Rousseau's Idea Of The General Will And It's Relevance For Building Harmonious Society Of China

Rousseau is an outstanding French Enlightenment thinker of 18th century. The core of his political and ideological thought is freedom. The reason why he proposes the concept of general will is that all the citizens can achieve freedom by means of submitting it. Rousseau propose the general will not only with his unique experience and the social background, but also on the influence of other thinkers, such as GrotiusN Hobbes and Locke.General will is the common will of all the people, it embodies the fundamental interests of all the citizens. The general will and freedom are dialectical and integrated. The aim of the general will is to change the dependence between individuals to dependence between individual and community, in order to eliminate the internal and external dual dependence. In the external world, freedom can achieve mainly through the development of laws, which reflect the general will. Rousseau believes that the law is just the embodiment of general will, so it shouldn't be on behalf of individual or small collective interests, it must concerns the fundamental interests of all the citizens, and thus legislation must reflect the distribution of the principles of justice. In the internal world, Rousseau thinks the virtue is important, so the government should mold the citizen's soul by means of stressing individual rights and social responsibility, in order to eliminate the harm of internal dependence.In our current wave of building a harmonious society, we must solve a number of problems: the external world, such as wealth disparities, the internal world, serious moral decline, and Rousseau's ideas can give us profound enlightenment and lessons. We need the unification of the rule of virtue and the rule of law, and we need the unification of rights and social responsibilities.