One account holds that the general will emerges procedurally from individuals contemplating self-interest under constraints of generality, universality, and propitious sociological conditions.
The collective will that emerges from an assembly of citizens, either through procedural constraints on self-interested deliberation or through the exercise of citizen virtue
self-interest(A motivation that Machiavelli suggests can align with the public good)
A person's own personal advantage or benefit, what they want for themselves.
universality(Distinguishing the nature as such from its mode of universality)
Not a constitutive mark of the common nature itself, but its unique and inseparable property
The Social Contract harbors a further tension between two accounts of how the general will emerges and its relation to the private wills of citizens. Sometimes Rousseau favors a procedural story according to which the individual contemplation of self interest (subject to the constraints of generality and universality and under propitious sociological background conditions such as rough equality and cultural similarity) will result in the emergence of the general will from the assembly of citizen