EXCERPT Rousseau is widely known as the philosopher who laid the foundations of modern democracy. He is also known as the father of Romantic literature. In history of philosophy it is commonly thought that there is a considerable gap between how humanity is conceived by Rousseau the philosopher, author of Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men and The Social Contract and Rousseau the writer of literature who penned Julie; or, The New Heloise, Emile, or On Education, and the Confessions. As a political philosopher, Rousseau is known as someone who took the near-totalitarian position that the individual should follow the will of the community. The passage in The Social Contract that states that ‘the general will is always in the right’ (part 2, chapter 3) is well known. This passage has been interpreted as contending that the will of the community should supersede that of the individual; in fact, it is positively evaluated by conservative thinkers such as Carl Schmitt, whose work I will refer to later in this chapter. On the other hand, the literary Rousseau is remembered as a thoroughgoing individualist who valued solitude, scorned insincerity, and condemned the imposition of communal norms. Many see Julie; or, The New Heloise as the origin of the expression of love as a free outpouring of emotion unencumbered by custom or class, and Confessions shocked many readers with its raw descriptions of private sexual experiences and feelings of jealousy. Far from being a totalitarian, this Rousseau is viewed as a passionate existentialist comparable to Dostoevsky. Totalitarianism or individualism? Society or existence? In other words, politics or literature? Ernst Cassirer called this split the ‘question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’. But is there really a split here? Are society and individual existence opposed to one another? I had my doubts about this, and in General Will 2.0 I tried to show that a reinterpretation of The Social Contract, especially its famous concept of ‘general will’, could serve as the key to solving the puzzle of this split. I invite you to read the book itself for the details, but my suggestion was that Rousseau’s idea of ‘general will’ was developed precisely for those who by their nature don’t like people—in more contemporary language, those who are socially withdrawn or suffer from communication disorders—as a paradoxical apparatus that serves to generate a society without the mediation of sociality …