Rousseau’s general will was a statistical aggregate achieved without any communication

Evidence

Rousseau stresses that arriving at the general will requires no communication; indeed, it excludes it. Communication distorts statistical objectivity. Accordingly, he would like to prohibit political parties and associations. The democracy he envisions is democracy without discourse or communication. Proceeding statistically is supposed to yield a synthesis of quantity and truth. Rousseau offers a biopolitical response to the question of the features defining a good government. He avoids approaching the question morally. For him, the purpose of a political association is simply the protection and welfare of its members. The surest sign of success is the increase of population. Unquestionably, for him, the best government is the one in which the citizens ‘become populous and multiply the most’. Thus, he sounds the call: ‘Calculators, it is now up to you: count, measure, compare.’ — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics, 171

Categorization

• XREF: This upends the usual deliberative-democracy reading of Rousseau; connects to my notes on information-cost theory and why some orders ban communication (cf. Milgrom’s fair-entry models).
• QUESTION: Is Han’s reading that Rousseau’s volonté générale excludes ALL communication accurate, or a distortion of the fuller Rousseau corpus?