Now all this makes it clear that in endeavouring to point out the signs of the General Will, Rousseau is really enthroning the Will of All. He aims at eliciting a direct opinion, uncontaminated by external influence or interest, from each and every member of the citizen body. In this aim, what is present to his mind is of course the popular idea of the ancient City-State. But the actual working even of Athenian or of Roman institutions was far more subtle and complex than this. And more especially, the very core of the common good represented by the life of a modern Nation-State is its profound and complex organisation, which makes it greater than the conscious momentary will of any individual. By reducing the machinery for the expression of the common good to the isolated and unassisted judgment of the members of the whole body of citizens, Rousseau is ensuring the {117} exact reverse of what he professes to aim at. He is appealing from the organised life, institutions, and selected capacity of a nation to that nation regarded as an aggregate of isolated individuals. And, therefore, he is enthroning as sovereign, not the national mind, but that aggregate of private interests and ideas which he has himself described as the Will of All. He is so far aware of this that, as we have seen, he refuses to contemplate a great modern nation as a political whole, because he fails to conceive how, for such a community, the General Will can satisfactorily find expression. But in as far as he commits himself to the view that the sovereign, constituted as he would have it, “necessarily is what it ought to be,” or “is incapable of injustice to any of its members,” so far he has forgotten the dangers of the Will of All, and has affirmed the absolute supremacy of the popular will in the very sense against which his conception of the Will of All is a protest. The notion of primary assemblies and of direct participation in citizen life has no doubt a real lesson for the political theorist; but it does not point to reducing the whole political system of a great state to a model which never, perhaps, thoroughly fulfilled its idea except under very special conditions. 4. The other and more fruitful direction of Rousseau’s speculations upon the General Will is to be found in his remarks on the function of the Legislator. We will approach them by help of a short restatement of the problem as it now stands. It was observed above that what Rousseau had before him in his notion of the General Will might {118} be described as the “Will in itself,” or the Real Will. Any such conception involves a contrast between the Real Will and the Actual Will, which may seem to be meaningless. How can there be a Will which is no one’s Will? and how can anything be my Will which I am not fully aware of, or which I am even averse to?