Criticisms
Early critics of Rousseau included Benjamin Constant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel argued that, because it lacked any grounding in an objective ideal of reason, Rousseau's account of the general will led ineluctably to the Terror. Constant also blamed Rousseau for the excesses of the French Revolution, and he rejected the total subordination of the citizen-subjects to the determinations of the general will.
In 1952 Jacob Talmon characterized Rousseau's "general will" as leading to a Totalitarian Democracy because, Talmon argued, the state subjected its citizens to the supposedly infallible will of the tyranny of the majority. Another writer during the Cold War period, liberal theorist Karl Popper, also interpreted Rousseau in this way. Other prominent critics include Isaiah Berlin.
Read more about this topic: General Will
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“I have no concern with any economic criticisms of the communist system; I cannot enquire into whether the abolition of private property is expedient or advantageous. But I am able to recognize that the psychological premises on which the system is based are an untenable illusion. In abolishing private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments ... but we have in no way altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness.”
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