Introduction

mind a perfectly definite idea. Every association of several persons creates a new common will; every association of a permanent character has already a “personality” of its own, and in consequence a “general” will; the State, the highest known form of association, is a fully developed moral and collective being with a common will which is, in the highest sense yet known to us, general. All such wills are general only for the members of the associations which exercise them; for outsiders, or rather for other associations, they are purely particular wills. This applies even to the State; “for, in relation to what is outside it, the State becomes a simple being, an individual” ( Social Contract , Book I . chap. VII ). In certain passages in the Social Contract , in his criticism of the Abbé de Saint-Pierre ’s Project of Perpetual Peace , and in the second chapter of the original draft of the Social Contract , Rousseau takes into account the possibility of a still higher individual, “the federation of the world.” In the “ Political Economy ,” thinking of the nation-state, he affirms what in the Social Contract (Book II , chap. III ) he denies of the city, and recognises that the life of a nation is made up of the whole complex of its institutions, and that the existence of lesser general wills is not necessarily a menace to the General Will of the State. In the Social Contract , he only treats of these lesser wills in relation to the government, which, he shows, has a will of its own, general for its members, but particular for the State as a whole (Book III , chap. II ). This governmental will he there prefers to call corporate will , and by