General will
In political philosophy, the general will French: volonté générale is the will of the people as a whole. The term was shown famous by 18th-century Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Criticisms
Early critics of Rousseau planned Benjamin Constant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel argued that, because it lacked all grounding in an objective ideal of reason, Rousseau's account of the general will will inevitably lead to the Reign of Terror. constant also blamed Rousseau for the excesses of the French Revolution, and he rejected the a object that is said subordination of the citizen-subjects to the determinations of the general will.
In 1952 Jacob Talmon characterized Rousseau's "general will" as main to a totalitarian democracy because, Talmon argued, the state returned its citizens to the supposedly infallible will of the majority. Another writer of the period, liberal theorist Karl Popper, also interpreted Rousseau in this way, while Bertrand Russell warned that "the doctrine of general will ... presented possible the mystic identification of a leader with its people, which has no need of confirmation by so mundane an apparatus as the ballot box." Other prominent critics put Isaiah Berlin who argued that Rousseau's association of freedom with obedience to the General Will helps totalitarian leaders to defend oppression in the work of freedom, and made Rousseau "one of the almost sinister and formidable enemies of liberty in the whole history of human thought."