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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
The “software” that structures our financial system and, through it, our broader economy is made up of certain basic concepts that guide how we think and hence act. These concepts include money, credit, finance, investment, and – above all – capital. This conceptual software manifests itself in our current “operating system” of institutions and practices. But our concepts and the system itself are radically out of date both as representations of monetary, financial, productive, and distributive reality and thus as realizations of democratically productive potential. Robert Hockett shows that this mismatch has serious consequences and argues that it’s time for a complete overhaul of our economic understanding.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Introduction: One Conflation, Two Separations
Notes
1 Our Polity
I, you, we
Joint ‘we’s and several ‘we’s
Joint ‘we’s birth obligations and authorizations
Vertical and horizontal
The political ‘we’ – the polity – just is the most general joint ‘we’
Why we miss this
Why we make ‘we’s
Notes
2 Our Money
From our state to our money
From joint ‘we’ accountability to several ‘we’ accounting
Accounts and accounting, credits and debits, authorized means of discharge
From “several” accounts to “joint” account books – ledgers
Accounts, ledgers, numeraires
Size, complexity, obligation-tracking, and -verifying
Formality and (explicit) verticality
Monetary verticality made explicit: coin and currency
Notes
3 Our Finance
Money and “finance”
Obligations, claims, credit and “capital” – first pass
“Time and money”
Money and time, finance and “capital” – first pass
Credit, money, credit money – first pass
The joint/several swap and “the financial system”
Metal, paper, history
Constraint, balance, health
Notes
4 Our Capital
From our polity, money and finance to our capital
Capital
Money revisited
Public capital
Notes
5 Our Capital Commons
Institutional embodiment
Public accounting – the ledger of the producers’ republic
Public liabilities – Treasury wallets and the democratic digital dollar
Public assets – the productive use of public capital
Notes
Conclusion: Our Republic, Our Capital, Our Productive Selves – Our Joint ‘We’s Recovered
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Introduction: One Conflation, Two Separations
Begin Reading
Conclusion
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1
Stylized Production Function
Figure 4.2
Stylized Production Function in a Monetary Exchange Economy
Figure 4.3
Stylized Representation of Stratified and Derivative Markets
Figure 4.4
Exogenous Deposit and Endogenous “Bank” Money
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1
Democratic Digital Dollar (“3D”) and Wallet Architecture
Figure 5.2
Public Balance Sheet
Figure 5.3
Reformed Bank/“Spread Fed”/Producer Relations
Figure 5.4
“People’s Fed”/NRDC/PSF Administrative and Financial Flow Structure
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Dedication
For Blanca
Making Capital Democratic
A Reconstruction of State, Credit, and Finance
Robert C. Hockett
polity
Copyright © Robert C. Hockett 2025
The right of Robert C. Hockett to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2025 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-7006-5
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024952016
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Acknowledgments
Among the living, I heartily thank my “brother” Dan Alpert, Peter Barnes, Kaushik Basu, Lawrence Baxter, my “sister” Sarah Bloom Raskin, Mark Blyth, my “everything” Blanca Braun, Partha Dasgupta, Jeni Dhodary, my “sister” Rana Foroohar, my pal Jamie Galbraith, my “brother” Aaron James, my dear brilliant friend Steve Keen, Roberto Mangabeira Unger, my “sister” Marianna Mazzucato, my “brother” Paul McCulley, Fred Moseley, Martin O’Neil, Julia Puaschunder, my mentor John Roemer, my mentor Robert Shiller, my dear pal Alan Thomas, Michael Thompson, and Susan Witt. I owe a particularly strong debt to Ian Malcolm and his superb colleagues, notably Ellen MacDonald-Kramer, at Polity.
Among those who have left us, I wish that I could directly thank Professor G. A. Cohen, Professor Enrique Dussel, Senator Carter Glass, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, Finanzminister Rudolf Hilferding, HM Treasury Minister-without-Portfolio J. M. Keynes, Controlleur General John Law, Ms. Rosa Luxemburg, Herr Doktor Karl Marx, Ministre des Finances Jacques Necker, Sir James Steuart, Mr. Henry Thornton, Professor Léon Walras, Mr. Paul Warburg, Professor Knut Wicksell, and my dear mentor, the recently departed Professor Erik Olin Wright.
Introduction: One Conflation, Two Separations
Classical liberalism – our shared ideological endowment as received, elaborated, and bequeathed by the thinkers of the eighteneenth and nineteenth centuries – seems to have left many Europeans and most Americans afflicted with two forms of self-estrangement. Both forms are mutually supportive, and both forms proceed from a shared primal error. Both forms additionally are “tragic,” in that both are entirely needless.
The first self-estrangement is alienation from our own most inclusive modality of collectively deliberating, planning, and acting together in pursuit of shared ends – that is, from our political selves, and from the polity that those selves all constitute. This is so even in respect of that shared end which is the optimal public facilitation of each private person’s individual ends. Each ‘I’ is, as it were, separated from our common political ‘we’ – our res publica, or “public thing.” Our republic.
The second self-estrangement is that from our own most inclusive modality of coordinating our materially productive and distributive wealth-generating activities – that is, from our producing and our goods- and services-exchanging selves, as well as from the media of productive investment and exchange, the “money,” to which our productive and distributive relations give rise.1 Each ‘I’ is, as it were, separated from our monetary and therefore our productive and distributive ‘we’ as operative in our shared “exchange economy” or “commercial society” – the “common currency” used in our “common weal.”2 Our commonwealth.
A familiar idiomatic manifestation of the first separation is the ubiquitous, as it were negatively fetishizing reference to “the state” or, more often in modern American parlance, “the government” that one hears with dispiriting frequency.3 In such locutions, we hear strange intimations that our own mode of acting together is something set over and irretrievably apart from, or exogenously imposed upon, or even actively hostile to, ourselves and our fellow citizens – that is, again, from, upon, and to the very people who constitute this polity and authorize its instrumentalities to act in their name.
A familiar idiomatic manifestation of the second separation is the ubiquitous reference to our economy, our money, and our wealth as things that, like “the state” or “the government,” “come from without” and are exogenously given. Money figures as something that “doesn’t grow on trees,” must be “backed up” by gold or some other scarce alien substance, and is “debased” by “the government” itself when the latter resorts to the “mere printing” of “mere fiat money.” “The economy,” for its part, is taken to be extra-political, even extracivilizational, not unlike weather, hence something to which persons – including “the government” – must simply conform themselves stoically, rather than trying to shape or design.
In the latter instance, of course, alienation from “the government,” from “money,” and from “the economy” – hence from our political and our productive and goods/services-exchanging selves altogether – combine into one all-encompassing self-separation. It’s a bit like “a complex,” in the old Freudian sense of that word: a single great tangle of far-reaching, unquestioned, and ultimately unstable premises that together leave all in a world – a social world, no less – far beyond our own powers of understanding, construction, and control.
Notwithstanding that, it is we who’ve constructed it.
And we in “the West,” and in America in particular, have been thinking like this, and living accordingly, for decades, if not longer.4
Under such circumstances it is tempting to ask, why the definite article? Why “the” government, money, and economy? Why not “our” government, money, and economy?
I referred to these “definite article” forms of estrangement as “needless,” hence “tragic,” as well as “mutually reinforcing” and rooted in one common error. And I’ve just now suggested they travel together. I want in the critical meditation that constitutes the first three chapters of this book to show how these estrangements bind with each other, then to show why they are tragically needless, by tracing them both to their shared primal error.
In a sense, they’re two sides of one coin, pun hereby ratified, if not quite intended.
If I succeed in carrying out this intention, it will be easy to see once I’m done that our polity, our economy, our money, productive capital and finance, far from needing “democratization,” are at bottom already quite deeply democratic. What remains is for the demos itself both to see and to “own” this, that we might then put our state and our money – our capital – to much better, indeed more productive, more just, and more democratic, use. That we shall do in the reconstruction that constitutes the final two chapters of this book.
Here then is how I’ll proceed. I’ll begin with “the state” and “the government” and our political selves, if for no other reason than that what needs drawing out here is already reasonably close to the surface of intuition.
I’ll then turn to “money,” “finance,” “economy,” and our materially productive/distributive selves, the structures of which are much easier to recognize once we’re clear about the structure of our political selves – that is, about what we collectively are and what living, acting, and producing together as one demos or polity entail. In effect, I’ll work a conceptual reconstruction of the fundamental economic categories whose names we hear every day, bringing them into more perspicuous and truth-manifesting correspondence with the political and legal categories that structure our expectations around public governance.
I’ll then be positioned to elaborate what I take to be the most noteworthy implications that these reflections yield where the conduct of finance and the reclaiming of public capital in a producers’ republic are concerned. These will find readily “operationalized” form as an institutional reconstruction corresponding to the preceding conceptual reconstruction before we are finished. In that sense, this book will prove both analytically clarifying and practically galvanizing. In effect, it sketches a fully practicable “utopia” in the course of revealing just why this utopia must be made real.
Notes
1.
The suggestion that money is something to which our productive and distributive relations give rise, or that even in some sense they constitute, might ring obscure at the moment. Its truth, I believe, will grow obvious as we proceed. So will the reason for frequently speaking here of “productive and distributive” relations jointly rather than “productive” relations and “distributive” relations severally. Here is a foretaste: It takes material resources to make (more) material resources, and in a “decentralized exchange economy” or “commercial society” such as our own this means we must distribute resources (over persons or other productive agents) in particular ways in order to produce resources. As
chapter 2
of the present work will draw out, money is that means.
2.
As with the suggestion, just now, that money is constituted by productive and distributive relations, so with the suggestion that our monetary ‘we’ is our productive and distributive ‘we’ – what now rings obscure will appear more perspicuously once we are through.
3.
“Negatively fetishizing” – that is, treating as somehow “external” and “radically other,” while at the same time dreading and fearing. Dreading and fearing it as a menacing “other.” Our own shared creation – indeed our own shared identity as ‘we’ made of ‘I’s – viewed now as monstrously alien.
4.
One or another form of liberal thought seems to have been part of the complex of American political and economic thinking since the get-go, inasmuch as “the founders” made significant use of both Locke and Smith, among others (the latter’s most oft-cited treatise even having been published in 1776). But the early modern “republican revival” seems to have been even more influential in the early days of the American polity, having waned in its sway nearly to the vanishing point only some time in the early to mid-twentieth century. Cf. Robert Hockett,
A Republic of Producers
(forthcoming, Yale University Press); Robert Hockett, “A Jeffersonian Republic by Hamiltonian Means,”
University of Southern California Law Review
79(1) (2005): 45; Robert Hockett,
Whose Ownership? Which Society?, Cardozo Law Review
27 (2005): 1–103.
1Our Polity
Here is an invitation. Let us construct a small protorepublic. If you accept this invitation, so that it’s ‘we’ who now do the constructing, this polity we build will bear certain interesting properties.
I, you, we
We’ll start with what we are doing right now. You who now read these words, and I who have written them, are at present a unity. Ours is a unity that tends, because quite familiar, to be taken for granted. And so it’s a unity whose entailments and implications are easy to miss. Yet it’s a truly remarkable thing that is pregnant with many remarkable upshots – a wonderful thing that is ours for as long as you’re reading.
We’re embarked on a common project – the project of successfully communicating a thought or idea, a “vision” or “argument.”1 By the time we are done, you might remain unconvinced by my argument; you might disagree with my claims or my view on some or all points. But for you to determine what you might make of my argument, and hence whether you agree on some points or disagree entirely, you must first take it in. And I for my part must get it across.
On this we’re agreed – implicitly if not explicitly. This agreement is presupposed by your reading, and by my writing. We’re in this together, for now.
There is, then, a ‘we’ here. And this ‘we’ is more than a mere partitive or aggregative ‘we.’ It is an integrative ‘we.’ It is an incipient form of what Rousseau might have called an “association,” as distinct from an “aggregation.”2 It is a kind of momentary “common mind,” distinct from your mind and my mind even while constituted in indispensable measure by both of our minds.3 It’s what is referenced when one uses oftheard locutions like “reading from a common script,” “singing from the same hymnal,” or “being on the same page.”
To see this more fully, suppose you are reading not this essay but some other essay by some other person. And suppose I am writing this essay in the expectation that someone – perhaps you, perhaps not you – will read it. Suppose further that you see me writing this essay as you are reading the other essay, and I see you reading that other essay as I work on this one. It will in this circumstance be correct, in a restricted sense, for either of us to say, of the two of us, that “we are communicating.”
But there is an ambiguity.
The ambiguity is that in saying that “we are communicating” under the circumstance just specified, we might mean either we are “communicating with one another,” or that we are each simply “engaged in communicative activity.” If we mean the latter, again in the circumstance specified, then we speak truly. If we mean the former, by contrast, then we speak falsely. For in the circumstance I have described, we communicate severally but not jointly.
We do not communicate “with one another.” We simply communicate (with others – the others we’re reading) in the same room as one another.
Joint ‘we’s and several ‘we’s
Let’s call the doing-it-together ‘we’ the joint ‘we,’ and let’s call the doing-it-simultaneously-but-separately ‘we’ the several ‘we.’ We could use other terminology if we preferred – the “integrative” or “collective” versus the “aggregative” ‘we,’ for example, or the “unitive” versus the “partitive” ‘we’ – and occasionally I will use alternative locutions of this sort. But since a fair bit of legal terminology will figure into the discussion below, I might as well start with the legally tried and true “joint” and “several.”
Here is the thing about the joint or integrative as distinguished from the several or aggregative ‘we’: the two ‘I’s and two ‘you’s in the joint ‘we’ are both jointly constituting something – a sort of shared piece of subjectivity that is internally complex even as it is outwardly simple. They are accordingly what might be called “internally” related, just like any two or more things that are mutually integrated rather than separately aggregated.4 They are what they are in virtue of the relation they’re in, not unlike how “left” and “right” are what they are in virtue of one another and their relation, or how every number is what it is in virtue of its relations with all other numbers that constitute with it “the system of integers,” “of whole numbers,” “of rational numbers,” or whatever system is salient at a given moment of thought.
As you read this essay, you become “my,” not just “a,” reader, and I become “your” interlocutor, for purposes of the communicative consummation. While you are reading, there is a ‘we’ here that joins us – the “joining” of “jointness.” For the duration of your reading, there is a unitive and integrative ‘we’ here that joins us and “internally” binds us. Each of us then is what s/he is, for the purposes and duration of the relation – that is, we are “the relevant” writer and “relevant” reader – in virtue of this relation itself.
This is the sense in which our ‘we’ in this relation is something – a shared subjectivity – that is distinct from, even while indispensably and integrally constituted by, each of us. This is the sense in which the several – in this case, the two – ‘I’s merge into the joint – the one – ‘we.’ This is the sense in which the word ‘we’ here accordingly designates or implicates a sort of temporarily “joint mind” or “joint self” or “joint subject” or “joint will” over and apart from, even while indispensably and integrally constituted by, our distinct, several selves, subjects, or minds. Where a ‘we’ is not joint but several, there is no such communion. There is only co-presence or coexistence.
If you and I “just happen” to be writing and reading, respectively, with neither of us reading what the other is writing, then it can be said that we each are engaged in communicative activity. ‘We,’ in a certain sense, are indeed doing so. But there is no collective or associative or integrative as distinguished from merely aggregative ‘we’ here. We can be said, in a thin sense, to have “something in common” – the fact that we both are engaged in communicative activity right now. But this commonality is, so to speak, accidental. We simply happen to be engaged in the same sort of activity at the same time.
Where we are communicating “with” one another, by contrast, living to the fullest the “com” (“withness”) of that word, the commonality is not accidental but essential and constitutive. And the “something in common” now thickens – it is “deeper.” Our relation in this case is “internal,” not “external,” to our identities within the relation.5 We are what we are here, for the purposes of and over the duration of the joint activity, precisely in virtue of that activity. That activity is our common bond. It is what “joins” us together into a joint – an internally joined, integrative – ‘we.’
Joint ‘we’s birth obligations and authorizations
Here’s one more thing about the joint ‘we’: it generates something jointly authoritative and hence severally binding. It is, as it were, pregnant with obligation. There is a form of normativity latent or imminent in it, something that brings new forms of interpersonal propriety and impropriety – obligation and possible breach of obligation – into play.6
When a ‘we’ is merely several or aggregative, there is no new question of possible “violation” or “wrong” or “illegitimacy” or “acting without authorization” lurking about. There is only the set of antecedently incumbent obligations – obligations not to deprive others, whom you might or might not ever encounter, of their antecedently given entitlements, entitlements not to be taken from, tricked, or molested. When a ‘we’ is joint or integrative, by contrast, new obligations are born – obligations not to violate the covenant that is implicit in the sharing of purpose that constitutes the joint ‘we’ in the first place.
You’re reading Proust somewhere, I’m writing “Hockett” somewhere, and that’s all there is to it. No new bond, no new obligation, nothing newly binding. No new “strings” to attach us. The only operative normativity is that which bound us well before and quite apart from our presently referenced, separate, or several activities. If on the other hand you’re reading me, the prospect of wronging each other in new ways, in a manner bound up with joint activity and hence our shared purpose, enters the scene in that very joint act.
Consider this: If on the next page you suddenly find the words “JUST JOKING” in all caps, with no further writing to follow, I’ve in a certain sense wronged you. I’ve misled and duped you, having led you to expect a shared meditation only to pull out the rug from under you once you’ve accepted my invitation to contemplate and deliberate together. I have violated an implied covenant between us.
Likewise, if you publish this essay in your journal, and your journal is called, previously unbeknownst to me, The Journal of Jokes, you’ve in a certain sense wronged me (I hope). I in the one case, and you in the other, have as it were “frustrated the purpose” of our joint engagement in an attempt at communication and joint meditation. We have violated our implicit agreement, and in that sense have violated “us” and have violated each other. We have severally made a mere joke of what was evidently meant – by both of us, jointly – to be serious.
The notions of “bindingness,” “obligation,” and “violation” at work here carry with them the notion of “something higher” than either of us – something beyond or incumbent upon us even as it is of us – a sort of transcendence of us that is imminent between us.7 It’s something authoritative to which we are both in a certain sense subject. It carries something “prescriptive” or “normative” that presses upon us, and in that sense is, metaphorically speaking, “above” or “beyond” or “outside” us even while activated or generated by us.
This “higher thing” in this case either is or is closely bound up with our ‘we’ – our joint ‘we.’8 Were we each acting alone – were our ‘we’ merely several – there’d be no question of this kind of wronging. There’d be no shared purpose for either of us to frustrate, no commitment, implicit or otherwise, to break. We’d just do what we (severally) do and that would be that.
Vertical and horizontal
In this sense, we can say that a joint ‘we’ introduces a sort of “vertical” dimension into what we are doing – to what would otherwise be no more than an “external,” “accidental,” and “horizontal” relation. When you do what you do and I do what I do and there is no commerce between us, we are “on the same level,” so to speak. Everything’s flat. But when we do something together, there is now a sort of “normative third” present that is “above” or “beyond” us, a “third” that comes with – or in fact in a certain sense just is – the “internality” and no-longer-accidental character of our relation.9
That third is our ‘we,’ something that as ‘us’ jointly can be neither of us severally. In that sense it is sort of both us and not-us. Its being not-us is the source of its authority “over” (each of) us, of its being incumbent “upon” (each of) us. Its being us, in turn, is the reason that we are the principal parties who are able both to violate it and to speak in its name – that is, to speak “authoritatively” – when we remonstrate with each other, in the event one of us frustrates our jointly shared purpose via that violation. For it is we who have “authored” it, we who now constitute it.
We might say, then, that in mutually interacting with a common purpose we (1) constitute a joint ‘we,’ and thereby (2) individually come under obligations that (3) we collectively authorize one another to demand be fulfilled.10
This proves to be a pregnant thought later. For we shall find that it binds the political ‘we’ and the productive/ distributive ‘we’ – it binds state and economy, our state and our economy. And it does so, we’ll see, through a conduit that in contemporary geographically far-flung polities and economies we presently call money.11
Productive and distributive activity in decentralized exchange economies pervasively involves joint exchanges of promises, hence joint issuance of countless reciprocal obligations. (Where an economy is not a decentralized economy, polity and economy are one, and so there is no need to speak of them separately or as things that retain some single “connecting link,” such as money.) Citizens through their states in turn authorize one another to demand that such promises be honored and obligations be met, contract law being the central case. Just as obligation and authority travel together as two sides of one coin, then so do state and economy.
And money, we’ll find, is the coin. Simultaneously, it is the token of obligation and the collectively authorized means of discharge of obligation. But more of this in due course.
The political ‘we’ – the polity – just is the most general joint ‘we’
All of the above is probably a bit hippy-dippy sounding. Heavy, heady, pseudo-psychobabble mystic-sounding stuff that you might say or hear while you are “smoking something” or are “dropping acid” among intimates. But in fact it’s something we all are familiar with – as evidenced, among other things, by the presence of the words “joint” and “several” themselves in our language. And it is very important for present purposes.
For confusion on this point – the ubiquitous, unthinking conflation of the collective ‘we’ and the aggregative ‘we’ – is responsible for the first form of estrangement with which I above opened this essay. (It is also, we’ll see, responsible for the second form of self-estrangement, but we are not there yet.)
We treat “the state” or “the government” – our own polity – as “radically other” because we forget it is our common project, our means of acting together, rather than just our common fate or our separate fates. It is our joint emanation, not an alien determinant of our several destinies. (It is our “internal” means of selecting our shared destinations, not an “outward” imposition of radically separate destinies.) What ‘it’ does, ‘we’ do – collectively or associatively, not aggregatively. This is so even when the state or the government embodies our joint ‘we’ and in that sense is distinct from and authoritative over our several ‘I’s.
As citizens rather than mere guests of “our” state, we are constituents of something that we ourselves willfully constitute – a politically constituted ‘we.’ We are essentially, not accidentally – internally, not externally – related to one another and to our state – our state – for purposes of the relation: that is, for political purposes, for “purposes of state.” We share “our citizenship.” And that is because we share our state.
The state is simply the most agent-inclusive, project-inclusive, temporally extensive joint ‘we’ of them all. The “meta-we,” as it were, that institutionalizes our joint pursuit through time of that grand project which is the enabling of all of our ‘I’s and our smaller ‘we’s’ projects, be they individual, familial, or other sub-state groupings’ – including business firms’ – projects.
As citizens, we are internally and essentially related in respect of our sharing of this state – in respect of our citizenship. Our relation – our state – is accordingly both of us and yet distinct from us, much as “a couple,” in the romantic or marital sense, is something distinct from its members even while critically constituted by those members – those members in their capacities as (qua) participants in the romantic or marital relation.
Indeed, a state can be viewed as a thin form of perpetual covenant not altogether unlike the marital or romantic or familial covenant. Its members – its citizens – are embarked on a broadly inclusive, trans-temporal “project” together: again, the effectively perpetual project of securing and maintaining an environment in which all can flourish both jointly and severally, on whatever account or accounts of such flourishing the citizens individually or in sub-state groupings regard as compelling and legitimate. Scarce wonder a Rawls would have written of the state as a “social union of social unions.”
Something like this seems to be what Rousseau had in mind when he wrote of a “general will.” There is a tendency, at least in the Anglo-American – that is, in effect, the liberal and neoliberal – world to think that Rousseau must have meant something ghastly and indeterminately bounded, even something of dubious existence in using this term. Voltaire famously quipped that if God didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent Him; many anglophone thinkers seem to think the same of Rousseau’s “general will.” They treat it as a sort of convenient deus ex machina that Rousseau simply pulled out of a hat so as to rationalize certain surprising prescriptions to which his pre-reflective sensibilities drove him. And the fact that he was francophone probably did little to allay anglophone suspicions on this score.
But in fact Rousseau is more clear-eyed and less mush-mouthed than are his early anglophone critics. For he sees, even if he understandably gropes a bit to articulate, that there’s a distinction between the collective or integrative and the merely aggregative ‘we’ that I have sought here to explicate. As noted above, after all, he distinguished explicitly between aggregations and associations. And he says that this joint, associative we is the “general will” of any true republic.
Rousseau was of course under no illusions about the difficulty of actually constituting and realizing a republic – hence a true general will – out of multiple selves whose impulses could drive them apart from one another as readily as they could drive them together. (Rousseau himself seems to have been all the time intimately on the ins, then the outs, with his closest acquaintances.12) Indeed, he claimed that no true republic had yet come to be on this earth.
That probably struck anglophone readers as gratuitously – and characteristically Gallicly – paradoxical. But the point of his reflections is that the idea of a republic, and hence of a general will, is the best way of understanding what we are trying to do when we form and then act as a state. The idea of the republic functions as a sort of “regulative ideal” that is effectively the telos of all legitimate government constituting and, then, state action. (Scarce wonder those master elaborators of the idea of a regulative ideal, Kant and then Hegel, admired Rousseau as they did.)
