The Social Contract contrasts general wills with private or particular wills. A general will is said to be the will of “the whole community”; private wills are ascribed paradigmatically to individuals in a state of nature. Genuine authority exists only when laws are made by individuals expressing their opinions about what the general will is, rather than their private wills as registered in their preferences. Collective choices that aggregate preferences represent “the will of all,” not the general will. The distinction is exhaustive: Any will that is not general is private. Thus the wills of groups less than the whole community and even the will of all are assimilated conceptually to the category defined by the primordial condition that motivates the establishment of de jure states. Practical politics, in Rousseau's view, is a struggle for supremacy of the general over the private will, a struggle waged at the level of “opinion” for the character and judgment of each individual.

However, despite the centrality of this distinction for his political theory, Rousseau's account of the difference between general and private willing is poorly elaborated and easily misconstrued. Like other eighteenth-century contractarian formulations, Rousseau's appears to suggest that the state of nature and the political community that succeeds it designate real historical conditions. This construal implies the actuality of general will coordination in existing political communities – obscuring the distinction, implicit in The Social Contract, between de jure and de facto authority and conveying a misleading sense of the obstacles in the way of general will coordination for modern states.