In The General Will Is Citizenship, Jason Neidleman advances a republican conception of citizenship, which is described and defended via an analysis of the general will in the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, leaders of the French Revolution, and Restoration-era liberals.

The general will is the will members of society have qua citizen, as opposed to the will they have qua private individual. It encapsulates tensions fundamental to egalitarian politics--tensions between individual autonomy and the collective good, between voluntarism and virtue, between popular will and rational will.

Essential to the general will is its foundation in a conception of civic virtue, roughly understood as the subordination of private interests to the common good. Rather than appeal to universal reason or natural law, theorists of the general will look to the formation of citizens as the only way to secure justice and legitimacy.

In addition to articulating a set of abstract principles of justice and legitimacy, they attend to the social and cultural prerequisites to the flourishing of those principles. From within the framework of this dualemphasis, Neidleman constructs a picture of citizenship that exposes the limitations of standard, contemporary conceptions of citizenship, which attend insufficiently to the tensions captured by Rousseau's general will. He also contributes to the contemporary attempt to defend a republican view of citizenship, by systematically delineating the theoretical resources available to it in the French political tradition.