The General Will is Citizenship Inquiries into French Political Thought

In The General Will is Citizenship, Jason Neidleman advances a republican conception of citizenship, which is described and defended through a piercing analysis of the general will in the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, leaders of the French Revolution, and Restoration-era liberals. Neidleman explains that the general will is the will members of society have qua citizen, as opposed to the will they have qua private individual. It encapsulates tensions fundamental to egalitarian politics--tensions between individual autonomy and the collective good, between voluntarism and virtue, between popular will and rational will.