The rise of modern philosophy a new history of western philosophy volume 3 (new history of western philosophy) ( PDFDrive ) (1) 315

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY in the hands of demagogues Robespierre at the height of the French revolutionary terror could claim that he was expressing the general will, and forcing citizens to be free Who was in a position to contradict him? The conditions Rousseau laid down for the general will’s expression were that every citizen should be fully informed and that no two citizens should be allowed to combine with each other The Wrst condition could never be fulWlled outside a community of gods, and the second condition of its nature demands a totally tyranny to enforce For better or worse, the Social Contract became the bible of revolutionaries, and not only in France; Rousseau’s inXuence was enormous Napoleon, never one to underestimate his own importance, attributed to Rousseau an equal responsibility with himself for the gigantic changes that Europe underwent as the eighteenth century turned into the nineteenth ‘Who can tell’, he asked as he approached death, ‘whether the world would be a better place if Rousseau and I had never lived?’ Hegel on the Nation-State Rousseau’s notion of the general will was taken up, in diVerent ways, by Kant and Hegel Kant sought to give it a non-mythical form as a universal consensus of moral agents each legislating universal laws for themselves and for all others Hegel transformed it into the freedom of the world-spirit expressing itself in the history of mankind There seems a vast diVerence, Hegel realized, between his thesis of the evolution of the spirit into ever greater freedom and self-consciousness, and the dismal spectacle presented by actual history He accepted that nothing seemed to happen in the world except as the result of the selfinterested actions of individuals; and he was willing to describe history as the slaughterhouse in which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of states, and the virtues of individuals are sacriWced But the gloom, he maintained, is not justiWed; for the self-interested actions of individuals are the only means by which the ideal destiny of the world can be realized ‘The Ideal provides the warp, and human passions the woof, of the web of history.’ Human actions are performed in social contexts, and self-interest need not be egoistic One can Wnd self-fulWlment in the performance of social roles: my love of my family and my pride in my profession contribute to 300