published in 1718, and therefore fully available to Rousseau – Fénelon had begun his treatment of divine justice by saying that:

This language would certainly have interested Rousseau: for it virtually equates justice with generality, equality, and the absence of “favoritism” – the very things that shape the meaning of “justice” in Du Contrat Social. But Rousseau could never have countenanced Fénelon’s next move: for while the archbishop of Cambrai begins by equating justice and généralité, he wants to be able to justify special divine grace given to the predestined or elect; and therefore a little later in his letter to Father Lami he says that:

To deny this super-added, extra goodness that God gratuitously heaps on the elect, selon Fénelon, is to deny Augustinian predestination altogether; and that is a heresy:

From a Rousseauean perspective, Fénelon begins well by imagining a God who links up justice, generality, and equality; but then, to save the dogma of predestination, he severs the tie between généralité and justice, and tries to justify God’s particularistic favoritism by appealing to Scripture (“many are called, but few are chosen”).²⁴⁰ But at least Fénelon starts at the right point; indeed he (at first) relates généralité and égalité to each other more strongly than any figure before Rousseau himself.²⁴¹ In Fénelon’s initial account of a nonpredestining god, in fact, one might almost be reading Du Contrat Social: “not the slightest inequality would appear; not the slightest favoritism; not the slightest preference; everything would be general, effective, proportioned to need.” Might Rousseau’s city not be an imitation of what God could have done had he wished to dispense with all particular grace? For then vox populi would be (almost) vox dei.²⁴²

Rousseau’s hostility to any Fénelonian notion of nonuniversal grace, of divine favoritism, carries over into the Lettres écrites de la montagne – and in a way that shows that Rousseau knew perfectly that arguments over “particular” grace had had (mainly unfortunate) political effects in the seventeenth century. In the Cinquième Lettre, Rousseau argues that his Émile and Contrat Social have been illegally condemned by the Genevan authorities, and appeals to the authority of the neo-Pascalian moralist Vauvenargues (“whoever is more severe than the laws is a tyrant”).²⁴³ He knows, Rousseau says, of only one comparable instance of legal oppression in Genevan history: “this was in the great quarrel of 1669 over particular grace.”²⁴⁴ Following the inability of les Professeurs to decide the truth about divine grace, Rousseau urges, the Council of Two Hundred rendered a judgment: “the important question at issue was to know whether Jesus had died only for the salvation of the elect, or whether he had also died for the salvation of the damned.” After “many sessions” and “ripe deliberations,” Rousseau adds sarcastically, the “magnificent” Council of Two Hundred “declared that Jesus had died only for the salvation of the elect.” But this, for Rousseau, was a merely political decision, in the worst sense of “political”: “Jesus would have died for the damned, if Professor Tronchin had had more credit than his adversary.” Rousseau brands the whole affair as “fort ridicule,” and adds that civil authorities should “appease quarrels without pronouncing on doctrine.”²⁴⁵ (In the [unpublished] original manuscript of Montagne, Rousseau at this point offers an analogy that only makes clearer his knowledge of seventeenth-century theological disputes: “What ridicule would the Parlement of Paris not have drawn on itself if it had wanted to decide, on its own authority [de son chef], whether the five propositions were or were not in the book [Augustinus] of Jansenius!” He adds that since the Jansenists “disputed” even Rome’s right to judge the Augustinus “how could they have recognized [this right] in a secular tribunal?”²⁴⁶The published version of the Cinquième Lettre, together with the unpublished passage on Jansenism, makes it plain that Rousseau knew perfectly the provenance of the controversy over volonté générale: if he knew “the five propositions,” he knew that the last of them dealt with the scriptural assertion that “God wills that all men be saved.”)

Rousseau’s reference to the “great quarrel of 1669 over particular grace” merits a slightly fuller examination: for since he did a great deal of research into Genevan history before writing the Lettres écrites de la Montagne, he knew perfectly well what the “great quarrel” had involved.²⁴⁷ In 1669 the Council of Two Hundred – moved to act by Calvinist conservatives who had been alarmed by the theological innovations of a newly-arrived Cartesian philosopher – required that all Genevans deny the “universality of grace” (as something given generally to all men): and this 1669 decree was simply a brief re-affirmation of a 1659 policy. But that earlier policy in its turn was nothing but a watered-down version of a 1649 “profession of faith” drawn up by the Genevan Church; and it is some of the articles of that profession of faith that seem to color Rousseau’s sarcastic pronouncements about Jesus’ having died “only for the salvation of the elect.” For that 1649 document had rejected a series of theological “errors”: it denied the notion “that Jesus Christ died for each and every individual [pour tous et un chacun des particuliers]”; it denied that “there is a vocation of universal salvation for all men, and that they can all, if they will, believe and be saved”; it denied that “by his revealed will God wills to save all men.” All these “errors” were rejected, together with the additional error of believing that God “has some desire … or universal conditional grace, to save each individual, if he believes in Jesus Christ.” And one article of the 1649 profession of faith explicitly added that Saint Paul’s letter to Timothy asserting that “God wills that all men be saved” must be explained in light of these “errors”: “general expressions from Scripture must not be understood [as applying] to each and every man, but to the universality of the body of Jesus Christ.”²⁴⁸ Since the “great quarrel” of 1669 recapitulated a quarrel of 1659, and 1659 recapitulated 1649, Rousseau certainly knew all of this; and all of it is reflected in the language of Montagne.

In any case, and whatever may have been the facts of the great quarrel of 1669, the whole controversy over la grâce particulière is, in Rousseau’s final judgment, one of those “questions that interest nobody and that no one whosoever understands”; that being so, it should be “always left to the theologians.”²⁴⁹This is what one would expect Rousseau to say, given his view in La Nouvelle Héloïse that “all” have received the only real grace; and in Montagne he actually says it. (It is an irony worth noticing that Rousseau, in appealing to the authority of the neo-Pascalian Vauvenargues, does so in condemning as “quite ridiculous” the very controversy over grâce particulière that Pascal himself had treated wholly seriously in the Écrits sur la Grâce.²⁵⁰ But Rousseau’s citing of Vauvenargues at least shows that Rousseau knew the thought of this eighteenth-century Pascalian – hence that he might well have been familiar with Vauvenargues’ Pensées-inspired thought that “a body that subsists by the union of many members and confounds the particular interest in the general interest … is the foundation of all morality.”²⁵¹ And this would establish an important link between Pascal and Rousseau, carrying Pascal’s “body full of thinking members” into Rousseau’s own time.)

If, for St. Preux in La Nouvelle Héloïse, God is a Malebranchian who operates through loix generals and avoids an unjust “acceptation of persons,” of what use is prayer – which asks precisely for grace particulière? Here St. Preux, though careful in his language, is strict: “in seeking grace, one renounces reason … who are we to want to force God to perform a miracle” on our behalf? Prayer, indeed, has the good effect of “elevating” us to God and of “raising us above ourselves”; but this does not mean that our prayers will be answered by God: “it is not he who changes us; it is we who change [ourselves] by raising ourselves to him.”²⁵²

These quasi-Malebranchian passages – which seem to confirm Bossuet’s fear that, if Malebranchian généralité is carried far enough, grace vanishes altogether – got Rousseau into great difficulty with the French censorship; and in a remarkable letter to the censor Malesherbes (March 1761), Rousseau says that if he has made St. Preux a “Molinist” – mainly by affirming freedom and minimizing grace to the vanishing point – he has done so in order to avoid making him a “Manichean”: if equal and general human liberty is not the cause of evil, then an evil spirit, equal to God, must be. But, Rousseau adds, if St. Preux “wants to be a heretic on grace, that is his affair.” As for the censor’s charge that St. Preux is the leader of “a revolt against the authority of Scripture,” Rousseau says, he would sooner call it a “submission to the authority of God and of reason”: for God and reason, he continues, must “go before” the Bible, and serve as its “foundation.”²⁵³ And that is a perfectly Malebranchian sentiment. This letter, together with other passages from La Nouvelle Héloïse treating Fénelon and “quietism,” make it clear that Rousseau’s knowledge of the history of French theology was rather extensive and also that, at the same time, God’s “case” must be judged by the Rousseauean concept of general justice, which cannot countenance any particularisme at all. For St. Preux, as for Malebranche, one must never trade an “idea” for an “anthropology.”

Part of St. Preux’ objection to prayer turns on the notion that no one is entitled to demand a “miracle” on his own behalf; and this serves to remind us that Rousseau was just as out of sympathy with miracles as Malebranche had been. Rousseau’s treatment of miracles, indeed – in the Profession de Foi du Vicaire Savoyard and in the Lettres écrites de la Montagne – is so Malebranchian that it is sometimes almost a transcription of Nature et Grâce.

In the third Lettre, Rousseau defines the miraculous in Malebranche’s very language: “a miracle is, in a particular fact, an immediate act of the divine power, a real and visible exception to her laws.”²⁵⁴ (Here, of course, Malebranchisms are piled up: “particular,” “order,” “nature,” “laws.”) Once one knows what a miracle is – or rather would be – there are two remaining questions, Rousseau urges. The first is, can God perform miracles? That, for Rousseau, is certainly no problem: “this question, treated seriously, would be impious if it were not absurd.” The only interesting question, Rousseau affirms, is “Does God will to perform any miracles?”²⁵⁵ Does he actually do what he obviously could do? Here Rousseau is quite clear: the (allegedly) miraculous adds nothing to “the glory of God,” and indeed only favors human “pride” (Malebranche had said “conceit”).²⁵⁶ In any case, Rousseau goes on, we shall never really know certainly whether there are any miracles, thanks to the definition of the miraculous itself:

And as an example of the “quite extraordinary things” that he himself has done, Rousseau says that when he was secretary to the French ambassador in Venice (1743) he performed a number of “new” and “strange” magic tricks involving the mysterious appearance of writing on “blank” paper; finally he adds, as a deliberate provocation, that “I contented myself with being a sorcerer because I was modest, but if I had had the ambition of being a prophet, who could have stopped me from being one?”²⁵⁸ With a defiantly personal “confessional” touch, then, Rousseau appropriates Malebranche’s notion that human conceit (allied with magic) is at the root of most “miraculous” happenings. (Rousseau’s argument is, ironically, Antoine Arnauld’s inverted: both appeal to the limitations of human knowledge, Rousseau to defend a Malebranchian nature ruled by general laws, Arnauld to defend God’s particular providence.)²⁵⁹

Rousseau’s (more or less Malebranchian) distaste for miracles is at its clearest – in the Lettres écrites de la Montagne – in his attempt to reduce the miraculous elements of Christ’s mission to near-nothingness. Rousseau begins by insisting that Christ himself started his earthly work, “not by miracles but by preaching” in the Temple at the age of twelve. (What mattered to Christ, according to Rousseau, was not miracles but la Parole; Malebranche had said le Verbe, but the thought is the same.)²⁶⁰ When, according to Rousseau, Christ “finally” undertook a few miracles, it was “most often” (le plus souvent: Malebranche’s term) on “des occasions particulières” such as the wedding-feast at Cana – and even here Christ’s purpose was not at all to “manifest his power,” but simply to “prolong the gaiety of the feast.” And this last observation is closely connected to Rousseau’s view that what makes Christ “lovable is that he had a sensitive heart” and was an “homme de bonne société.”²⁶¹ Rousseau adds pointedly that it is especially “Jansenists” who try to make Christ and Christianity “tiresomely austere”; and in a footnote he tells an amusing story of a “Jansenist curé” who said of Christ’s participation in the wedding-feast at Cana that “Ce n’est pas ce qu’il fit de mieux.”²⁶²Complaining that Jansenism makes Christianity a “terrible and displeasing” religion that subverts the “agreeable” and “sweet” “veritable loi de Jesus-Christ,” Rousseau finishes the third Letter from the Mountain by lumping Jansenism with partisanship for the miraculous: for he ends the letter with a general assault on “fanatics” who have “disfigured and dishonored” Christianity.²⁶³

Miraculous deviations from généralité are treated with equal reverence in Rousseau’s single most important religious statement, the Profession de Foi du Vicaire Savoyard. Following countless Malebranchian insistences that “God’s goodness is the love of order” and that it is through “order” that he “links each part of the whole,”²⁶⁴ Rousseau has the vicar say withering things about the “miraculous” missions of self-appointed divine agents: “Let us suppose that divine majesty deigns to abase itself far enough to make a man the organ of its sacred volontés: is it reasonable, is it just, to demand that the whole human race obey the voice of this minister?”²⁶⁵

Rousseau has the vicar continue in a Malebranchian language, which has been given a slightly nasty edge: “Is there any equity,” the vicar asks, in having to accept, as evidence of a miraculous “mission,” nothing better than “quelques petits miracles particuliers,” performed before “a few obscure people” known to the rest of the world only by “hearsay”? If one had to accept as authentically miraculous the “prodigies” which “les simples” (Malebranche’s term) find astonishing, there would soon be “more prodigies than natural events.” It is not quelques petits miracles particuliers, the vicar insists, but “the unalterable order of nature that best reveals the Supreme Being”; if there were “many exceptions” to order, law, and generality one would no longer know “what to think.” “For myself,” the vicar concludes, “I believe too much in God to believe in so many miracles [which are] so little worthy of him.”²⁶⁶ (Again a Malebranchian distinction: it is not a question of what God can do, but of what is “worthy” of him.)

The same partisanship for an orderly, “general” nature, coupled with the same hostility to miracles particuliers, recurs in Rousseau’s main defense of Émile (including the Profession de foi) after its condemnation – the Lettre à Christophe de Beaumont. In some fragments of this letter (fragments left out of the final version because they were dangerously sarcastic), Rousseau says that those who depict God as a miracle-worker must imagine that he “amuses himself” with nature-defying “sleight of hand” because he is “at loose ends” for something to do; and he adds a further sarcasm in which (quite pure) Malebranchism takes an uncharitable turn: miracle lovers, Rousseau says, represent God:

And in an adjoining sentence which colors the whole passage, Rousseau insists that “there are liars who say ‘believe,’ and imbeciles who believe that they believe.”²⁶⁸

When, then, Rousseau says in the Confessions that he supplemented the social education he was receiving from Mme. De Warens at Les Charmettes with a very different sort of education – “I began with some book of philosophy, such as the Port-Royal Logic, the Essay of Locke, Malebranche, Leibniz, Descartes, etc.”²⁶⁹ – one can well believe that the “book” of Malebranche that he pitched upon may have been the Traité de la Nature et de la Grâce; without this St. Preux’ defense of généralité in La Nouvelle Héloïse, and the arguments against grace particulière in the Lettres écrites de la Montagne, have no traceable provenance. And if Rousseau’s early poem, Le Verger des Charmettes, is indeed bad verse, it at least reveals good reading – good reading that establishes a rapport between the seventeenth century and Rousseau:

VIII

The passages from La Nouvelle Héloïse, Lettres écrites de la Montagne, and Émile, which demonstrate that Rousseau had a wide and deep knowledge of seventeenth-century theological controversies, mainly reflect those controversies – reflect without (very much) transforming. But there are other passages that engage in a great deal of transforming – particularly of works by Malebranche and Bayle. Now Malebranche, in Nature et grâce, had insisted not only on generality, simplicity, and uniformity, but also on Christ as “architect” of the church viewed as a “Temple”;²⁷¹ and Bayle had recalled much of this when he complained (in the Réponse aux Questions d’un Provinical) that there is “nothing easier” for God as world-architect than to “follow a simple, fecund and regular plan which is at the same time suitable for all creatures” – that God’s “love for the public good” should outweigh a mere show of divine “ability,” just as a prince, in commissioning a palace, should insist that it be “suitable” for its inhabitants, even at the expense of regularity or “magnificence.”²⁷²Rousseau must have had Bayle’s “answer” to Malebranche in mind when he wrote a portion of his Jugement (1756) of the Abbé de St. Pierre’s Polysynodie: indeed Rousseau had to inject only a little extra political content into inherited theological language. In the Jugement Rousseau urges that perfection “in a whole as complicated [composé] as the body politic” does not depend only on the perfection “of each part” – just as, by architectural analogy, “to design a palace it does not suffice to place each item well, but one must also consider the rapports of the whole, the most suitable connections, the most commodious order … the most regular symmetry.”²⁷³ All of these “general objects” are so important, Rousseau goes on, that the “able” architect willingly “sacrifices” for the “betterment of the whole” a thousand “particular advantages” – particular advantages that he could have kept in a “less perfect” and “less simple” arrangement.²⁷⁴ In just the same way, Rousseau adds, politics “does not consider en particulier either finances, or war, or commerce,” but “relates all of these parts to common objective.” And the proportions that are most suitable to this common objective are the result of “general plans” (les plans généraux), which, “in seeking the greatest perfection of the whole” always look for “the simplest execution.”²⁷⁵ In this passage from the Jugement, as is evident, Rousseau is plainly siding with Malebranche, against Bayle – after all, Rousseau insists on generality, simplicity, the perfection of the whole. But the point is that without a certain kind of tradition standing behind him, Rousseau would not have spoken this language – an idiom addressed to those brought up on Malebranche and Bayle. Rousseau is able, by using a few “code” words, to summon up the force of a century’s argumentation over généralité and simplicité.

Not that Rousseau thought that the Abbé de St. Pierre himself had succeeded in arriving at a politique générale; on the contrary, in Book V of Émile Rousseau complains that “it was always the policy of the Abbé de St. Pierre to look for a little remedy for each particular evil [chaque mal particulier], instead of climbing to their common source and seeing that one cannot cure them except all at once.”²⁷⁶ Falling back on the familiar body-members metaphor, Rousseau adds that “it is not a matter of treating separately each ulcer that appears on the body of a sick person, but of purifying the whole [la masse] of the blood that produces all of them.”²⁷⁷ And Rousseau illustrates his political dictum that one must go to the root causes générales, not just toy with chaque mal particulier, by pointing out that Augustus’ laws against celibacy neglected the general root in favor of a futile attack on particular manifestations; had the goodness of his general policies brought citizens to marry freely, he would not have had to make “vain” particular regulations.²⁷⁸

But it is not just Rousseau’s political writings that reflect seventeenth-century philosophy, and particularly Malebranchism. To be sure, one doesn’t usually think of Rousseau as a writer on science – with the exception of his late botanical studies. But when Rousseau does, exceptionally, write on a scientific subject – as in the Institutions Chymiques of c. 1747 – he uses the notions of généralité and particularité as much in the realm of nature as in that of “grace:” as in Malebranche, generality and simplicity have equal weight for Rousseau in la physique and in la morale.²⁷⁹

This is especially clear in the fine set piece called “Of the Mechanism of Nature,” with which Rousseau opens Book II of the Institutions Chymiques. Beginning with an analogy between nature and the opera (“in our opera-theaters … each gives his attention to a particular object; rarely is there someone who appreciates the whole”), Rousseau goes on to complain that even scientists become so obsessed with particularities (“des Papillons, des Mouches”) that nature in the large escapes them altogether:

Here, inverting Pascal, one must imagine a body full of nonthinking “members.” And here too, plainly, it is a fault to let particularité obscure one’s view of the rapports of the parts in a harmonie générale – a perfectly Malebranchian thought that also informs the Jugement of St. Pierre’s Polysynodie.

Malebranchism is, if anything, even more evident in Rousseau’s remarks about the God who must have produced this harmonie générale. Setting out with the thought that “an intelligent Being is the active principle of all things,” Rousseau goes on to urge that while it is true that such a being “could no doubt have produced and preserved the universe by the immediate concourse of his power and will alone” – that is, through a multiplicity of volontés particulières – it was nonetheless “more worthy of his wisdom to establish general laws [des loix générales] … whose effect is alone sufficient for the preservation of the world and all that it contains.”²⁸¹ (This, as is evident, is simply Malebranche’s Nature et Grâce recapitulated; equally evidently, the notion that general laws are “worthy” of God’s “wisdom” anticipates St. Preux’s defense of Malebranchian généralité in La Nouvelle Héloïse.)²⁸²

It is true enough that when it comes to knowing (adequately) the “general laws” of nature, Rousseau is instantly more cautious – as he was to be, later, in Lettres écrites de la Montagne, which insist that miracle-recognizers must know perfectly what is “natural” and what is supernatural.²⁸³ “It would be necessary to know the structure of the universe better than we do” Rousseau admits “in order to determine which are the first and most general of these laws [of nature]; perhaps they are all reducible to a single one.”²⁸⁴ But if general natural laws are reducible to one only, in Rousseau’s view, it is hard enough to see how that can be simple Cartesian motion: “we see well enough that movement is the universal agent … but when Descartes claimed to draw from this one principle the generation of the universe, he built a system singular for its ridiculousness” – one that “armed” doctrinaire materialists with absurd ideas of self-moved matter.²⁸⁵Movement alone, however, Rousseau goes on to complain, will never be able to produce “the least of all the plants, nor the most vile insect”: anticipating the argument of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, he insists that “the construction of an organized body through laws of motion [alone] is a chimera that one is forced to leave to those who content themselves with words.”²⁸⁶ Despite these fascinating intimations of Kant, the crucial point of the Institutions Chymiques is still that harmonie générale is the vérité to be recherché, even if one doesn’t (yet) know that general harmony perfectly. Malebranche would never have countenanced Rousseau’s harsh words about Descartes, but he would have recognized the rest of the opening of Book II of the Institutions Chymiques. And that is because Malebranche and Rousseau both search after generality in nature and in grace.

IX

To be sure, Rousseau’s recherché de la généralité, particularly in politics, is not without its difficulties; and his reflection and transformation of seventeenth-century theological notions is perhaps not always advantageous. No one has seen this more clearly than the Italian scholar Alberto Postigliola, in a remarkable essay entitled De Malebranche à Rousseau: Les Apories de la Volonté Générale et la Revanche du ‘Raisonner Violent.’”²⁸⁷

Postigliola begins by uncovering Malebranchian themes “of a philosophical and epistemological character,” which he later finds echoed in Rousseau. He specially stresses Malebranche’s “important depreciation of that which is limited, finite, particular,” accompanied by the magnification of “that which is universal, constant, general” – particularly of a general order ordained by a God whose rational, nonarbitrary authority operates through “the principle of the simplicity of means.” Without claiming that Rousseau’s account of a just human society “reflects à laletter” Malebranche’s “model” of a just universe, Postigliola still finds striking parallels: in Malebranche “we have … the universal and sovereign divine reason, which acts through general wills … that conform to general laws which it establishes itself”; in Rousseau “we have the sovereignty of the moi commun which is exercised through general wills … which yield a [system of] legislation.”²⁸⁸ Sometimes, in Postigliola’s view, Rousseau’s reflecting of Malebranchian themes leads to an unfortunate, if interesting, result: Rousseau, having appropriated Malebranche’s notion of justice (“understood as a rationalist and ‘geometrizing’ generality”) committed the “unforgivable” error of forgetting that the “general will” of a people lacks “the divine attribute of infinity.” “The error of Rousseau,” Postigliola concludes, “consisted precisely in using the epistemological categories of Malebranche … while continuing to speak of a generality of the will which could not exist in reality as ‘unalterable and pure’ unless it were the will of an infinite being… . In the Rousseauean city, generality cannot fail to be finite, since it can be no more than a sort of finite whole, if not a heterogeneous sum.”²⁸⁹

This particular objection, so strikingly stated by Postigliola, leads to an even more general one. In Malebranche, God’s will is essentially and naturally general; in Rousseau’s men’s wills must be made general through a civic education supplied by a Moses or a Lycurgus – a problem that Rousseau more than once likens to the problem of squaring the circle.²⁹⁰ But one can reasonably ask: is “will” still will if it must be transformed? Do Rousseau’s notions of education – private and civic – leave will as an autonomous “moral cause” (to recall Rousseau’s own expression)?²⁹¹ Of course Rousseau’s hope is that, at the end of political time – when political “infancy” has been left behind, and civic maturity attained²⁹² – the “general will one has as a citizen” will have become a kind of second nature, approaching the true naturalness of volonté générale in Malebranche’s divine modus operandi. But “approaching” is the strongest term one can use, and the relation of “will” to the educative authority that “generalizes” it remains a central problem in Rousseau – the more so because he ordinarily denied that there is any “natural” authority on earth, even in great educators.²⁹³

In any case, Postigliola’s historical inquiries into the provenance of volonté générale cast valuable new light on the still-obscure history of the “general will” before Rousseau. And they serve to remind us that the argument that generality is good, and that particularism is bad – an argument that gives shape to most of Rousseau, some of Kant, and even part of Hegel²⁹⁴ – really has its origins in the late seventeenth century, in the arguments between Malebranche, Pascal, Fénelon, Bossuet, Arnauld, Leibniz, and Bayle.Without knowing that, how could one make (much) sense of Hegel’s claim – in section 140 of the Philosophy of Right – that hypocrisy is “knowledge of the true general [or universal]” coupled with “volition of the particular that conflicts with this generality” (a particular willing that is “evil in character”)?²⁹⁵ (Hegel, immediately and revealingly, goes on to cite Pascal’s Lettres Provinciales, then relates the struggle between the general and the particular to “the old questions about efficacious grace.”)²⁹⁶ If Hegel knew all of this, and also used the notion of généralité in a wholly favorable sense – the “deep insight” of Hegel’s “general class” of enlightened civil-servants springs to mind²⁹⁷ – then one cannot stop inquiry with the general will before Rousseau; for there is plainly a general will after Rousseau, not least in Hegel.²⁹⁸ But that is a question for another day.

1

Arnauld did not read the Discourse summary that Leibniz had sent him under the best of circumstances. As Arnauld wrote to Count Ernst von Hessen Rheinfels in his first, very brief letter of March 1686, he was so busy that he was not able to study even such a short piece until a month after receiving it. Moreover, he was not feeling well. “At the present time I have such a bad cold that all I can do now is to tell Your Highness [my opinion] in a couple of words.” Read it he did, finally, and the words he used were chosen for maximum effect: “I find in his [Leibniz’s] thoughts so many things that frightened me and that, if I am not mistaken, almost all men would find so startling that I cannot see any utility in a treatise that would be evidently rejected by everybody.” It was now Leibniz’s turn to be the target of Arnauld’s famous temper.⁴

The title of article thirteen of the Discourse, which is all that Arnauld initially had to go on and which he cites in his first letter to Leibniz, states that “the individual concept of each person includes once and for all everything that can ever happen to him.” Thus, Adam’s sinning by eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge and Adam’s being the father of Cain, as well as every other event in Adam’s life are contained in the concept of Adam. But then – because Adam is the first man, and because (as the title of article nine says) “every individual substance expresses the whole universe in its own manner, and … in its full concept is included all its experiences together with all the attendant circumstances and the whole sequence of exterior events” – presumably included in Adam’s concept is every other event in the history of humankind, all of which should follow from what Adam does. This much is clear to Arnauld from the start. Moreover, although this is not yet something of which Arnauld is fully aware, since Leibniz explains it only in his replies to Arnauld’s first two letters (July 1686), the concept of an individual is therefore distinguished from the concepts of all other individuals by the totality of the properties, states, and actions it contains. To conceive of any single feature of that substance, any moment of its existence, no matter how apparently insignificant, being other than what it is, is in fact to conceive of an entirely different substance, albeit one that is very similar in many other respects to the original substance.⁵ As Leibniz says, if the first man had not eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge, then he would not have been Adam but rather some other individual very much like Adam but lacking one of Adam’s properties.⁶ Eating the fruit is, like every other feature or action of Adam, an essential part of the concept of Adam. Thus, if God creates Adam, Adam will sin; for if he does not sin, then it is not Adam whom God has created.

Arnauld is perhaps the greatest defender of God’s absolute liberty in the seventeenth century. And he basically insists that if Leibniz is right about the concept of an individual containing everything that will happen to him, then God’s first free choices in creation are also His last free choices. For God may have been free to create or not to create Adam – that is, the first human being, whose individual concept includes and thus necessarily implies not just the original sin but everything that succeeds him, including all his progeny (the entire human race and everything that happens to it). But then supposing that God does decide to create Adam, Arnauld insists,

As Arnauld reads Leibniz – or, rather, as he reads the titles of the articles of the Discourse – if God creates Adam, then not only will Adam sin, but also there is nothing that God can do about it. Having chosen to create Adam, God thereby gives up His liberty with respect to everything that subsequently happens.

Thus, in that first letter, Arnauld’s response to article thirteen of the Discourse seems to be deeply grounded in his concern to safeguard divine freedom and omnipotence. He is concerned that, according to Leibniz’s view, God, having created the initial conditions, does not have any “freedom to make a change” (in Leibniz’s paraphrase),⁸ to step in and alter the course of nature. But, as I hope to show, there is more to it than that. Arnauld’s response also represents an abiding concern to safeguard the proper conception of the nature and extent of divine providence. In short, if Leibniz (as Arnauld reads him) is right about Adam and his concept – not just in the title of article thirteen, but also in his subsequent explanation about the individuation of concepts of substances – then this has problematic implications for divine providence, implications that put Leibniz in as serious trouble as Malebranche.

2

Arnauld’s attack on Malebranche’s Treatise on Nature and Grace reveals how far apart the two Catholic theologians are on some central issues of theodicy, including whether or not there are real evils and imperfections in God’s creation. But the assault on Malebranche’s conception of the status of evil reflects an even deeper difference between the two thinkers on the nature of God’s activity itself. The most problematic aspect of Malebranche’s theodicy, for Arnauld, is also its most central one: the idea that God acts only by general volitions and never by particular ones. Such a claim, which relieves God of having to take direct responsibility for everything that happens in the universe, is what allows Malebranche to concede that some elements of God’s handiwork really are imperfect or defective without convicting God Himself of impotence, ignorance, or injustice.

Malebranche is fond of insisting that a wise, simple, eternal, and constant God acts only by “general volitions [volontez générales]” and (almost) never by “particular volitions [volontez particulières].”⁹ A general volition is a will to do something that is in accordance with some law or general principle. A law of physics, for example, specifies that if a body of a certain size at rest is struck by a body of a certain size in motion, then it will be moved in a certain way. When Malebranche’s God then moves a body in the appropriate way on the occasion of its being struck by another body, He is acting by a general volition. Similarly, if God causes a feeling of pain in some person on the occasion of his being pricked by a needle, this is done through a general volition, since it is in accordance with the laws of mind-body union that He has established. A particular volition, by contrast, does not obey any law, but is (relative to the laws) ad hoc. If God were to move a body without its having been struck by another body or if He were to cause pain in someone without anything having happened to that person’s body, He would be acting by a particular volition.¹⁰ Malebranche insists that such arbitrary acts by God, just because they are not regulated by general laws of nature, are miracles.¹¹ Thus, Malebranche’s God not only institutes the most simple laws, but He also is bound by his own nature – as a wise, good, immutable, and absolutely simple being who acts with perfect constancy – to follow those laws in the causal operations through which He makes nature function.

In addition to the a priori reasoning that Malebranche provides for this claim about the generality of God’s will, based on the consideration of God’s attributes, Malebranche adds a secondary argument based on more practical considerations. If God acted by particular volitions – that is, if God regularly brought about events not because they were, given the antecedent conditions, demanded by the laws of nature but because He simply and directly wanted those particular events to happen – then it would always be a sin not to accept passively everything that happens. A person caught in a burning building would sin against God were he to try to escape from that building, since the building’s collapse on him would be something willed very specifically by God Himself, and not just something that happens to be brought about in the law-governed, ordinary course of nature.¹²

Why, then, is there evil in the world? Why are individuals born without limbs, why are there floods and droughts, why is there sin and suffering, and why do virtuous people sometimes suffer while vicious people prosper? And why, especially, are not all human beings saved by the grace of God?

Malebranche believes that it is important, above all, to bear in mind that God does not will any of these evils with a particular volition. God does not choose them for their own sake and regardless of what else happens to be the case.

These unfortunate events occur because God allows them to occur – or, rather, brings them about – as a part of the ordinary course of nature as this is regulated by its most simple laws. General laws have a wide variety of effects. As anyone whose plans have ever been disturbed by the weather knows, these laws, which on the whole make for an orderly and predictable world, cannot take into account the convenience and wishes of particular individuals or even those of an entire species. Birth defects, earthquakes, and other natural disorders are but the “necessary consequences [of] laws so simple that they serve to produce everything beautiful that we see in the world.”¹⁴ God, obliged as He is to following the laws of nature, “makes it rain on fallow lands as well as on those that are cultivated,” because that is the meteorological result to which the laws lead. Likewise, if a person should be “dropping rocks on the heads of passers-by, the rocks will always fall at an equal speed, without discerning the piety, or the condition, or the good or bad dispositions of those who pass by.”¹⁵ Just as the rain falls where it must, regardless of what lies underneath, so the rocks, falling as rocks do, will land on the heads of the virtuous and the vicious alike. In these and other cases, God is simply carrying out the natural consequences of the laws of nature – laws that are so simple that they admit of no exceptions and specify that when certain things occur, other things must happen.

God, then, is more committed to acting in a general way and to a nature governed by the most simple laws than He is to the well-being of individuals and the justice of the distribution of rewards and punishments. As the universal cause, He follows those laws, come what may to those affected by them. For this reason, Malebranche says that God “permits disorder but He does not create it, He does not will it.”¹⁶ But the word “disorder” is ambiguous. An event is a disorder in one very relative sense if it frustrates the ends or ambitions of an agent. A rock falling on one’s head is certainly a disorder for the injured party. But from a more global perspective, such an event is perfectly ordered, since it follows from the sequence of previous events in a lawlike way. “It is no disorder for lions to eat wolves, wolves sheep, and sheep the grass that God tends so carefully that He has given it all the things necessary for its own preservation.”¹⁷ For Malebranche, nature is perfectly well ordered – and that is exactly why disorders happen.

Thus, there is sin and suffering in the world; rain falls on the oceans while soil planted with seeds suffers drought; there are murders, deformities of birth, and tsunamis; and not every individual receives the grace necessary to move him to faith. But none of this happens because God directly wills it. Rather, such things happen as a result of the simple laws of nature and grace, which were instituted by God at creation and which He is committed to carrying out, come what may.

When Arnauld read all this in the Treatise on Nature and Grace, everything changed.He revised not only his previously positive assessment of Malebranche’s Search After Truth, but his opinion of the man himself. As Arnauld explains at great length in the Reflections, Malebranche’s theodicy and its account of divine agency completely undermines God’s providence by removing Him from a direct and immediate care for every part of His creation. And this doctrine, Arnauld believes, no good Christian can possibly tolerate.

Whatever God wills, Arnauld insists, He wills in particular, by a “positive, direct and particular volition.” This applies to everything in the world, no matter how small and insignificant, regardless of its apparent beauty or deformity. Every natural disaster, monster, and failed ambition, every life and every death – and, above all, every soul’s salvation or damnation – are intended parts of God’s plan. “God makes every drop of rain fall with a particular volition,” he says. To suggest otherwise, as Malebranche does, is to compromise the universality of divine governance. “Nothing happens in the world – be it a leaf or a fruit falling from a tree, or, more importantly, the birth or death of an animal, except by the will of God applied to each event … by the particular commands of His providence.”¹⁸

We do not always know why God wills this or that event. The purposes of God’s volitions escape our finite understanding. We may not be able to see a reason why the rain falls on unseeded soil or on an already swollen river. But this does not justify the conclusion that such events are defects of nature or are not things willed positively by God, by whom everything in particular is ordained. Arnauld insists that this is what “everyone who has read Scripture for thousands of years” knows. Only Malebranche feels the need to provide a figurative or metaphorical interpretation of the Bible’s words when it speaks of God acting in particular ways; Malebranche alone, he says with typical sarcasm, believes that Scripture employs “a language so extraordinary that it has misled everyone who has read these divine books for more than a thousand, two thousand, three thousand years, and that it has not been intelligible except to only one man, who, after so much time of error and illusion, has found the secret to interpreting these puzzles.”¹⁹

The unfortunate but necessary conclusion of Malebranche’s view that “God acts only by general volitions,” Arnauld claims, is that God’s true providence manifests itself only in miraculous events. In these cases alone, where the ordinary course of nature as determined by its general laws is violated, does God will something directly and by a particular volition.²⁰ But Arnauld believes that God’s providence is revealed in every single and particular aspect of the world. All of nature, from the smallest detail to the largest cataclysm, is a direct expression of God’s power and other attributes.

This does not mean that God is constantly acting in ad hoc and unpredictable ways. Divine providence, at least in the realm of nature, plays itself out in a perfectly lawlike manner. God, Arnauld says, accomplishes his eternal designs “under the appearance of inferior [i.e., natural] causes and through the ordinary course of things in the world.”²¹ The difference is that, whereas Malebranche’s God (at least as Arnauld reads him) acts by general laws, through volitions whose content is general and do not regard anything in particular²² – like a distant king issuing broad commands about how his subjects should in general behave, come what may and without paying any attention to individual subjects – Arnauld’s God acts (in nature) for the most part according to or following general laws through particular volitions directed at specific things and events (or, perhaps a better way to put it, the effects of the particular volitions of Arnauld’s God generally exhibit a lawlike regularity). Like a king who directly orders an individual subject to perform a certain action because that is how he wants people in general to behave, Arnauld’s God sees to it that a leaf falls under certain circumstances (a strong wind, decreasing hours of daylight) because that is the regular way in which He desires nature to proceed.

In the realm of grace, wherein Arnauld’s God dispenses with laws and generalities altogether and acts to save individual souls only through particular, unmotivated acts of infinite mercy, the unreasonableness of Malebranche’s position and its inappropriateness for God is even more evident. Malebranche grants that there are rare times when God’s wisdom, as determined by Order, require Him to act by a particular volition and to perform a miracle – for example, to aid the people of Israel or to cause or forestall some disaster of nature. Moreover, Malebranche maintains that the creation of the world itself, including all the individual beings it initially contained, as this is described in the opening chapters of the Bible, must have taken place through particular volitions. This is because until God first creates something, there are no natural events to get the system of general laws working. God can act by general volitions only if there are particular occasional causes to determine Him to bring about consequent events; God must create the earth, Adam and Eve, and the beasts surrounding them through particular volitions because until He does so, there is no world nor any creatures whose activities occasion the working of the laws governing nature and living beings. But, Arnauld asks, if God can act by a particular volition to keep Daniel from being eaten by the lions or to create a lowly fly, then surely He would act by a particular volition to keep a natural disaster from killing thousands or to save a soul from eternal damnation, a much more momentous and important achievement, especially if, as Malebranche insists, His ultimate aim is to build His “Eternal Temple.” If anything could justify God’s departure from “the most simple and general ways,” it would be the salvation of a soul that God wants to save but that is destined for damnation by the laws of grace.

Only a God acting by particular volitions – in nature and in grace – is a true providential God. “God orders all things,” Arnauld reminds Malebranche, “this is what His providence consists in.”²⁴ Only this conception of God’s action – which makes Him directly and intentionally responsible for everything that happens – is conducive to the proper worship of God, to the love and fear of Him alone.²⁵

3

Now let us go back to Arnauld’s criticisms of article thirteen of Leibniz’s Discourse. Recall that this was written soon after Leibniz completed the Philosophical and Theological Reflections on Malebranche’s Treatise on Nature and Grace. The terms of Arnauld’s debate with Malebranche provide a nice framework for seeing more deeply into what may really be bothering him in Leibniz’s Discourse outline.

Arnauld is certainly concerned about the ramifications of Leibniz’s view for divine freedom. But he is also concerned about the way in which Leibniz’s account of the complete concept of an individual removes God from direct providential care with respect to every aspect of creation, distancing God from an immediate, intentional involvement with everything that happens. As Arnauld initially reads Leibniz’s view, God may get to choose to create or not create Adam. But having chosen to create Adam, he neither has any control over the subsequent course of events nor even any practical intentions regarding them. What happens, happens because it is embedded in the concept of Adam, whether or not God wants it to happen, whether or not it is the expression of – or even consistent with – God’s wisdom.

Keeping in mind the proximity of Arnauld’s first letter to Leibniz with the composition of his response to Malebranche’s account of providence (less than a year separates the two), Arnauld’s initial objections to Leibniz appear to be not only an expression of his desire to safeguard God’s freedom – that is, could God, having chosen to create Adam, possibly then stop Adam from sinning or keep Judas from betraying Jesus? – but it is also a natural extension of his recent attack on Malebranche, an attack grounded in Arnauld’s belief that there is nothing that happens except because God directly and positively wants and intends it to happen. Leibniz’s God should seem to Arnauld to be as uninvolved in the unfolding of events in the world as Malebranche’s God is. Or, to put it in terms Arnauld might prefer, Leibniz’s God – as Arnauld first understands it – wills nothing in human history with a particular volition except the existence of Adam.

I should add that the issue here is not, as Sleigh describes it, a causal one – that is, whether a particular volition in God is the real cause of some event.²⁶ Even if, on Leibniz’s view, every event in nature is causally related to a volition that is particular in God, this would not satisfy Arnauld’s concern. Rather, the issue is an explanatory one. Is everything that happens in conformity with and explained by what God directly wants and intends in particular to happen? Does every individual aspect of the world express one of God’s providential desires? In his first two letters, Arnauld, fresh from tearing into Malebranche on just this issue, is under the impression that in Leibniz’s scheme things fare no better.

Arnauld, of course, gives us good reason to think that this, and not just divine freedom, is the issue. For example, in the letter of May 13, 1686, it is clear that what bothers Arnauld is that if God knows all the individuals who have come into the world only because they are all involved in the individual concept of Adam, then “they would then have been thus involved independently of God’s decrees.”²⁷ He goes on to insist that, as he see things, “an infinite number of human events … have occurred by the express and particular commands of God” (emphases added in both quotes), and not because they are simply “involved in the individual concept of the possible Adam.”

4

But here is a deeper question. In his third letter to Leibniz, Arnauld expresses his satisfaction with Leibniz’s response to his inquiries about Leibniz’s doctrine of the concept of an individual substance and what it seems to imply about Adam, his posterity, and the proper understanding of divine freedom and providence. Of course, it may be that the always-impatient Arnauld is tired of pressing this point and simply wants to move on to the next issue. But to anyone familiar with Leibniz’s views on theodicy and Arnauld’s demands for an acceptable account of providence, Arnauld’s conciliatory reply here should be puzzling. How can he be satisfied? After all, like Malebranche, Leibniz believes that while everything that happens is envisioned by God (in Leibniz’s case, as constituents of the best of all possible worlds) and nothing happens that is not strictly speaking brought about by God (and thus presumably causally related to a volition that is particular), it is not the case that everything that happens is directly desired or intended by God. To see this, consider article seven of the Discourse. Leibniz there says that while everything in creation is certainly in accordance with God’s general volition insofar as it all “conforms to the most perfect order He has chosen,” there are many things that God “allows” or brings about with what Leibniz elsewhere calls a “permissive will” but that are not things that God directly wills or desires – namely, the evils in the world, especially human sins.

Like Malebranche’s God, Leibniz’s God acts knowing full well, even concurring with, the consequences of His action, including those consequences that are not really what He desires or prefers, that are not the objects of particular volitions. Both Malebranche’s God and Leibniz’s God permit, rather than positively will, the evils that exist in the world. This should be troubling to Arnauld, and, as perceptive as he is, he might not need to have read the full text of article seven to see it.

But now look closely at what Leibniz actually says to Arnauld in his replies to the first two letters. He explains that God’s creative act, in choosing one possible Adam over all the others, is not just about choosing to create an underdetermined or limited Adam but includes intentions that are directed at every single thing that occurs in the subsequent course of events.

Notice that while Leibniz says here that there are particular volitions directed at “what transpires in this universe,” he does not say whether or not there is a particular volition for every circumstance that transpires in the universe, leaving open, even suggesting the possibility – which he knows would be attractive to Arnauld – that every single feature of creation corresponds to a particular intention in God (in contrast to Discourse VII, where many things are not the objects of particular volitions). In his next letter, Leibniz seems to go a bit further and insist explicitly that every contingent fact included within Adam’s concept (and thus within the concept of the world) is the object of a corresponding particular desire in God. This allows him to say that whatever happens, presumably whether it is a good thing or a sin, is an intended expression of God’s purposes, a result of God’s “resolution” or “determination”:

Earlier in the same letter Leibniz had said that

Leibniz, taking his lead from Arnauld, prefers to conclude his explanation in terms of how this all avoids “fatalistic necessity” and anything “contrary to the liberty of God.” But the passage also shows that he is sensitive to what he knows about Arnauld’s concerns about the universal scope of divine providence, as these are manifest in the debate with Malebranche. In fact, Leibniz is being very clever here. He knows, first of all, that Arnauld has not seen article seven of the Discourse, where Leibniz is quite clear that not everything that “transpires in the universe” is the intended object of a particular volition in God and is quite open about God’s merely permitting (but not desiring) some things to happen. Second, by insisting that in making the free choice to create one world rather than another God does not merely select some initial collection of substances and then watch passively and helplessly as the world’s series of events necessarily unfolds independently of His will; and by explaining that an omniscient God, knowing full well what every concept of every individual involves, chooses to actualize one particular set of original substances – that is, the initial state of one possible world – just because of what will follow necessarily from them; and by going so far as to say that God has a “resolution” or a “determination” for every contingent circumstance, even sins, Leibniz can all but say that every aspect of creation is envisioned by God and forms a part of His plan, and even (despite what he says in Discourse VII) corresponds to a particular volition in God.

But notice that what Leibniz does not do in his replies to Arnauld is to elaborate on the content of the Discourse article whose title gives Arnauld so much trouble and to mention anything about God’s merely “permissive” will, or God’s not desiring certain things that happen – and it is a good thing for Leibniz that he does not, since these would set Arnauld off as much as Malebranche’s use of God’s general volitions did. As we have seen, Arnauld could not accept the idea that God merely permits, as opposed to positively willing, the evils that exist in the world. Arnauld is committed to the claim that God does, through his providential will, will in particular the existence of each and every item in the world, including each and every act of sin and the damnation of every damned soul. If only Arnauld could have seen behind the scenes here, he would not have so quickly accepted what Leibniz was saying.

But then again, Leibniz in 1686 knows exactly what to say to Arnauld. He knows that Malebranche’s errors on providence are not far from Arnauld’s mind. He is aware that the person he is now arguing with is also the author of the just published Reflections – which he has read only within the last six months – and thus he has no illusions about the demands that his Jansenist friend will make on any account of divine agency. Fortunately, Leibniz also knows what it takes to assure Arnauld, rather misleadingly, that, on the question of the extent of divine providence throughout the details of nature, they are not that far apart.

Theologians of the General Will

To undertake a conceptual history of the general will – with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s mature reflections as its end-in-view – would be an enormous undertaking. Conceptual historians would have to consider the many theoretical strands evident in Rousseau’s writing,⁵ as well as the many complex constituents of the general will as he conceptualized it. For these reasons, it makes good historical and philosophical sense – and imposes a decisive economy – to trace the concept when it is matched by the complex term “general will.”⁶Thus, Patrick Riley justifiably and rigorously traced the complex “transformation of the divine into the civic” where “general will” was terminologically invoked by various writers. With that historiographical decision, Riley identified (as far as his “diligent inquiry” revealed) the first known use of “general will” in Antoine Arnauld’s Première Apologie pour M. Jansénius in 1644.⁷

The terminological inventiveness of Arnauld was occasioned by the long-standing debate between Christian theologians over the scope of salvation – among them, Augustinians, Pelagians, Thomists, Jesuits, Jansenists, Calvinists, Oratorians, and Socinians. At the heart of this debate was a hermeneutic question about Scripture, touching upon the interpretation of God’s will and grace. How should Christians interpret St. Paul’s message – “God wills that all men be saved” – as declared in 1 Timothy 2:4?⁸ In defending Jansenius and his severe reading of Augustine, Arnauld upheld the Pauline doctrine that it was indeed God’s “general will” to save all men. But he proceeded, hermeneutically, as Riley demonstrates, to render “the ‘general will’ … as little general as possible,” doing so “by diminishing the compass of ‘all’ [and] by shrinking the meaning of ‘will.’”⁹ Thus, a much smaller subset of “men” were actually chosen to receive God’s particular grace and be saved in the afterlife as an elect few.

The terminology of “general will” was thus unleashed, according to Riley. Famous theologians and philosophers – the brilliant Jansenist Pascal, the visionary Oratorian Malebranche, and the sometime Calvinist Bayle – soon contested the meaning of salvation and God’s will in St. Paul’s Epistle to Timothy. Moreover, the concept underwent extensive innovation in a mere few decades. It became a theological vehicle to interpret other texts of Scripture, as well as to proffer varying accounts of God’s design of the universe and the beings populating it. In Pensées (1670) and Écrits sur la Grâce (c. 1656), Pascal transferred “general will” to another Pauline doctrine found in 1 Corinthians 12 about members in the church (read expansively to cover “bodies politic”). Malebranche responded to Arnauld at great length in Traité de la Nature et de la Grâce (1682) which began its life as a “clarification” appended to Recherche de la Vérité (1680). In both works, Malebranche not only contested the scope of salvation as Arnauld delimited it, but also expanded on the generality of God’s will. God willed that all men be saved, more inclusively, but also that the entire universe be ordered and governed by simple, uniform, natural laws. This, in turn, became the basis for Malebranche’s theories of occasional causation and of human “ideas,” as well. The indefatigable Arnauld responded with Des Vrayes et des Fausses Idées (1683) – on general-will topics ranging from grace to ideas – prompting the return favor from Malebranche, Defense de l’Auteur de la Recherche de la Vérité (1684). Nothing appeared capable of ending the cascade of critiques and counter-critiques between them.

Bayle entered this fray initially by following Malebranche in finding God’s “general will” as a law-governed plan for the natural and moral universe, especially in his famous Pensées Diverse sur la Comète (1682). In this text on the extraordinary comet of 1680 and in later less-Malebranchean texts – especially Commentaire Philosophique (c. 1686) and Dictionnaire Historique et Critique (1697) – Bayle innovated yet further. Before him, the “general will” had at most been suggestive of political content, as in Pascal’s “bodies politic.” But Bayle made the general will a manifestly political concept regarding parental authority, magistracy, and justice. It was Bayle, then, who, in Riley’s words, “secularized” and “politicized” the “general will,” making him the direct predecessor to Montesquieu and Rousseau.¹⁰

Neither these theorists nor their texts escaped the attention of John Locke. Locke became familiar with them in different contexts: during his travels to France in the 1670s, while exiled in Holland in the 1680s, and when engaged in his own debates of the 1690s. His extensive library contained several of the central or related texts on nature, grace, and the general will.¹¹ He owned the 1675 and the (“Nouvelle”) 1678 editions of the Pensées. Hailing him as “that prodigy of parts,” Locke subsequently paraphrased Pascal’s account of “reputation” and employed a variant of his famous wager.¹² Among his prized books, Locke numbered Malebranche’s Traité de la Nature et de la Grace (Reference Malebranche1684) and no less than four editions of Recherche de la Vérité. As if that were not enough “searching for the truth” in Malebranche – for whom he confessed “a personal kindness”¹³ – Locke also had on his shelves Critique de la Recherche de la Vérité (1675) by Simon Foucher, Critique de la Critique de la Recherche de la Vérité (1675) by Robert Desgabets, and Malebranche’s own Defense de l’Auteur de la Recherche de la Vérité (1684). He first became acquainted with Malebranche’s nemesis and dogged critic, the Port Royal Jansenist Arnauld, as the co-author of La Logique, ou l’Art de Penser (1666), whose fourth French edition (1674) was in Locke’s library and to whose English translation Locke may have lent a hand.¹⁴Locke’s acquaintance was not passing since one finds considerable resonance between the Port Royal logic and Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, particularly on “ideas.”¹⁵He owned several other works of Arnauld’s, including Des Vrayes et des Fausses Idées (1683). From this crucial book, Locke took extracts of criticisms of Malebranche in 1684–1685,¹⁶ two years after Henri Justel, the bibliophile friend of Bayle, called to his attention the debate between Arnauld and Malebranche.¹⁷ Bayle and his works were extremely important to Locke, as well, when, as often, he agreed with them, and when, especially in the case of an imagined society of atheists, he did not. The two philosophers may have met; and they certainly referred to each other in their respective correspondence. “I value his opinion in the first rank,” Locke shared with his Quaker friend Benjamin Furly in hopes of getting Bayle’s thoughts on the Essay.¹⁸ Bayle quoted or cited passages from the Essay and A Letter concerning Toleration in the Dictionnaire, a work Locke owned and hailed as “Bayle’s incomparable dictionary.” He also recommended its reading for “a Gentleman.”¹⁹ Locke not only had on his shelves Commentaire Philosophique, he likely wrote the unsigned review of it in Jean Le Clerc’s Bibliotheque Universelle et Historique.²⁰ Fascinated with the comet – and engaged in correspondence about its properties and measurement²¹ – Locke perused his own first edition to comment upon a particular section of Bayle’s Pensées Diverses,²² the text wherein began the politicization of the general will.

His library books aside, Locke engaged the scriptural issues – beginning with salvation – touching upon the general will. In different texts, Locke consistently identified salvation as the grace of God, the crux of Christian belief, and “absolutely necessary to happiness.”²³However, he provided “no detailed discussion of soteriology,” as John Marshall tells us, coming close only when condemning “those who presumed to define whom God would save.”²⁴ This distanced Locke from, say, the Calvinism of Bayle or the Jansenism of Arnauld. It also aptly characterized Locke’s response to Jonas Proast amidst their acrimonious letters on toleration whose duration and word-count rivaled the debate between Arnauld and Malebranche. In them, Locke condemned Proast’s orthodox Anglican dictate that magistrates could use “force or coactive power” over ordinary believers to “keep them in the right way to salvation.” “It is plain,” Locke accused Proast, “that you have an itch to be handling the secular sword.”²⁵ He quoted nearly verbatim 1 Timothy 2:4 in the final chapter of the Third Letter of Toleration: “It is the will of God also, that men should be saved; but to this it is not necessary that force or coactive power should be put into men’s hands, because God can and hath provided other means to bring men to salvation: to which you [Proast] indeed suppose, but can never prove force necessary.”²⁶

Having denied original sin in earlier works – since men sinned freely and copiously enough to warrant eternal miscarriage “by their own fault”²⁷ – Locke went on to note: “That some men shall be saved, and not all, is, I think past question to all that are Christians: and those that shall be saved, it is plain, are the elect.”²⁸ But Locke neither enumerated the saved nor backed his reference to “the elect” with anything like a systematic theology of election.²⁹ Indeed, he had no “systematic theology” at all.³⁰

There was, however, something of a political theology at work in Locke’s dispute with Proast. That is, politics attended God’s general will that all men should be saved. “Government is the will of God,” proclaimed the sentence immediately preceding the allusion to St. Paul’s epistle to Timothy. This concluded Locke’s argument that God-given “reason has taught [men] to seek a remedy in government” to “avoid mutual injuries.”³¹ Thus God gave “the community itself” – through its magistrates – the right to punish violations of civil law, though not in matters concerning salvation. Moreover, in willing government, God willed civil laws. He willed them in general, leaving particular civil laws to the free will of men in their particular contexts.

Locke dealt even more directly with 1 Corinthians 12, the second signal Scripture text in the conceptual unfolding of the general will. He did so in A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul when applying himself “to the Study of the way to Salvation.”³² This work of scriptural hermeneutics came at the end of the decade when Locke was most engaged with the French theologians of the general will, especially Malebranche. Composed in 1703–1704, it was his last literary act. However, Locke was goaded into this task a few years earlier by another orthodox divine, Jonathan Edwards. Edwards had accused Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) as being “atheistic” and “all over Socinianized.”³³ Amidst these damning accusations, Edwards charged that Locke’s proclamation that the Gospels contained the “fundamental articles of faith” in effect denied the doctrinal importance of the Epistles. Locke responded with A Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity (1695). “I have as high a veneration for the epistles as you [Edwards] or any one can have.”³⁴ And Edwards’ charge was easily refutable by Locke’s frequent invocation of the Epistles in earlier writings – though, being anonymous, Locke could hardly refer his critics to them. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, the Epistles – including both Corinthians – figured in Locke’s responses to Edwards, Proast, and Edward Stillingfleet, the bishop of Worcester. A Paraphrase and Notes silenced any doubt on the matter when published posthumously in 1705–1707 under Locke’s name.

In the hermeneutic preface to Paraphrase and Notes,³⁵ Locke described “Contents,” quoted “Text” (namely, the King James Bible), and offered “Paraphrase” of five of the Epistles of St. Paul, including 1 Corinthians. His paraphrase of chapter 12 – verses 12, 14, 18, 19, 20 and 25 – captures the spirit of his reading.

With only slight license, one could (in Pascalian and Malebranchean terms) paraphrase Locke’s own paraphrase as proclaiming it the general will of God that members be fitted into the body by their peculiar gifts and abilities. The “body” in question – while analogized to the human one – was the church or, rather, any given church. When citing Locke’s paraphrase, Riley suggests that, in contrast to Pascal, Locke (“with characteristic sobriety and caution”) read 1 Corinthians 12 in “a more orthodox and cautious” way.³⁷If (debatably) fair in this context, any broader portrait of Locke as sober, cautious, or orthodox would not capture his controversial views about the Trinity or the divinity of Christ. Much less does it capture the polemical sting of his theological forensics against Proast and Edwards in the decade before Paraphrase and Notes. Locke, it is true, did not replace “church” with “body politic” in the manner of Pascal. However, it cannot be denied or avoided that Locke directly quoted and paraphrased the Corinthian Epistles, as Pascal did not, giving Pascal greater leeway.

A broader assessment of Locke’s thoughts on membership in a body would invoke bodies politic (made clearer below when discussing “the members of a Commonwealth … combined together into one coherent living Body”).³⁸ The earlier reference to a church as “a growing lasting societie” already hints in this direction. Moreover, Locke’s view of a church as a “free and voluntary society” was utterly political in the context of Proastian advocacy of uniformity and the use of force by magistrates to police faith and worship.³⁹ While it is true, then, that Locke did not expressly use the term “general will” when discoursing about membership in a church or body politic, it is not an unfair rendering of his political theology, in light of what we know he knew of Pascal, Bayle, and Malebranche.

Locke’s Ideas

Locke, yet, did in fact invoke the “general will” – in term and concept – when confronting Malebranche over “ideas.” And he did so before – setting the scene for – his encounters with Proast, Edwards, and general-will scriptural texts. It was John Norris, the premier acolyte of Malebranche and a countryman whom Locke had once befriended, that prompted the matter.⁴⁰Indeed, Norris published the first critique of An Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690) as an appendix to his Christian Blessedness (1690), under the title Cursory Reflections on a Book call’d, An Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690). Norris began by offering up “so rare a Curiosity as Mr. Lock’s book” and his own “Free Censure” of its “pretty Smiling sentences.” He then proceeded in forty-four pages to freely censure Locke’s “impugnation” of innate principles and of “Platonists” (with their alleged “Gibberish” about “the Soul of the World”). Norris’s principal criticism took aim at Locke’s account of “ideas” as mental perceptions whose empirical origins and natural history were to be found in the impressions of sensation. This made them a species of “Material Beings,” an inconceivable notion to Norris and other neo-Platonists. Norris insisted that, whereas Locke could not, “I can tell what an Idea is, viz. the Omniform Essence of God partially represented or exhibited, and how it comes to be united to my Mind.” “You know Sir,” he addressed Locke, “I account for the Mode of Human Understanding after a very different way, namely, by the Presentialness of the Divine λοηος or Ideal World to our Souls, wherein we see and perceive all things.”⁴¹ Behind these enigmatic words lay doctrines of a divinely ordained, law-governed universe and, in particular, of Vision in God. And behind these doctrines lay Nicolas Malebranche’s Recherche de la Vérité whose Latin translation Norris duly cited.⁴²

Recherche de la Vérité was a brilliant work of great complexity, at odds in most respects with An Essay concerning Human Understanding.⁴³ Locke allowed that it was the work of an “acute and ingenious author,” filled with “a great many very fine thoughts, judicious reasonings, and uncommon reflections.”⁴⁴ However, he clearly recognized the yawning gulf between Malebranche’s masterwork and his own on “the way of ideas.” That gulf was reinforced in correspondence, especially with William Molyneux.⁴⁵ Locke also refuted – or challenged to a standstill – both Malebranche and Norris. While he had taken notes as early as 1684–1685 from his first copy of Recherche (1676) and from Arnauld’s Des Vrayes et des Fausses Idées, it was Norris’s attack on the Essay in 1690 (and again in a second edition of 1692) that spurred him to respond in four separate manuscripts.⁴⁶ Locke’s pique was evident in them, especially “JL Answer to Mr. Norris Reflection [16]92” and “Some other Loose Thoughts” (Reference Locke1693), posthumously published as Remarks upon Some of Mr. Norris’s Books (Reference Locke and Desmaizeaux1720). Locke dismissed the Platonism in Norris’ Cursory Reflections and in Reason and Religion (1689) about ideas being literally “in God.” Malebranche, however, played a far larger part in Locke’s critique, consistent with the Oratorian’s fame across Europe. The longest and most important of the four manuscripts – “JL Of seeing all thing[s] in God 93” – was composed and paginated by Locke in Reference Locke1693. Locke seriously considered adding it as a full chapter to a subsequent edition of the Essay, but, in the end, decided against it for fear of needless controversy.⁴⁷However, he encouraged posthumous publication, and it came out, in 1706, as An Examination of P. Malebranche’s Opinion of Seeing All Things in God. In the manuscript and the Examination, Locke expressly addressed the “general will.”

Locke was, it appears, the first in England or in English to cite Malebranche on the “general will” when criticizing him and Norris in the (unpublished) manuscript of 1693.⁴⁸ Had he published it as a chapter of the Essay, this would surely have been recognized during his lifetime or soon thereafter. In any case, Locke did in fact use the term “general will” in assailing Malebranche before the English translations of Recherche by Thomas Taylor and Richard Sault, both in 1694.⁴⁹He also appears to have done so even before Norris did. Of course, it was Norris who brought the greatest attention to Malebranche’s doctrines in his own works – notably The Theory and Regulation of Love (1688), Reason and Religion (1689),⁵⁰Christian Blessedness (1690), and Cursory Reflections (1690). But the term “general will” was not used in these works, though the concept lay behind what Norris stated about love, vision in God, and a law-governed universe. In his later and most important work of 1701 and 1704 – The Theory of the Ideal or Intelligible World, to which he was already calling advance notice in Cursory Reflections – Norris would use the term when recycling his Malebranchean doctrines.⁵¹

The most objectionable features of Malebranche’s account of the general will – as regards Vision in God – came out in Locke’s “Summary of his Doctrine.” In the middle of section 47 of the 1693 manuscript (appended below) – which, after editing, became section 42 of the Examination – Locke quoted in translation the key sentences from the penultimate paragraph of Book 3, Part 2, Chapter 6 of Recherche de la Vérité.

Locke then pressed his objections: “This phrase [of] the union of our wills to the Ideas conteind in Gods immensity, seems to me a very strange one and what light it gives to his Doctrine I truly cannot finde.”⁵³ Being strange – whether in the sense of odd or novel – was not in and of itself objectionable since Locke called many doctrines “strange” – including a few of his own.⁵⁴ What was problematic, however, was the dogmatic assertion that human ideas – much less speculative opinions or articles of religion – depend in any significant way upon the will.⁵⁵In A Letter concerning Toleration, Locke had expressly argued that “to believe this or that to be true, does not depend upon our Will.”⁵⁶ Indeed, he claimed that he was so surprised to see Malebranche invoking “the will” in connection with “ideas” that he compared different editions of Recherche to ensure that some editorial error was not to blame. Similarly problematic was the lack of explanatory power in Malebranche’s doctrine: “this union of our wills to the ideas contained in God’s immensity, does not at all explain our seeing of them.” Our having ideas, via sight, on Malebranche’s or indeed any other account, “is brought about in a way we comprehend not.”⁵⁷

Locke’s own doctrine of ideas as perceptions emphasized empirical origins and natural history. Ideas, he argued, were produced by “the motion of some parts of our bodies” – whether “nerves or animal spirits” – after receiving the sensory impressions of sight. This doctrine was in no way undermined by Malebranche’s speculations, even granting that everything in the universe was due to the general “will of God.”⁵⁸ The options need only be weighed.

Locke concluded the section by confessing his “incapacity to comprehend” such subtle processes that God had produced by his will and laws. He would need, he said, to “know a great deal more of him [God] and myself.”⁶⁰ Locke’s theological humility, if a trifle feigned, was nonetheless the counterpart of an accusation against the hubris, impiety, and enthusiasm of Malebranche for claiming to know so much of God’s will. Molyneux certainly decried the “enthusiasm” he claimed to find in Malebranche – and this was an accusation soon echoed in English philosophical circles.⁶¹ Locke was even more pointed in his charges in this regard when coupling Norris with Malebranche as “Dictators in the Commonwealth of learning.”⁶² “I hope they will not deny God the privilege to give such a power of motion, if he pleases.” But, alas, these dictators “make God like themselves, or else they would not talk as they do.”⁶³

The precise difference between Locke and Malebranche – it is important to underscore – did not turn upon any concept of the general will as such, much less their shared view of God’s design of an orderly, law-governed universe.⁶⁴ Locke clearly granted, as quoted above (and in the appendix), that general “Laws establishd by the good pleasure of his will” governed the universe. This did not require a doctrine of “an irresistible, fatal necessity” – much less “the religion of Hobbes and Spinoza” – as Locke thought Norris implied.⁶⁵ For God created his universe to be populated with human beings with free will. Rather, the precise difference between Locke and Malebranche might be recast in terms reminiscent of first Timothy. It is God’s general will that all men see. However, some particular men might be born or become blind by means of natural processes or human accidents that are fully compatible with God’s design of a law-governed universe. But how or by what mechanism men see is not known as a matter of certainty, whether “ideas” are (with Malebranche) Platonic conceptions lodged in God or (with Locke) sensory perceptions of material beings created by God. Locke and Malebranche embraced competing “hypotheses” about these matters, as Locke termed them.⁶⁶ Not incidentally, Locke’s sophisticated reflections on “method” – consisting of balancing out the evidence for competing hypotheses⁶⁷ – was composed in just this context of his debate with Malebranche and Norris. Locke’s intervention in the debate over the general will – structured as it was by Malebranche’s doctrine of Vision in God – thus had as one of its very striking consequences Locke’s own reflections on the hypothetical method of scientific reason.

From Locke’s perspective, the debate over God’s general will subsumed the debate over human ideas, a debate in which he had the highest stakes. Long familiar with the works of theology and philosophy in which the “general will” figured prominently, Locke contributed to the debate when defending the “ideas” of his Essay concerning Human Understanding against Malebranche and Norris. Like Pascal, Locke gave matters a political twist when decrying “Dictators in the Commonwealth of learning” and underscoring that government was the will of God. However, he did not overtly politicize the “general will” as would Bayle, Montesquieu, and Rousseau in due course. However some of his most important theological reflections on will, law, and liberty had direct implications for the general will in its overtly political form. No less a figure than Jean-Jacques Rousseau fully appreciated this.

Rousseau’s Principles

From Rousseau’s perspective, “the general will … conveys everything he most wanted to say.”⁶⁸In concluding The General Will before Rousseau, Riley quotes this authoritative declaration by Judith Shklar. Endorsing it, he lists Locke as a voice that is “too resonant not to be heard” in Rousseau’s crowning concept.⁶⁹ Rousseau himself, it would appear, thought Locke’s voice was resonant in his own political theory. In concluding the sixth of the Letters Written from the Mountain (1764) – in reference to “natural and political right,” as well as “matters of Government” – he stated forthrightly: “Locke in particular treated them exactly in the same principles as I did.”⁷⁰ The questions naturally arise: what were these principles, and how were they related to the general will? Prior questions exist, too: how serious was Rousseau’s invocation of Locke, and what broader affinities between the two make Rousseau’s invocation credible?

From exile in 1764, Rousseau invoked Locke in these terms when defending The Social Contract and Émile.⁷¹ Allegedly destructive of religion and government, these instantly famous works had been condemned and publically burned in Paris and Geneva in 1762. Rousseau responded to warrants for his arrest or inquisition by fleeing France to Switzerland and, within a year, renouncing his Genevan citizenship. He also sent a letter to some Genevan reformers – whom he considered his supporters – to make a legal représentation on his behalf. The représentants did so, albeit cautiously.⁷² Then, Rousseau’s enemies among the Genevan authorities denounced Rousseau’s letter as “the tocsin of sedition.”⁷³ Rousseau and the représentants came under attack in Letters Written from the Country (1763) by Jean-Robert Tronchin, the public prosecutor in Geneva. Tronchin had advised the government to censor Rousseau’s works in the first place for, among other crimes, seeing “all forms of Government only as provisional forms, as Experiments that one can always change.”⁷⁴ “Can anyone,” Tronchin asked rhetorically, “close his eyes to the fact that in Émile or in The Social Contract, Religion and Government are delivered into the hands of their most audacious critic?”⁷⁵Rousseau answered in Letters Written from the Mountain (1764) – soon condemned, too – rebutting Tronchin, accusing the Genevan authorities of violating the republican principles of their constitution, and defending The Social Contract and Émile against critics and censors.

Given this charged and dangerous context, Christopher Kelly and Eve Grace – in their recent edition of the Letters – find a polemical defensiveness in Rousseau’s remark about Locke. But they see no shared principles at stake, only a similar boldness.

Kelly and Grace are right to underscore the polemical context of Rousseau’s defensiveness; and Rousseau did call attention to famous thinkers who treated politics, as he did, with “some boldness.” He explicitly named Sydney, Althusius, Locke, Montesquieu, and the Abbé de St. Pierre.⁷⁷ However, he then invoked Locke a second time – “in particular” – for their sameness of principle, not manner of treatment. In that grave context, moreover, Locke was not an inappropriate figure with whom Rousseau might well have identified his principles. Locke, too, had been attacked for allegedly undermining religion and government, as in the controversies with Proast and Edwards. And there were similar controversies surrounding the Two Treatises of Government, as well. There is good reason to believe, then, that Rousseau meant what he said about sharing the “same principles” with Locke.

Rousseau’s invocation of Locke was not limited to the sixth Letter. Other gestures suggest Rousseau’s intellectual affinities with Locke. Locke was one of only three philosophers – with Plato and Malebranche – in whose works Rousseau found “the most profound metaphysics.”⁷⁸ The “Essay of Locke” was named in The Confessions (written in 1769) as a select “book of philosophy” – alongside “the Port Royal Logic” and unnamed texts by “Malebranche, Leibniz, Descartes, and so on” – with which Rousseau “began” his self-education.⁷⁹ Agreement with Locke on a project of philosophy also occurred earlier in Rousseau’s development, to judge by a 1739 ditty:

The recurring figure of Malebranche is noteworthy, especially for “the laws of bodies and thoughts.” However, it is “with Locke” – not Malebranche – that Rousseau undertook a natural history of ideas, implying empirical origins and sense impressions. Thus Rousseau, by his own admission, placed himself in the epistemological company of his friend, the ideologue Abbé de Condillac, who translated and popularized Locke’s Essay.⁸¹ Rousseau also went on to include a sensationalist psychology in the “creed” of the Savoyard priest in Émile. This invites speculation that, had he known for sure,⁸² Rousseau would have sided with Locke against Malebranche about the manner in which God’s general will caused the transmission of human “ideas.” Rousseau, though, did not endorse Condillac’s later materialism or the speculation that God created thinking matter – “whatever Locke may say.”⁸³

Rousseau displayed other affinities and debts to “the wise Locke.”⁸⁴ In the draft of Discourse on Political Economy, he followed Locke’s view on “fundamental law,” bidding his readers to “see Locke” about the obligation “by a general will” that all citizens contribute to the public weal.⁸⁵In Émile, he repeatedly singled out Locke for praise (or blame) regarding Some Thoughts concerning Education. “Better reasons and more sensible rules cannot be found than those in Locke’s book.”⁸⁶ Sensible rules were crucial to Rousseau because, as Riley argues, a proper regimen of education must nourish and instruct the general will of a sovereign citizenry. “The Creed of the Savoyard Priest,” moreover, echoed Locke’s theological reflections and ecclesiastical criticisms, by then well known. Like Locke’s, Rousseau’s theology embraced reasonableness, free will, and doctrinal simplicity. Both entail overt denials of original sin, atheism, and papal authority, while displaying a guarded skepticism about miracles, the Trinity, and the divinity of Christ. The minimal core of theocentric belief necessary for founding and maintaining a legitimate civic order in The Social Contract bore Locke’s traces, as well. Indeed, “here Rousseau’s debt to John Locke’s Letter concerning Toleration is most striking.”⁸⁷ This included, a policy of toleration in the form of its paradoxical complement – not tolerating intolerance. The “horrible doctrine” of intolerance was condemned as “contrary to good morals” in Émile.⁸⁸ In The Social Contract intolerance was the one and only “negative dogma” of civil religion, for “wherever theological intolerance is allowed, it is impossible for it not to have some civil effect; and as soon as it does, the Sovereign is no longer the Sovereign.”⁸⁹

Toleration is one of two principles that Christopher Brooke has identified when offering the best contemporary treatment of Rousseau’s invocation of Locke in the sixth of the Letters Written from the Mountain. Regarding toleration, Brooke argues: “Rousseau’s central conclusions about religion and politics are in fact extremely Lockean.”⁹⁰ The only reason for hesitating to identify toleration as one of the very “same principles” Rousseau claimed to share with Locke, on that fraught occasion, was that toleration was not at issue in the charges against Rousseau emanating out of Geneva or Paris; and the topic scarcely shows up in the Letters when Rousseau defended himself against those charges.⁹¹ While toleration genuinely bridges the political theories of Locke and Rousseau, it seems that the “same principles” confessed in the sixth letter lie elsewhere, closer to the charges that Rousseau’s “principles [were] destructive of all Governments.”⁹² The second of the two principles that Brooke identifies – the distinction between sovereignty and government – leads to the core of the matter, once reconstructed to pay particular attention to law, liberty, and the (general) will.

When summarizing the key doctrines of The Social Contract in the sixth of the Letters, Rousseau reiterates that the state or body politic in action was “sacred and inviolable.”⁹³ Sovereignty was most sacredly in action when the citizenry made fundamental law. Law itself was “a public and solemn declaration of the general will, on an object of common interest.”⁹⁴ Thus, Émile’s tutor lectured, “the essence of sovereignty consist[s] in the general will.”⁹⁵ Given the mutually constitutive character of citizen and sovereign, the general will could be characterized as either the will of a citizen to realize the public good in making law or the will of the sovereign in decreeing law for the public good. Conceptually, these were complementary locutions that Rousseau deployed to make his signature point about lawmaking and the general will. When an individual followed the law, he was a “subject,” in Rousseau’s sense. He was also, to put it differently, following “the supreme direction of the general will.”⁹⁶ Either way, the subject was following the law that he helped make as a citizen, as a member of the sovereign body. In obeying the law, therefore, he obeyed himself. In this, he remained free, at liberty.⁹⁷ Indeed, according to the ninth of the Letters, “no liberty is possible except in the observation of the Laws or the general will.”⁹⁸ He drove home the point with some fury against Tronchin in the sixth, shortly before invoking Locke:

Being “governed” or governing, then, was not strictly a matter of sovereignty.

“The constitution of the State and that of the Government are two very distinct things,” Rousseau insisted.¹⁰⁰ In identical formulations in The Social Contract and Letter number six, he asked and answered the question:

Government was but the executive power, constrained to apply general laws (dictated by the general will) to particular objects or actions. Ideally, it “always executes the Law and it never executes anything but the Law.” Alas, herein lurks trouble because the government was “a body itself” with “its own will”; and the government’s will and the general will “sometimes agree with and sometimes combat each other.” Worse yet:

The provocative terminology of “slaves,” “masters” and “destruction” channeled the republican and agonistic lexicon of The Social Contract.¹⁰³ This is strikingly evident in Book III, Chapters 10 and 11: “Of the Abuse of Government and of Its Tendency to Degenerate” and “The Death of the Body Politic.” There, Rousseau put the onus on government, almost uniquely, when explaining the decline of the active sovereignty of the people. “Just as the particular will incessantly acts against the general will, so the Government makes a constant effort against Sovereignty.” It is the Government that “usurps the sovereign power.” It becomes “no longer anything to the rest of the People but its master and tyrant.” And “tyrant and usurper are two perfectly synonymous words.”¹⁰⁴

Given such provocation, Rousseau’s readers – whether persecuting magistrates or radical republicans – had good reason to doubt the innocence of his plea in the sixth of the Letters that “far from destroying all Governments, I have established all of them.”¹⁰⁵But they had no good reason to doubt the sincerity of his concluding invocation of Locke. For Locke like Rousseau indeed held the “same principles” in these matters, not only about the tyrannical tendencies of government to usurp supreme power, but the salvific vision of a free citizenry under law.

The last sentence of Locke’s Two Treatises of Government proclaimed that “the People have a Right to act as Supreme” – even to “continue the legislative in themselves” – on those revolutionary occasions in which power had been “forfeited” by “the Miscarriages of those in Authority.”¹⁰⁶ This brought to a close Locke’s blistering critique of tyranny, usurpation, and “slavery under Arbitrary Power.”¹⁰⁷ His critique, in turn, justified “an appeal to heaven” – namely, armed resistance to governments that had violated their trust in failing to rule by law.¹⁰⁸ The origin of Two Treatises in English crises of the early 1680s did not dampen the universal appeal of such language of critique and resistance, to judge by later revolutionaries – especially in France – who summoned Locke’s stirring words for their own causes.¹⁰⁹

The radical conclusions that Locke reached were based on some fundamental principles. The most important and theoretically fecund of these, implicit above, was precisely the conceptual distinction between sovereignty and government. However, terminologically, the first of the Two Treatises was such a sustained onslaught against “absolute sovereignty” that, in the second, Locke used the term “sovereignty” sparingly, even when shorn of “absolute.” In its place, he used “supreme Power,” which, in turn, he connected to law, distinguished from the executive, and bottomed on the consent of the people.¹¹⁰ Moreover, “this Legislative is not only the supream power of the Commonwealth, but sacred and unalterable in the hands where the Community have once placed it.”¹¹¹ Yet, the people could alter this “sacred” power in extremis, for “the Community perpetually retains a Supream Power of saving themselves.”¹¹² Political salvation in and through (making or changing) the law was not a mere theoretical possibility for Locke.¹¹³ “The People of England” had in fact exerted their supreme power in 1689 when, altering the legislative power, they “saved the Nation when it was on the very brink of Slavery and Ruine.”¹¹⁴

Law – to articulate these matters differently – was a declaration of “the Will of Society,”¹¹⁵ just as natural law was a declaration of the will of God.¹¹⁶ Through the legislative power – to which individual citizens must have given their free consent – a larger political ontology centered on the will emerged in Locke’s theory.

Just as any body wished its own good,¹¹⁸ the body politic wished the public good through its laws. “The public good is the rule and measure of all law-making,” declared Locke in A Letter concerning Toleration. “If a thing be not useful to the commonwealth … it may not presently be established by law.”¹¹⁹ The general point – as “public good,” “common good,” “good of the whole,” or “good of the people” – was repeatedly made in Two Treatises.¹²⁰Along with castigating Sir Robert Filmer for the “Tumult, Sedition, and Rebellion” that the doctrine of absolute sovereignty had unleashed, this was the very note on which Locke began the second of the Treatises. “Political power” was a “Right of Making Laws” in a commonwealth “only for the Publick Good.”¹²¹

Locke went further to connect law with liberty – indeed, liberty under law – as a theological principle loaded with political implication. “God [gave] Man … a freedom of Will, and liberty of Acting … within the bounds of that Law he is under.”¹²² The concept of law here was expansive, covering natural and civil law. In an utterly remarkable passage, Locke forged a unity between several concepts and principles (shared later by Rousseau): law, liberty, public good, free will, consent, property, and nondomination (as the freedom from the arbitrary will of others). The passage embedded the striking phrase: “where there is no Law, there is no Freedom.”

In glossing this passage, Peter Laslett made the dramatic connection: “Locke is much closer here than was once recognized to Rousseau’s position that men can be compelled to be free, compelled by the law of the legislative which they have consented to set up.”¹²⁴ If Locke would have winced at Rousseau’s articulation of the verbal paradox of “being forced to be free,” he would nonetheless have understood the point – since he himself was making it – that citizen-members of the body politic are free – and freely follow their own will – when they obey the laws that are declared by the will of Society to which they have given their consent. This is surely one of the “same principles” – connected to the others in the above paragraphs – to which Rousseau was referring when he justifiably called Locke to his defense.

Conclusion

John Locke was not, as Rousseau was, a theorist of the general will. In his political and theological writings, there was neither sustained use of the requisite terminology nor systematic exposition of the concept’s reach and range. He was certainly no Rousseauian avant la lettre. Too many differences separated them. To take one example, Locke agreed that the will of society was sacred and inviolable, but he could not have abided Rousseau’s claim that sovereignty (or the general will) was “absolute.” His critique of “absolute sovereignty” precluded such a pairing of terms.¹²⁵ To take another, he would surely have rejected the portrait of all Christianity in Rousseau’s discussion of civil religion.¹²⁶ But some of their most cherished principles were nonetheless “the same,” as Rousseau confessed. In so doing, from his perspective, Rousseau inducted Locke into the conceptual history of the general will. From Locke’s perspective, the induction would not have been unwarrantedly proleptic, either, as would be his canonization as bourgeois, liberal, or libertarian. His criticism of Malebranche and Norris had occasioned his use of “general will” while being familiar with Arnauld, Pascal, Bayle, and contests over Scripture.

The conceptual history of the general will is richer for the incorporation of Locke into it, just as Locke is more richly understood in connection with Rousseau, Malebranche, and the general-will theologians. We understand these thinkers better, for understanding them together; and we get a fuller picture of the range of sources, insights, and debates on a defining concept of modern political thought.

1. Spinoza’s “One Mind” or General Will

Although Spinoza is never cited as part of the general will tradition, he employs a phrase that evokes the concept: the “common mind” (veluti mente). For Spinoza, citizens bound together in a state “are all guided, as it were, by one mind.”¹⁵ This term – rendered as “one mind,” “union of minds,” or “harmony of minds” – appears several times in Spinoza’s treatment of political foundations¹⁶ and is clearly central to his conception of the state. Yet his various employments of it serve as much to confuse as enlighten his readers. I identify three contexts in which he describes a community as governed by a “common mind.” Each context draws on different faculties to achieve this harmony, and each is burdened by its own particular flaws. Nevertheless, as society evolves from its lowest to highest forms, it achieves more perfectly this preservation, since “the best method of ensuring that one preserves oneself as far as possible is to live in the way that reason prescribes.”¹⁷

2. Does Spinoza Have a General Will?

Before defending Spinoza’s place in the narrative of the general will, it is important to sketch a working definition, since Spinoza never actually employs the term himself. For all the historical work done on the general will, there is scarcely a general definition of the general will. But much can be derived from the term itself. Most obviously, it must be both willed and general. First, anything resembling a general will presumably must be willed in order to be operative. This is true for the early Christian proponents of the general will, such as Arnauld, who emphasizes God’s will in saving souls.⁷⁶ Similarly, Malebranche and Leibniz also emphasize God’s will in the design of the laws of nature.⁷⁷ And obviously, Rousseau’s general will places crucial emphasis on the will.⁷⁸

Second, a general will must also be general. It can be general in two respects: in its derivation and application. General derivation stems from the secularized political accounts starting in the mid-eighteenth century. To be derived generally means that the will comes from the general body of the people. Montesquieu’s early socialization of the general will reflects this, when he asks, “Do you want to know whether the desires of each are legitimate in these things? Examine the desires of all.”⁷⁹ More famously, Rousseau derives his general will by removing the “plusses” and “minuses” from the will of all that cancel one another out.⁸⁰

Perhaps more significant than general derivation is general application, a feature stressed in almost all accounts of the general will. The general will applies to all. This is why the general will is commonly contrasted with a particular will, such as in Diderot and Rousseau. As Riley’s Malebranche describes the laws of God, “God … does not act by volontés particulières, by lawless ad hoc volitions.”⁸¹ God’s laws apply to all equally. This is also true in Diderot’s socialized general will, which emphasizes the “general and common interest” (20). Likewise, Rousseau associates the general will exclusively with the “common interest” (SC, 60 [III: 371]). Riley emphasizes this element of Rousseau’s generality:

Finally, there is a less formal – but commonly occurring – feature of most general will theories.

General-will theorists tend to emphasize its implementation through quasi-Christian universal love, such as in Pascal, Malebranche, Leibniz, and especially Rousseau. For example, Rousseau’s repeated condemnations of self-love can be understood as reflecting his preference for a fraternal love embodied in the general will. This is, to be sure, related to the generality of the general will. But it is something more at the same time. Rousseau wants citizens to care for others in the same way that they naturally care for themselves. As this love is extended, the general will itself is more enabled.

To summarize, the general will commonly contains four elements. First, it must issue from the will of some agent or agents – God in the theological tradition and the people in the political tradition. Second, in the political tradition, it is general in derivation insofar as it derives from the people in some sense. Third, the general will applies to all equally. It is distinct from both particular providence in the theological tradition and bills of attainder and their counterparts in the political tradition. Finally, the will tends to be implemented through a fraternal love among citizens. The more they love one another, the more effective the general will.

To be sure, Spinoza does not employ the term “general will,” but even Riley associates the notion of “one will” with the general will in pointing out Pascal’s reworking of 1 Corinthians 12 as, “to make the members happy, they must have one will and submit it to the body.”⁸³ So precise nomenclature is not a prerequisite for being part of the tradition. Several scholars have intimated that Spinoza employs a variant of the general will, but without spelling out in detail the reasons for believing this.⁸⁴ In order to make this association, it is important to analyze Spinoza’s common mind from the perspective of the definition just offered. First, is it issued by a “will”? The text provides good reason to believe that this is the case: “since the body of the state must be guided as if by a single mind (and consequently the will of the commonwealth must be regarded as the will of all), what the commonwealth decides to be just and good must be held to be so decided by every citizen.”⁸⁵ The “common mind,” like the general will, is apparently “willed” by the people, if only in a very different respect from others in the tradition. This passage also suggests that the common mind satisfies the second criterion of the general will – that it be derived from the general body of the people. Spinoza’s enthusiasm for democracy confirms this, insofar as he rejects the exercise of power by the “appetite of the individual” in favor of “the power and will of all together.”⁸⁶ He also insists that the social contract itself is contingent on an act resembling the will: “the fact that men give up, or are compelled to give up, their natural right and bind themselves to live under fixed rules, depends on human will.”⁸⁷ To be sure, however, this ‘will’ is unlike that found elsewhere in the tradition, as it does not exist as faculty outside of nature. By “will” Spinoza means individuals acting as part of nature. I explore this unconventional conception of the will below.

Third, do the dictates of the common mind apply to all equally? The answer appears to be “yes” in two respects – as a matter of compulsion and as a principle. Spinoza makes it clear that all must follow the common mind: “all must obey it [the sovereign will emanating from the common mind] in all matters.”⁸⁸ He emphasizes, “it is our duty to carry out all the orders of the sovereign power without exception.”⁸⁹ But just as importantly, he urges that the laws ought to concern the “welfare of the whole people” rather than a subset therein.⁹⁰ This is sufficiently important that it marks his definition of a free person, as compared with the slave. Where the government rules by a particular will, subjects are “slaves.” Where the government rules for all, they are free subjects: “A slave is one who has to obey his master’s commands which look only to the interests of him who commands … a subject is one who, by command of the sovereign power, acts for the common good, and therefore his own good also.”⁹¹

That the common mind represents a kind of general will is perhaps most vividly shown in the Ethics:

For Spinoza, the striving for continued existence – and especially a rational one – is contingent upon precisely the kind of generality articulated by the most noted thinkers in the general-will tradition. Rousseau’s general will, for example, insists that citizens reject their private wills in favor of what is good for the entire community. Indeed, this is the task confronting his lawgiver, who must change human nature from its natural selfishness to becoming part of a “larger whole” that seeks the good of all.⁹³ Likewise, Kant’s Kingdom of Ends – itself a manifestation of the general will⁹⁴ – insists on treating the interests of others as of equal value to one’s own. Spinoza’s common mind fits comfortably in this tradition, insofar as citizens should “seek nothing for themselves that they would not desire for the rest of mankind.”⁹⁵

These considerations appear to add up to a general will, something transcending mere appeals to the “common good” typical throughout much of Western political thought. Aristotle, after all, had defined a monarchy as the rule of a single individual for the common good, and scarcely anyone would suggest that this amounts to a formulation of the general will. For much of the “common good” tradition outside of the general will, it is often adequate that the good one seeks be reached accidentally, rather than being specifically willed. But Spinoza’s modern emphasis on the will, combined with his specific prescriptions concerning its generality, makes his placement in this tradition perfectly reasonable.

3. Spinoza in the General-Will Tradition

From a historical perspective, two things about Spinoza’s treatment of the “one mind” stand out. One concerns his place in the general-will tradition; the second addresses his place against it. First, his explicit political applications of the general will challenges the commonly-received chronology of its development. Patrick Riley has argued that the general will was largely a theological concept in Pascal, Arnauld, Malebranche, and Leibniz. It was not until Montesquieu, on this narrative, that the general will became political. But if we are to take Spinoza seriously as a theorist of the general will, then this chronology must be re-ordered. It is worth recounting Riley’s narrative in order to appreciate Spinoza’s importance. Riley locates the general will’s first appearance in the Western tradition in Antoine Arnauld’s Première Apologie pour M. Jansenius in 1644, which developed the Apostle Paul’s assertion that “God wills that all men be saved.”⁹⁶ Arnauld derived no political implications from the concept, instead focusing on the question of the extent of divine salvation. The next to grapple with the general will on Riley’s account is Pascal, who writes about the volonté générale with “political overtones” in 1656 – but only as it applies to God’s justice, not that dispensed by the state.⁹⁷The most substantial early modern account of the general will, according to Riley, was Nicolas Malebranche’s in his Treatise on Nature and Grace of 1680. As the title suggests, Malebranche locates a general will in both the realms of grace and nature. His innovation was to apply the general will to God’s dealings with the natural world. In particular, Malebranche reasoned that God’s will was manifested in nature via general law – what others would call general providence. But despite this important extension of the concept, the general will is still very much in Malebranche the providence of God and God alone.It is not until Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws in 1748 that the general will came into its own as the thoroughly political concept that would ultimately work its way into Diderot, Rousseau, Kant, Fichte, and Hegel. If we are to read Spinoza as operating with what is functionally a general will, however, this places him quite early in the tradition, between Pascal and Malebranche, and more than seventy years ahead of Montesquieu’s political application. In other words, a careful examination of Spinoza demands a place for his work as the first in the general-will tradition to understand and employ the notion in an explicitly political fashion.

4. Spinoza against the General-Will Tradition

The second notable fact about Spinoza in the general-will tradition is that his approach shares almost nothing of the metaphysical foundations presupposed by his contemporaries and immediate successors. The philosophers mentioned above are all metaphysical Platonists insofar as they embrace the existence of immaterial substance. Most significant in this regard are Malebranche, Leibniz, and Montesquieu, who are all explicit in their affinity for Platonism and antipathy for naturalism. As Steven Nadler has written, ‘‘Malebranche … simply sees himself as a traditionalist on the matter of ideas, upholding the original (i.e., Platonic) philosophic understanding of the term.”⁹⁸ Similarly, Leibniz embraces a metaphysical idea of justice as one of the “necessary and eternal truths,”⁹⁹ while condemning the legal positivism of Hobbes as being Thrasymachian, such that “treason, assassinations, poisonings, torture of the innocent, all will be just, if they succeed.”¹⁰⁰ And finally, even the empirically-minded Montesquieu embraces justice as an idea, while condemning the argument that justice can be fashioned from a purely naturalist metaphysics¹⁰¹ and mocking Spinoza for eliminating the ontological differences between human beings and animals.¹⁰²For each, Platonic ideas – or something closely resembling them – are essential for the normativity that is central to their politics. It is in appealing to a higher metaphysical standard of justice that each scorns legal positivism and its associated failures.

Beyond this, not only is the early general-will tradition dominated by metaphysical Platonists – they are also Christians, framing the general will in explicitly Christian terms. The general will emerges amongst devout Christians in the context of grappling with divine salvation – that is, whether or not God wills generally that all souls should be saved. So one must ask what role a Jewish heretic might play in this tradition.

So in acknowledging Spinoza as an expositor of the general will, one must also concede that he is singular within this tradition. Spinoza’s naturalism puts him at odds with every other figure to write on the general will through Montesquieu. And if he is successful in constructing a general will on these foundations, he represents a stark and radical alternative to the tradition established by Pascal and Malebranche.

To gain a greater appreciation of Spinoza’s unique approach to the general will, it is instructive to compare him with Rousseau, who is the inheritor of the Malebranchian tradition. Rousseau does not disguise his distaste for Spinoza, warning in the First Discourse against the “dangerous reveries of … Hobbes and Spinoza.”¹⁰³ And it is easy enough to see why – Spinoza laid the metaphysical foundations for the philosophes, Rousseau’s fundamental antagonists and philosophic opponents. Nevertheless, there are many elements shared by Spinoza and Rousseau. At least two scholars have noted some resemblance of this “one mind” to Rousseau’s “general will.” Walter Eckstein observed: “There is undoubtedly a certain affinity between Spinoza’s ‘one mind’ [mens una] and Rousseau’s ‘common will,’”¹⁰⁴and Steven Smith has more recently noted that Spinoza’s one mind “sounds almost like a proof-text for Rousseau’s theory of the general will.”¹⁰⁵ Indeed, Eckstein has gone so far as to suggest that Spinoza was “one of the main sources of Rousseau’s political philosophy.”¹⁰⁶ While I think there is insufficient evidence for a claim this strong, it is also clear that there is some undeniable affinity.

One of the most striking similarities between Spinoza and Rousseau is their shared appeal to harmony. As already discussed, Spinoza believes harmony essential to any enduring and thriving state – and that harmony can only be achieved by fostering broad ties of friendship among citizens. If anything, Rousseau pushes this element of Spinoza’s thought even further. Fraternity plays a crucial role in establishing and securing his general will – and in ways that parallel and extend the principle established by Spinoza. He introduces several mechanisms to foster the fraternal bonds that make the general will possible. These include public festivals,¹⁰⁷ education,¹⁰⁸ and obviating vast disparities in wealth.¹⁰⁹Rousseau is particularly explicit in the Political Economy, suggesting that citizens must be taught a love of homeland with the result that “every man is virtuous when his particular will conforms in all things to the general will, and we readily want [or will] what the people we love want [or will].”¹¹⁰

Perhaps the greatest apparent similarity in this regard is their shared appeal to a public or civil religion. Spinoza’s nonsectarian “universal faith” of the Theological-Political Treatise bears more than a striking resemblance to Rousseau’s “civil religion” in the Social Contract. The similarity between these two constructs has much to do with how each serves his respective conceptions of the general will. The very nonsectarian nature of the “universal faith” asks citizens to set aside their particular or private interests and squabbles. It has been noted that the Dutch of Spinoza’s period were consumed with political divisions stemming from religious differences.¹¹¹ The TTP argues that those divisions stem primarily from flawed reasoning and that the only principles that can be derived from a careful and truthful reading of Scripture are the principles of his “universal faith.” This “universal faith” serves the general will in two respects. First, it aims to eliminate particularity stemming from unreasoned and biased readings of Scripture. But more ambitiously, it functions fundamentally to promote justice and charity.¹¹² These virtues, above all, promote harmony and sociability – themselves consistent with the common mind. Indeed, Spinoza’s hope is that, insofar as citizens can practice the precepts of the “universal faith,” citizens will embrace the kind of universalized love that both characterizes his state of love and facilitates the advancement toward adequate knowledge in its political context.

Rousseau’s “civil religion” is likewise nonsectarian, emphasizing unity over particularity and division. It stresses four fundamental tenets: (1) a belief in a powerful, intelligent, and beneficent deity; (2) a belief in divine justice; (3) a belief in the sanctity of the social contract and the laws; and (4) a rejection of intolerance. These doctrines bear much resemblance to specific elements of Spinoza’s “universal faith,” which likewise posits the existence of a powerful God dispensing divine justice.¹¹³ But beyond this, they share with Spinoza a desire to emphasize the sociability demanded by the general will. Rousseau emphasizes that this religion should make the individual “love his duties.”¹¹⁴ This goes beyond the minimal Hobbesian desire that citizens should perform their duties out of fear. Rousseau’s desire that citizens “love” their duties suggests, in fact, a love of one’s fellow citizens. And it is on the basis of this broad affection that he hopes to foster a richly realized general will.

The appeal to a nonsectarian religion also answers the question about what role a Jewish heretic might play in a tradition dominated by Christian Platonists. Spinoza (and later Rousseau) largely reverses the relationship of religion and politics in the general-will tradition. Whereas for the early-modern Christian Platonists, politics was at the service of religion, for Spinoza religion is now at the service of politics. While it is unclear that Rousseau learned from reading Spinoza, he follows in precisely the same spirit. This is a crucial development in the secularization of the general will that Riley attributes to Montesquieu. The story of the general will becomes much richer, however, once Spinoza is placed in the chronology, since he is far more engaged with the religious question in the realization of the general will than is Montesquieu. Spinoza never suggests dispensing with religion or even setting it off to the side while working out the thorny issues of politics. Rather, it is an essential tool in engendering the common mind. But in the end, it is a tool. And this reversal of the roles of religion and politics might have only been brought about by a non-Christian thinker, such as a Jewish heretic (in Spinoza’s case) or a strident Deist (in Rousseau’s). At the same time, however, even as Spinoza abandons the Christian Platonic tradition in this respect, he is faithful to it in another. This is because the values Spinoza advocates in his states of love and reason (e.g., the rejection of hatred, the embracing of fraternal love and justice) are largely drawn from this very tradition.

A second convergence is their shared assumption that forging a social contract requires appealing to the participants’ interests. That is to say, they accept that prior to the social contract individuals are governed by a narrow conception of self-interest.¹¹⁵ For Spinoza, reason may be scarce, but desires are not. So natural men are largely driven by a desire to “live and preserve themselves as far as in them lies, namely, by the urging of appetite alone.” It is largely this “desire to live in safety from fear, as far as possible”¹¹⁶ that brings natural people together into a social contract. It is not until after this contract is forged that Spinoza hopes to foster reason. Likewise, Rousseau acknowledges in his Geneva Manuscript that the initial social contract must appeal to the baser interests of “independent man”: “‘It is not a matter of teaching me what justice is; it is a matter of showing me what interest I have in being just.’”¹¹⁷

This element of willing an interest, however, points to a crucial difference between the two. Rousseau’s general will is indeed premised on a robust conception of a free will, asserted and defended repeatedly throughout his works, including the Émile, the Moral Letters, and the Second Discourse.¹¹⁸ Arguing against the naturalists of his own milieu – the philosophes – Rousseau claims that the very foundations of morality and justice presume a free choice of the will. He insists on this most directly in his Letter to Franquières, where he argues that without this metaphysical freedom “there are consequently neither virtue nor vices, neither merit nor demerit, nor morality in human conduct.”¹¹⁹ Without this important metaphysical presupposition, there can be no judging of actions as good or bad. This presupposition of a free will is common among the Continental Platonists Rousseau had absorbed from his youth. And there can be little doubt that he inherits this robust metaphysical conception of the will from his Platonic predecessors, such as Malebranche, Leibniz, Lamy, and others.¹²⁰

Spinoza, by contrast, offers a very different account of the will. He repeatedly denies free will, consistent with his naturalism. “Men are,” he explains, “deceived in thinking themselves free, a belief that consists only in this, that they are conscious of their actions and ignorant of the causes by which they are determined.”¹²¹ He repeats a few pages later, “In the mind there is no absolute, or free, will [libera voluntas].”¹²² This stems directly from his naturalism, which rules out scientifically inexplicable behavior, such as postulated by Malebranche or Rousseau. As all phenomena are capable of lawful characterization, so too with human behavior. Human beings are just as natural as apples, oceans, or planets. Freedom in Rousseau’s sense is inconsistent with this naturalism and lawful account of all phenomena.

This striking difference between Spinoza and the bulk of the general-will tradition seemingly poses an insurmountable barrier to his inclusion in that tradition. After all, how can one speak of a “general will” without a will? But Spinoza often does speak of freedom. His assertions of human freedom occur repeatedly in Books IV and V of the Ethics. Those susceptible to the positive emotions of humility and repentance, for example, are on the path to “becom[ing] free.”¹²³ One capable of living according to reason Spinoza calls “a free man.”¹²⁴

To be sure, he clearly indicates that free persons are determined by their own reason. In this way, freedom correlates with knowledge. The more knowledge one acquires about the operations of one’s mind and the world, the greater degree of freedom one has. Spinoza argues that the more knowledge one has of one’s own passions, the greater freedom one possesses: “the more an emotion is known to us, the more it is within our control.”¹²⁵ Free individuals understand the origins of hate and indignation, and with this knowledge can avoid them. For this reason, Spinoza’s free man bears some resemblance to the Stoics in his ability to overcome the bondage of the emotions. So one important sense of freedom for Spinoza concerns the way in which one handles the effects of external stimuli on the emotions.¹²⁶

But it is fair to question whether Spinoza’s conception of freedom is sufficiently robust to support something like a general will in Rousseau’s sense. For Rousseau, in order for the contract not to be “an empty formula” it must be understood as an agreement to “obey the general will”;¹²⁷ and one of its most important elements is the very act of willing. As Rousseau declares, the social contract is “the most voluntary act in the world.”¹²⁸

Whether or not Spinoza’s philosophy makes room for this kind of volition depends on how one reads him. Many argue¹²⁹ that his determinism renders his subsequent appeals to freedom incoherent. Others¹³⁰ have argued, to the contrary, that Spinoza’s determinism is not incompatible with at least a kind of freedom. They argue that Spinoza’s assertions of determinism and freedom are reconcilable by reading him as a compatibilist, whereby “rational agency and explanation in terms of causes need not be and are not in conflict with one another.”¹³¹ The compatibilist holds that freedom and determinism are not mutually exclusive. Although everything has a cause, the rational mind can serve as one of those causes. As Steven Smith argues, “To recognize that desires and beliefs have a causal context is not to say that we do not choose them, but that our choices form part of a set of background circumstances that make them intelligible.”¹³²

On Spinoza’s account, higher levels of cognition regarding the natural realm of cause and effect afford greater degrees of freedom. Consider the example of depression. Depression at one time was considered either a moral flaw or a helpless condition. But the more one understands about its natural causes, the more enabled one is to act according to one’s own rational faculties rather than simply reacting to the various external forces. By subjecting one’s condition to rational scrutiny, one is capable of introducing new causal factors affecting mood, such as exercise, diet, exposure to sunlight, and even various chemicals. So although subjects are still subject to various natural forces and hence determined in the relevant Spinozistic sense, greater understanding affords the ability to inject new forces capable of improving one’s condition. This is the kind of freedom Spinoza describes and advocates.

The compatibilist interpretation is certainly the only reading that renders Spinoza coherent; if he were an incompatibilist, his simultaneous denials of free will and assertions of freedom would represent a contradiction that would be too obvious for him to overlook in the course of developing his philosophy over a period of decades. So I proceed here on the premise that Spinoza is a compatibilist.

To be sure, Spinoza repeatedly reminds his readers that even this compatibilist conception of freedom is only rarely attained, even as it remains a worthy and profoundly rational goal of pursuing. He never tires of repeating that “it is by no means the case that all men can be readily induced to be guided by reason.”¹³³ But this phrasing itself is provocative. He does not suggest that every moment of everyone’s life is dominated by the passions. Rather, he leaves room for moments of reason, where one can properly gauge one’s true interest. It stands to reason that the very formation of the state and sovereign is one such moment. Spinoza suggests this in his formulation of the social contract: “they had to bind themselves by the most stringent pledges to be guided in all matters only by the dictates of reason.”¹³⁴ In other words, the transition from the state of nature to political society is one of those rare rational moments when individuals see their alternatives clearly: either live in a lawful society or die. This is far from the kind of complex reasoning process that Spinoza envisions for his free subjects in Book V of the Ethics. But it is also far from a trivial exercise of freedom. Choosing to live in a political society is, simply put, the most rational act in the state of nature. So to choose political society over anarchy is very much a free act in Spinoza’s sense. It is “free” specifically in the sense that the agent / soon-to-be citizen introduces the state as another causal mechanism that brings about the rational end of self-preservation. The state will subsequently compel precisely the ends that the agent most desires through laws and sanctions. In this regard, we can take Spinoza at face value when he insists that “the fact that men give up, or are compelled to give up, their natural right and bind themselves to live under fixed rules, depends on human will.”¹³⁵ This is not to say that there is such a thing as “the will” in anything like a metaphysical sense, as postulated by Descartes, Rousseau, or Kant. But “human will” for Spinoza here amounts to a rational act.

Stuart Hampshire helpfully clarifies what is entailed in Spinoza’s denial of free will, and what remains in its absence. According to Hampshire, Spinoza did not “deny that we are in fact often conscious of a state which we describe as ‘choosing between alternatives’ or ‘deciding by an act of will what to do what we do not want to do.’ … His contention is only that, in giving a coherent, rational account of human actions in terms of their causes, ‘will’ and ‘choice,’ as psychological phenomena, have no special place.”¹³⁶ For Spinoza, this ‘choice’ is made by a free individual insofar as that agent has acquired adequate knowledge of all relevant causal factors and acted in accordance with that knowledge. Consider the following example.¹³⁷ A heroin addict – like all individuals – seeks self-preservation. But while in the grips of addiction, the addict mistakes the pleasure of the drug-induced high for self-preservation. This decision is determined by a variety of factors, most notably the external force of the promised high and the inadequate knowledge of the addict – namely the false conception that a heroin high is most conducive to self-preservation.¹³⁸ Spinoza’s free person, however, has access to better knowledge. Spinozistic freedom entails that the agent be aware that repeated use of heroin is not conducive to self-preservation. The free person therefore “chooses” to pass up the opportunity of using the drug. But in a strict sense, this person is also determined. There were a number of causal factors that might have led to the decision – such as access to good information, a sound mind, opportunities to witness the struggles of heroin addicts, and so forth. These factors are not acquired through an act of free will, to be sure, as Spinoza defines it. But when this person acts with the benefit of these conspiring causal factors, Spinoza is comfortable in describing this as an act of “freedom.”

So too with the social contract. The agreement of even the wisest citizens to a social contract will not be free in the robust sense supposed by Rousseau or Kant. There will be causes determining the choice of individuals to sign on. For Spinoza, the right cause would be adequate knowledge of what is at stake in that contract. The most handicapped individual facing the signing of a social contract would be someone operating under the impression that self-preservation is best served by avoiding society altogether. As Spinoza repeatedly argues, nothing is more conducive to self-preservation than political society.¹³⁹ But so long as individuals are aware that self-preservation is most effectively served by society, we can expect them to sign the dotted line, as it were. To be sure, this decision is caused – by the desire for self-preservation above all – but it is caused by the right factors. While this is not a “will” in the sense postulated by Malebranche, Rousseau, and Kant, it represents Spinoza’s replacement or alternative for volition in the general-will tradition.

It is worth returning here to Spinoza’s social contract – since this is in some ways at the heart of much of the modern general-will tradition. Specifically, is Spinoza’s contract generated by fear? And if so, does this undermine the compatibilist conception of freedom operating in his political theory? To be sure, Hobbes’s denial of free will makes this question largely irrelevant. And he therefore holds all contracts – whether inspired by fear or calm reflection – equally valid. To be sure, this is true to some extent in Spinoza, insofar as he also denies a faculty of free will. But Spinoza also has a more robust conception of freedom as adequate knowledge than anything found in Hobbes.

Spinoza is certainly not beyond appeals to fear where needed, especially in his state of fear. Yet it is unclear that the initial social contract is entirely inspired by fear. For all intents and purposes, his description of the initial social contract – establishing the state of fear itself – is free and rational in his sense. Individuals sign so that they might “bind themselves by the most stringent pledges to be guided in all matters only by the dictates of reason … and to keep appetite in check.”¹⁴⁰ To be sure, once they establish the state, they return largely to acting on the basis of fear – the fear of sovereign sanctions – without necessarily envisioning a larger picture of how respecting justice might serve their interest in self-preservation. But the respect in which Spinoza describes the social contract suggests at least a moment of rational – and hence free – behavior. So although one might be brought to the choice between anarchy and political society through a series of frustrations or calamities, the choosing of society is rational on Spinoza’s account. “Free” decisions for Spinoza derive from adequate knowledge in the service of self-preservation, and nothing is more conducive to self-preservation than the choice of society over anarchy. Surely, Spinoza’s citizens should ultimately aspire to be free from fear entirely, but their fear in the state of nature is rational, and the choice of society is free insofar as it is based on the adequate knowledge that anarchy is inhospitable to continued existence.

Whether or not one is satisfied with Spinoza’s alternative for the “will” largely depends on one’s metaphysical assumptions. If one firmly believes in the existence of a faculty called the “will” as independent from nature, then Spinoza’s account surely falls short of accounts like Rousseau’s and Kant’s. This is true for incompatibilists, such as Berlin, who would find Spinoza’s account wholly inadequate. This point bears emphasis: for incompatibilists, there is nothing approaching a sufficient conception of the will in Spinoza. And, to be sure, this was the dominant view in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There is no question that Spinoza’s “will” is sharply different from anyone else’s in this tradition. But if one affirms Spinoza’s naturalism, it is difficult to envision a more viable account of the general will. Spinoza retains almost all of the substance of the general will found in the more metaphysically-invested figures of the tradition in affirming the values of generality, charity, love of neighbor, justice, and sociability.

This being stated, there is one apparent exception to Spinoza’s otherwise repeated rejections of a classical conception of will in his TTP. This emerges in the context of his account of the social contract, which makes it of particular relevance to political questions and especially the general will:

Of particular interest in this account of the social contract here is the phrase “will of all,” which employs the term, voluntas – the very faculty he steadfastly denies elsewhere. So apparently, while Spinoza denies an individual faculty of the will, he acknowledges a societal will.

To be sure, it would be misleading to read this “will” as the faculty of “free will” (libera voluntas) that Descartes and others suggest in employing voluntas. The “will of all” here is not radically free and undetermined, as might be supposed elsewhere in the tradition. Indeed, earlier in the excerpted paragraph above, Spinoza acknowledges that those confronted with the social contract live in “anxiety in the midst of feuds, hatred, anger and deceit.”¹⁴² To be sure, this condition is part of the causal nexus that determines the choice of society over continued anarchy. But Spinoza is apparently sufficiently convinced that a group act of choosing society jointly represents an adequate conception of the will for his political purposes. Indeed, this voluntas is almost certainly best read as a manifestation of the “common mind” he discusses repeatedly elsewhere. The “will of all” here is a collective choice – and, in this case, a wise choice of society over anarchy. So for Spinoza, the people collectively have a “will” – it is just not a metaphysically “free will.”

All this is to suggest that while Spinoza very much seems to merit a place in the general-will tradition, he is unique within that tradition. His naturalism and determinism stand entirely outside of the path carved out by the likes of Malebranche and Pascal. Rousseau and Kant both follow the Malebranchian model of a more metaphysically-invested path in crafting their conceptions of the general will. Yet for all of Spinoza’s metaphysical differences, his substantive policies stemming from employing freedom to forge general rules for the common good place him squarely in one of the most important traditions in modern political thought.

5. Conclusions

Patrick Riley has said that Kant’s account of the social contract and its attendant account of the general will is the “most adequate” of its tradition.¹⁴³ And, to be sure, Riley assembles a compelling case for this conclusion. Two essential components of his case, however, extend beyond what many contemporary political theorists are willing to entertain. The first is a robust conception of human freedom as absolute spontaneity – that is, a will entirely capable of resistance to causal forces. The second is the notion of a social contract itself as a Platonic Idea.¹⁴⁴These two elements offer an account of the social contract and the general will that is both impervious to contingency and manipulation and also one that is freely chosen in the strong noncompatibilist sense. These elements have contributed to Kant’s popularity among recent political theorists, including John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas. Habermas insists that he is working within the general will tradition as exemplified by Kant;¹⁴⁵ Rawls likewise claims to fashion his theory from the general will as formulated by Rousseau and Kant.¹⁴⁶

Yet at the same time, Habermas¹⁴⁷ and Rawls¹⁴⁸ claim to operate without the metaphysics employed by the early modern thinkers. That is, they deny the metaphysical status of ideas like “the will” and “social contract” that were at the core of Rousseau and Kant’s development.¹⁴⁹ This being the case, both Habermas and Rawls have been vulnerable to charges of internal inconsistencies. That is, while they have professed largely naturalistic or materialistic metaphysical positions, their appeals to Kant and Rousseau have them smuggling in the very metaphysical presuppositions they meant to exclude.

However one might evaluate the work of Rawls or Habermas, their respective appeals to the heavily metaphysically-invested figures of the general will tradition certainly raise reasonable suspicions. But if my reading of Spinoza is correct, such suspicions of internal inconsistencies do not render them without another avenue. Spinoza’s naturalism makes him perhaps the most important and unjustly neglected source for those who claim to do political theory in a “post-metaphysical” world.

So perhaps Rawls and Habermas have looked in the wrong places for inspiration. Spinoza, with his naturalism, has far more in common with their antifoundationalism than does either Rousseau or Kant. In this regard, this essay points readers sharing metaphysical assumptions with Spinoza back to their original source. Much can be learned from the first attempt to construct a naturalist account of justice and the general will, edging toward the post-metaphysical.

This is a compelling reason to engage more substantially with Spinoza. While not necessarily the “most adequate” general will theorist, he offers contemporary theorists a model more in tune with their own metaphysical presuppositions and therefore an opportunity to overcome charges of internal inconsistency. At the same time, engaging with Spinoza compels those inspired by Rawls and Habermas to engage the metaphysical issues they most commonly avoid, such as freedom versus determinism, compatibilism versus incompatibilism, and the nature of political right either as an idea or as a power. Further engagement with these questions only provides opportunities to fashion more complete and coherent extensions of the general will.

In this spirit, Spinoza’s emphasis on rational self-preservation is much more in sympathy with Rawlsian self-interest than are the more complex appeals to metaphysical justice in Rousseau and Kant. Rawls is generally careful to avoid treating justice as abstracted from individual interest, whereas Rousseau emphasizes, the existence of “eternal laws of nature and order,”¹⁵⁰ existing independent of interest and conventions. Rawls rejects these metaphysical pretensions and instead insists that justice flows from self-interest, as confined under the veil of ignorance. In this respect, he shares far more in common with Spinoza than with Rousseau. Spinoza likewise sees the rules of political organization stemming from a rational calculation of individuals’ interests. Both also see that the rational pursuit of individual interest leads to humane and democratic politics. So Rawlsian politics shares a great deal with Spinoza’s. That Rawls himself was unaware of these affinities is underscored by the lack of a single Spinoza citation A Theory of Justice.

But Rawlsians might benefit even further from engagement with Spinoza, insofar as he understands that the rational pursuit of interest also would necessarily involve fraternity and community. Rawls has been routinely criticized for his neglect of such values. Those critiques emphasize the dangers of individuals at the expense of community in Rawls and the modern liberal tradition. But careful consideration of Spinoza as part of the general will tradition suggests that self-interest and community are not necessarily mutual exclusive. They may even be mutually dependent. This is significant cause for reconsidering Spinoza’s role in the general will tradition as it exists today.

To this end, careful examination of Spinoza suggests greater methodological pluralism in the general-will tradition than has typically been assumed. Recovering his role in the story of the general will reveals two strikingly different paths for generating values still widely celebrated, such as justice, charity, fraternity, and equity. That is, methodological or metaphysical pluralism does not necessarily lead to value pluralism and potential strife – if we take Spinoza, Rousseau, and Kant to be largely commitment to the same substantive values. And perhaps this principle of harmony might ultimately be Spinoza’s greatest legacy.