The General Will and the Possibility of Democracy

Having long been antagonistic to notions of a "general will" (this antagonism deriving from my studies of nationalism and its mystifications and distortions), I have recently been alerted to the logical and logistical difficulties in theories of democracy. Popular sovereignty deriving from a general "will of the people" is the basis of legitimacy for contemporary "advanced" states and those that aspire to be. History shows that peoples or nations do not come about "naturally," without the intervention of governments or intellectuals, and the general will is only a bastard son of monarchical right, arising to fill the vacuum created with the decline of courtly prestige. Its legitimacy derives from the association of monarchy, tyranny, aristocracy and other forms of government with mass poverty, oppression, backwardness and general misery. Democracy gained prestige from its association with the Enlightenment. . . The people, who are the subject of the general will, have in democratic theory always been assumed; what determines membership in the people has only recently become to be seen as problematic. Setting aside this for the moment, a cursory examination of the supposed will of this putative people reveals little of substance.

Let's start by assuming the existence of this will and slowly chip away. Given that the will changes over time (only the most essentialist reactionaries could deny this), any given "snapshot" of it does not correspond to any actual set of positions; you can't step in the same river even once. So any representative government based on the will of the people is also engaged in thwarting it, given the lag between elections and governnment sessions and the impossibility of representatives constantly monitoring the thought of their constituents. If we take the view that representatives and other politicians are granted freedom to make decisions based on their consciences and considerations, we might repair the general will theory by taking it in a looser sense. . . If we jettison representative democracy for some form of direct democracy, we don't fare much better. People do not know what they want, and even if they did, they would not know how to bring it about. This applies even to the smartest people. How can we enshrine a political principle based on something unknowable and unworkable? We might revert to the thought that democracy is a bulwark against misery because is has the power to remove misery-producing governments. But it is not always clear that the government is the source of the misery and that another government would be any better. . . This best-of-the-bad, Churchillian view of democracy has unfortunately passed out of currency.