German scholar Goethe commented on Jean-jean-jacques rousseau that "Voltaire ended an old era and Rousseau opened a new era". The author thinks that Rousseau's book On Social Contract has laid such a great honor for him. In poor Rousseau's lifetime works, "general will" is his consistent theory. The original intention of Rousseau's "general will" is to establish a social mechanism to solve the contradiction between individuals and society, so as to create a sincere cooperation between people and realize the will of everyone in society, that is, in Rousseau's theory of general will, he said that "general will is always stable, unchanging and pure, but it can yield to other will that is pressed on it." On this basis, he continued his analysis. He said, "there is often a big difference between public will and public will: public will only focuses on public interests, and public will focuses on private interests." The general will is only the sum of individual wills, but apart from the positive and negative offsets between these individual wills, the remaining sum is still the general will. " Here we can vaguely think that "general will" is put forward as a relative concept of "general will" in On Social Contract.

Based on the general will in the social contract, Rousseau's logical result is the theory of people's sovereignty. The theory of people's sovereignty is generally regarded as the highest achievement of Rousseau's theory, as well as the highest achievement of modern natural law theory, and it is also the platform for Rousseau to get such praise from Goethe. Rousseau believes that a unified political body composed of social contracts has absolute rights beyond all its members. The absolute rights above all members here are Rousseau's "general will". It should be noted that this right is not completely in line with the general will. If this power is equivalent to the general will to a certain extent, it is Rousseau's so-called sovereignty. Rousseau believes that national sovereignty belongs to all the people, that is, sovereignty is the same body of all the people and the embodiment of the general will. Individuals are only members, and their collective is Rousseau's universal will to distinguish. Rousseau's "Alone" tries to further explain the value of general will to us from the aspect of sovereignty on the basis of comparing general will and general will.