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Green, Rousseau, and the Culture Pattern

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

D. H. Monro
Affiliation:
University of Otago, N.Z.

Extract

There are, I think, three distinct senses in which Rousseau uses the term “general will.” He means by it, as the nineteenth century Idealists used to point out, something very like Kant's “good will,” which all men have in common and which cannot conflict with itself. But he also means, quite as often, the Utilitarian compromise, The mean between divergent interests which takes account of all of them and satisfies as many as possible. And, thirdly, he means something like the “culture pattern” of the modern anthropologists. I want to show that Green inherits this ambiguity, and that his argument in the Principles of Political Obligation is plausible only because he does not distinguish between these three meanings of “general will.”

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1951

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References

1 The French is moeurs.

2 Rousseau, J. J., The Social Contract. Tr. Cole, G. D. H.. London, Dent, 1920 (Everyman's Ed.), p. 51.Google Scholar

page 349 note 1 Rousseau, J. J., Emile. Tr. Barbara, Foxley. London, Dent, 1933 (Everyman's Ed.), p. 48.Google Scholar

page 349 note 2 Social Contract, p. 94.

page 350 note 1 Green, T. H., Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation. London, Longmans, Green. 1941, p. 99.Google Scholar

page 351 note 1 Op. cit., p. 106.

page 352 note 2 Op. cit., p. 134.

page 353 note 1 Op. cit., pp. 233–4.

page 354 note 1 Op. cit., pp. 155–6.

page 355 note 1 Op. cit., p. 209.

page 355 note 2 Op. cit., p. 220.

page 355 note 3 Op. cit., p. 224.

page 356 note 1 Op. cit., p. 161.