Generality of law

Generality of law is the rule that legislation must address the people as a whole and govern classes of persons or actions in the abstract, rather than target an individual or particular case. In Rousseau’s account, this formal constraint allows the people to be both authors and subjects of law: a general law can bind citizens without placing them under another person’s arbitrary will.

The Principle and Its Method

The principle belongs to a theory of political right, not an empirical description of how established states happen to operate. Rousseau distinguishes the search for the universal basis of legitimate society from the study of existing institutions: political facts may help explain what occurs, but a fact alone cannot establish a right. Generality is therefore not merely a drafting convention. It is a condition for a political command to count as lawfully grounded rather than as power presented under the name of right.

The problem the principle addresses begins with the conflict between individual freedom and political association. A legitimate association must use its common force to protect each member’s person and goods, while allowing each, in joining with all, to obey himself and remain as free as before. The social compact makes this possible by placing each associate, with all rights, under the community as a whole. General law gives that collective authority a form that applies equally rather than converting it into a tool for particular interests.

Whole People, General Object

Rousseau’s test turns on the relation between the will that decrees and the object of its decree. A will directed outside the state is not general in relation to it. A command directed at a particular part of the state likewise separates that part from the whole: the remaining community and the targeted part become distinct, unequal parties. In that relation, the will of one side cannot stand as the general will of both.

By contrast, when the whole people makes a decree for the whole people, the decision concerns the community considered as a whole. Both the will and its object are general; Rousseau calls this act a law. The test excludes personal or factional commands from legislation, even when those commands are issued by an authority that otherwise possesses public power.

Generality concerns the law’s object as well as its author. A law considers subjects collectively and actions abstractly; it may establish privileges, but cannot assign one by name. It may create classes of citizens and set qualifications for belonging to them, but cannot declare particular people members of those classes. It may establish a monarchical administration and hereditary succession, but cannot select a king or name a royal family. Choosing particular persons belongs outside legislative power.

Law, Decree, and Republican Government

The distinction between general laws and particular commands clarifies the boundary between sovereignty and magistracy. What a person commands on his own initiative cannot be law. Nor does a sovereign’s command become law merely because it concerns a particular matter: it is a decree, an act of magistracy rather than sovereignty. Authority alone does not make an act legislative; its general form and object matter.

Rousseau consequently calls every state governed by laws a republic, whatever the form of its administration. Where laws govern, the public interest has institutional standing and the res publica is real; every legitimate government is republican in this sense. The label therefore identifies rule by laws expressing the general will, not one specific arrangement of executive government.

Freedom and Political Legitimacy

The principle answers the question of how citizens can be both free and subject to law. A law framed for the whole community does not single out one person as the will of another; it records the people’s will in a general form. The citizen is bound by a rule made by the political body to which the citizen belongs, rather than by an individual command masquerading as a common rule.

This distinction also separates law from force. If strength alone created right, each stronger force could replace the previous one, and obedience would last only while compulsion did. Generality instead locates legitimate obligation in a convention formed for common protection and expressed through the whole community. The law’s limits are part of its authority: it can regulate general conditions of association, but cannot use sovereignty to settle a particular case as though that act were legislation.

The principle thus joins the social compact’s promise of common protection to the institutional form of public rule. It makes generality a safeguard against the contraction of the state into a power that governs some as a master governs subjects. When government usurps sovereignty, the political community is dissolved and citizens recover their natural liberty; the general-law principle marks the line between public authority exercised under common rules and domination by particular commands.