Key Arguments

• Rousseau posits an ideal deliberative condition: "If, when the people, being furnished with adequate information, held its deliberations, the citizens had no communication one with another," linking correctness of decision to both information sufficiency and independence of judgment.
• Under these conditions, he claims, individual divergences would aggregate into the general will: "the grand total of the small differences would always give the general will, and the decision would always be good."
• The phrase "grand total of the small differences" connects back to his earlier 'sum of the differences' model, implying that when each citizen votes privately from his own perspective, without coordination, their errors offset and the shared interest emerges.
• This thought experiment suggests that corruption of the general will does not arise from numerical aggregation itself, but from distortions introduced by communication, coordination, and organized interests.

Source Quotes

There is often a great deal of difference between the will of all and the general will; the latter considers only the common interest, while the former takes private interest into account, and is no more than a sum of particular wills: but take away from these same wills the pluses and minuses that cancel one another, and the general will remains as the sum of the differences. If, when the people, being furnished with adequate information, held its deliberations, the citizens had no communication one with another, the grand total of the small differences would always give the general will, and the decision would always be good. But when factions arise, and partial associations are formed at the expense of the great association, the will of each of these associations becomes general in relation to its members, while it remains particular in relation to the State: it may then be said that there are no longer as many votes as there are men, but only as many as there are associations.

Key Concepts

• If, when the people, being furnished with adequate information, held its deliberations, the citizens had no communication one with another, the grand total of the small differences would always give the general will, and the decision would always be good.

Context

Immediately after the will of all/general will distinction in Book II, Chapter III, where Rousseau describes ideal conditions under which popular voting would infallibly express the general will.