Conference paper
UNFINISHED STATE? CONTEMPORARY STATE IN LIGHT OF ROUSSEAU'S THEORY OF GENERAL WILL
Dragutin Lalović
; Faculty of Political Science, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
The future of the contemporary state is considered genealogically, via a reconstructive review of Rousseau’s theory of political law, which depicts the original project of the constitution of the democratic state as a political community of citizens. Rousseau envisaged the modern state as an epochal legal/political program of the concurrent subjectivization of a nation (as ethnos) into a people (as demos) and the selfish man (“raisonneur violent”) into the citizen (“citoyen”). The rationale of this subjectivization is expressed in the theory of the general will. A people exists as a political subject, as a law-giver, only as a subject of the general will, the same as individuals become free citizens through the process of democratic generalization of their political will. The logic of the process of the generalization of the will, as political emancipation, lies within one nation as demos. A legitimate state is possible only if it realizes the individuality of a people as a substantial totality. General will is always solely public, the political will of a people, its will for its own identity. The national democratic state is not a historical given; the free will is a creation, a project of the actualization of the rule of the general will, realized by a sovereign people. The state is an unavoidable space of the tendential equalization of the general will of a people and the will of all free individuals, in which citizens within the legislative process accomplish their collective, inter-subjective autonomy. From the point of view of the prospects of the realization of this project, contemporary states are unfinished, even unfinishable states. Although in the contemporary plural society the national democratic state is no longer the sole space of the political and the legal subjectivization of citizens, it is still undoubtedly the central one. Rousseau’s theory of the general will offers the epochal criteria for the recognition of the political character of any citizens’ “political association” (not only the state), whether they be the sub-state or supra-state formations. Each and every political association is a genuine democratic community only if it is the “work of art” of the citizens themselves who self-confidently shape their collective activity, since a community of citizens is possible only if this integration represents the will of all of them as a sum of the irreducible differences among them.
Keywords
general will (volonté générale); the will of all (volonté de tous); particular will; universal will (volonté universelle); citizen; subject; national state; people’s sovereignty; democratic political community
Hrčak ID:
24227
URI
Publication date:
30.12.2002.
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