Empiricism, Rationalism, General Will, We

For the Empiricist,'general' means 'aggregate of particulars'; for the Rationalist, it means 'universal individual'. But, regardless of their differences, in common is the inadequacy of each to Rousseau's concept of General Will as is expressed in the formulation "We the people". For the Empiricist, 'we' is a mere abstraction, while for the Rationalist, its entailed multiplicity is merely Phenomenal. So, for the entire extant Philosophical tradition, the perhaps cardinal Political idea of the late 18th century, not to mention the first person plural grammatical category of most languages for millennia, is at least partly fictitious.