ocial 344). This coercion is interpreted as the core of membership in society; thus general will = duty to oneself as one part of the whole.
Locke agrees with Hobbes when he says that states are formed as a way of protecting citizens from attack and with both Hobbes and Rousseau that civil society is a consequence of contractual relations. In Locke's conception there is a tension between state and individual sovereignty. State legitimacy, authority, and organization arise from the need to keep common understanding of who owns what clear and settled. As Locke describes the social compact, citizens swap theoretically unlimited and disorganized access to all property for structures of equal protection of their own property (life, liberty, and estate): "The great and chief end therefore, of Mens uniting into Commonwealths, and putting themselves under Government, is the Preservation of their Property" (Locke 293; emphasis in original).
Mill's view of the tension between society and individual is that it tends to foster stable and generally free society and that the more a society tolerates "freedom of opinion" (524), the less it will slip into "judicial iniquity" that insists on the infallibility and completeness of a supposed social truth (516-17). Thus in a legitimately free society there is no "general will," however useful Rousseau's observations on the "enervating and demoralising effect of the trammels and hypocrisies of artificial society" (Mill 522) may be.
Marx of course throws out much in the Western tradition of civil society. He rejects Hobbes's argument for a monarchy-as-security; Locke's argument for a positive connection between the state and property; Mill's idea of tolerance against truth (Marx possessing truth as he does). He agrees with Rousseau that property is evil and that state structure is the agent of social ills, but the problem is not philosophical; it is material and urgent. Marx's social critique is ins...