Social contract (political philosophy)

In political philosophy, a social contract is a system that seeks to establish an effective working relationship, based on mutual rights and responsibilities, between the individual and the state. Under such a system, citizens voluntarily yield a proportion of their rights to the state in return for its ongoing benevolent protection. Despite ancient Greek precursors, the canonical expressions of the model date from the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The term itself derives from its most influential formulation and principal manifesto, The Social Contract, a treatise by the Swiss-French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78). Its publication in 1762 generated a huge response, both for and against its radical proposals, and inspired revolutionary fervor. It compelled thereafter a fundamental reconsideration of the goals of government and the rights of citizens. The social contract is a ground-breaking concept that has had a profound and lasting impact on the shaping of western democracy.

Background

Hypothetical discussions of the reciprocal duties of governors and governed had featured in the Republic of Plato (c. 380 BCE) and the works of Epicurus several decades later. Social contract theory, however, emerged as an Enlightenment-era response to the recognition of the large nation-state as the defining example of the modern political community. Its equilibrium of mutual responsibilities—the citizens' and the government's—depended on a definition of "rights" as a working concept. The Dutch legal thinker Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) argued that natural rights were bestowed at birth on all individuals, in a moral order fashioned by God, independent of monarchy. In the Leviathan (1651), by British political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, a covenant acknowledging unanswerable authority was the sole defense against the perpetual warfare that is the default condition of humankind in nature. The people's interests can be safeguarded only through voluntary obedience to a sovereign power—not a king, but an embodiment of collective popular authority—determining law, religious observance, and property rights. The British philosopher John Locke put property rights at the heart of his Second Treatise of Government (1689). Locke's view of morality rested on belief in a natural law granting all individuals fundamental liberties. Among these were the freedom to acquire property, meaning anything, concrete or intangible, gained via labor. In Locke's estimation, people agree that protection of their land and assets is more likely to be assured collectively and consensually than it is individually. Thus, they willingly devolve rights to an accountable central authority comprising a legislature and an executive. In turn, this authority is contractually forbidden from jeopardising the common good of the people, treating them unequally, or taxing them without consent. Rousseau's argument, substantively modifying these earlier theories, was that rights arose not from natural law, but from the march of civilization as a driver of technological and economic progress. His concept of general will required individuals to be simultaneously citizens partaking in sovereign power and subjects bound by the laws of the state. It was in this pioneering, if incendiary, form that the social contract assumed its most influential shape.

Impact

Locke had influenced the American Founding Fathers at the time when the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were drafted. Although the extent of this influence is debated, many American politicians held that, in light of Locke's philosophy, the British king, George III, had forfeited his right to govern. Moreover, the later, defining statement of contract theory, The Social Contract of Rousseau, promised even more than Locke: to free humankind from its chains.

Rousseau proposed that the populace should be inseparable from sovereign authority, having committed to a compact called the "general will." This was not universal will, because any constituency exhibits diversity. It was instead an ideal projection of collective intent, transcending politics, religion, and individual opinion. Legislature and executive are combined, and committees enact decisions decreed by the sovereign authority. Popular assemblies regularly convene, either to confirm the mandate of that authority, or demand revisions. Although the Contract is not a conventionally political document, governmental committees would resemble elective aristocracies. Rousseau's blueprint was essentially secular: humankind is capable of regulating itself, like a machine, without recourse to any supernatural agency. Such facets of the Contract provoked moral outrage during the eighteenth century and later. Critics saw it valuing expediency above ethics, substituting what works for what is right. Furthermore, it was vague on the question of dissent from the general will—itself a nebulous concept. Rousseau assumed that any rational individual would automatically see their personal interests coinciding with those of all other rational individuals. Failure to grasp this would indicate some form of defectiveness; consequently, dissenters must, for their own good and that of the community, be "forced to be free." The potential for this as a justification of totalitarianism was not lost on the instigators of revolution in France (1789–99), and elsewhere. One of the principal architects of the French Revolution, and fomenters of its bloodiest excesses, Maximilien Robespierre (1758–94), claimed the Contract as his inspiration. Although Rousseau died in 1778, years before these events, his optimistic belief in rational collaboration led to consequences far removed from his original vision.

After Rousseau, social contract theory waned in importance until the twentieth century, although some elements do figure in the work of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), hypothesizing a society of moral agents empowered to extrapolate universal legislation from individual expressions of will. In A Theory of Justice (1971), the American political philosopher John Rawls advocated a thought experiment, deriving from contract theory, to reassert the priority of the good over the pragmatic. If a community imagined itself in a state of primordial ignorance of every factor differentiating its members—including race, gender, ability, and religion—its subsequent attempts to build a rational society would have to include concern for all, because nobody could then know how potential future differences might affect them. Rawls thus demonstrated that social contract theory could still accommodate inclusive outcomes of value to the Western democratic process and in defiance of the oppressive uses to which earlier generations had put it.

Bibliography

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