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Social contract

Concept in political philosophy From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In moral and political philosophy, the social contract is a theory of state that conceives of a legitimate state as arising from the agreement of citizens who consent to surrender some of their freedoms and submit to the authority (of the ruler, or to the decision of a majority) in exchange for protection of their remaining rights or maintenance of the social order.[1][2][3]

The original cover of Thomas Hobbes's work Leviathan (1651), in which he discusses the concept of the social contract theory

Conceptualized in the Age of Enlightenment, social contractarianism is a core concept of modern theories of constitutionalism. The term takes its name from The Social Contract (French: Du contrat social ou Principes du droit politique), a 1762 book by Jean-Jacques Rousseau that discussed this concept. The starting point for most social contract theories is an examination of the human condition absent any political order, a social position termed the "state of nature" by Thomas Hobbes.[4]

In this condition, individuals' actions are bound only by their personal power and conscience, assuming that 'nature' precludes mutually beneficial social relationships. From this shared premise, social contract theorists aim to demonstrate why rational individuals would voluntarily relinquish their natural freedom in exchange for the benefits of political order.

Philosophical schools

Social contract theories generally encompass a number of common components:[5]

  1. First, there is usually, to begin with, a so-called original position or state of nature, prior to the existence of a state.[6]
  2. Within this state, hypothetical individuals will deliberate upon various arguments.
  3. In their deliberation, they will decide upon a contract, encompassing rules, standards, or institutions, among themselves.
  4. This contract is the social contract.
  5. Within this thought experiment, real individuals are to be guided by the contract in their interactions with each other.
  6. However, they must share and endorse the reasons that the hypothetical individuals had in choosing those rules within the deliberative setting.
  7. The real individuals will only obey the set rules inasmuch as they share the reasons that the hypothetical individuals had in deliberation.

Hobbesian

The Hobbesian social contract, as outlined in Leviathan, begins with an analysis of the state of nature of humanity, an anarchic state prior to any form of rule or sovereignty. The lives of individuals in this state are "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short"; it is a state in which self-interest prevails as "a war of all against all"; and the absence of reliably protected rights and agreements prevents a society from forming.

Naturally, Hobbes theorised, individuals in the state of nature would come together and cede some of their individual rights, so that others would cede theirs. For example, one would agree not to use force against another, and the latter would in turn agree not to use force against the former. This agreement is the social contract, and it irrevocably results in the creation of a sovereign state, which is to create laws to regulate social interactions. For the state not to be anarchic, Hobbes argues that there must be a sovereign ruler, which Hobbes compares to the biblical Leviathan, an entity with absolute authority over life and death. Without the terror of such a powerful ruler, humans would not obey the law, and they would not obey the reciprocal golden rule, "doing to others, as wee would be done to".[7]

Just like in the state of nature, without a system of law amongst sovereign states, states are bound to be in conflict because there was no sovereign, over and above the state, which was more powerful and capable of imposing some system such on every state by force. Hobbes' work later inspired realist theories of international relations, which consider the basic unit of analysis to be states with no overarching higher authority.[8]

Lockean

John Locke believed that individuals in a state of nature would be bound morally, by the Law of Nature, in which man has the "power... to preserve his property; that is, his life, liberty and estate against the injuries and attempts of other men". In The Second Treatise of Government (1689), he asserted that “the state of Nature (...) teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions.[9]

Without government to defend them against those seeking to injure or enslave them, Locke further believed people would have no security in their rights and would live in fear. Individuals, to Locke, would only agree to form a state that would provide, in part, a "neutral judge", acting to protect the lives, liberty, and property of those who lived within it.[10][11]

In Locke's theory of the state, the government, as an impartial judge, may use the collective force of the populace to administer and enforce the law, rather than have each man acting as his own judge, jury, and executioner—the condition in the state of nature.[12] While Hobbes argued for near-absolute authority, Locke argued for inviolate freedom under law in his Second Treatise of Government. Locke argued that a government's legitimacy comes from the citizens' delegation to the government of their absolute right of violence, though reserving the inalienable right of self-defense or "self-preservation". According to Locke:[9]

Whenever the legislators endeavour to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any farther obedience” and gain the “right to resume their original liberty.

Locke also regarded the social contract as involving the alienation of other rights (e.g. property will be liable to taxation), to the extent necessary to achieve the goal of security and other goals.

Ideas related to the social contract theory, particularly those of John Locke, intellectually inspired the United States Declaration of Independence. His ideas on every individual’s’ right to ‘life, liberty, and property’ as well as the people’s ‘right to revolt’ were particularly influential.

Reception in the United States

Locke’s idea that everyone has the right to 'life, liberty, and property' inspired the Declaration of Independence (1776)[13] of the United States of America, particularly in the phrase “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”[14][15] Indeed, Thomas Jefferson, one of the main authors of the Declaration, wrote in a 1825 letter that “Locke,” along with figures such as “Aristotle, Cicero, (...) [and] Sidney,” served as great intellectual foundations for the Declaration, as the text’s “authority rests then on the harmonising sentiments” of these writers.[16]

Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau's political theory differs in important ways from that of Locke and Hobbes. Rousseau's collectivist conception is most evident in his conception of the "general will", that is, is the power of all the citizens' collective interest: Rousseau did not believe in any form of representative governmen; rather, he thought that society was only legitimate when the sovereign (i.e. the "general will") were the sole legislators. He also stated that the individual must accept "the total alienation to the whole community of each associate with all his rights".[17]

Rousseau believed that for the social contract to work, individuals must forfeit their rights to the whole so that such conditions were "equal for all":[18]

[The social contract] can be reduced to the following terms: Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will; and in a body, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole.[19]

Rousseau argued that societal laws are upheld by the collective will of the citizens whom they represent. Thus, in obeying laws, the citizen "remains free." Within elections, the will of the establishment is the will of the collective. Barring corruption, the legitimacy of the democratic government is absolute.[20] According to Rousseau, since the indivisible and inalienable popular sovereignty decides what is good for the whole, if an individual rejects this "civil liberty" in place of "natural liberty" and self interest, disobeying the law,[21] he will be forced to listen to what was decided when the people acted as a collective. Thus the law, inasmuch as it is created by the people acting as a body, is not a limitation of individual freedom, but rather its expression. The individual, as a member of a collective, explicitly agreed to be constrained if, as a private individual, he did not respect his own will as formulated in the general will:[22]

In every real democracy, magistracy is not an advantage, but a burdensome charge which cannot justly be imposed on one individual rather than another. The law alone can lay the charge on him on whom the lot falls. For, the conditions being then the same for all, and the choice not depending on any human will, there is no particular application to alter the universality of the law.

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract or Principles of Political Right. Book IV[23]

Because laws represent the restraint of "natural liberty", they represent the leap made from humans in the state of nature into civil society. In this sense, the law is a civilizing force. Rousseau, thus, further believed that the laws that govern a people help to mould their character.[21] He further viewed the law as acting in a way that mitigates risks for all citizens, in a way akin to modern insurance.[24]

Rawlsian

Building on the work of Immanuel Kant with its presumption of limits on the state,[25] John Rawls (1921–2002), in A Theory of Justice (1971), proposed a contractarian approach whereby rational people in a hypothetical "original position" would set aside their individual preferences and capacities under a "veil of ignorance" and agree to certain general principles of justice and legal organization. This idea is also used as a game-theoretical formalization of the notion of fairness.[26]

Other models

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's individualist social contract (1851)

While Rousseau's social contract is based on popular sovereignty and not on individual sovereignty, there are other theories espoused by individualists, libertarians, and anarchists that do not involve agreeing to anything more than negative rights and creates only a limited state, if any.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865) advocated a conception of social contract that did not involve an individual surrendering sovereignty to others. According to him, the social contract was not between individuals and the state, but rather among individuals who refrain from coercing or governing each other, each one maintaining complete sovereignty upon him- or herself:

What really is the Social Contract? An agreement of the citizen with the government? No, that would mean but the continuation of [Rousseau's] idea. The social contract is an agreement of man with man; an agreement from which must result what we call society. In this, the notion of commutative justice, first brought forward by the primitive fact of exchange, ... is substituted for that of distributive justice ... Translating these words, contract, commutative justice, which are the language of the law, into the language of business, and you have commerce, that is to say, in its highest significance, the act by which man and man declare themselves essentially producers, and abdicate all pretension to govern each other.

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century (1851)

David Gauthier's Morals by Agreement (1986)

Main article: Contractarian ethics

David Gauthier's "neo-Hobbesian" theory argues that cooperation between two independent and self-interested parties is indeed possible, especially when it comes to understanding morality and politics.[27] Gauthier notably points out the advantages of cooperation between two parties when it comes to the challenge of the prisoner's dilemma. He proposes that, if two parties were to stick to the original agreed-upon arrangement and morals outlined by the contract, they would both experience an optimal result.[27][28] In his model for the social contract, factors including trust, rationality, and self-interest keep each party honest and dissuade them from breaking the rules.[27][28]

Philip Pettit's Republicanism (1997)

Philip Pettit has argued, in Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (1997), that the theory of social contract, classically based on the consent of the governed, should be modified. Instead of arguing for explicit consent, which can always be manufactured, Pettit argues that the absence of an effective rebellion against it is a contract's only legitimacy.

Formal models

History

Although the antecedents of social contract theory are found in antiquity, in Greek and Stoic philosophy and Roman and Canon Law, the heyday of the social contract was the mid-17th to early 19th centuries, when it emerged as the leading doctrine of political legitimacy.[citation needed]

In Western philosophy, the concept of the social contract was described by Plato in The Republic, Book II:

When men have both done and suffered injustice and have had experience of both, not being able to avoid the one and obtain the other, they think that they had better agree among themselves to have neither; hence there arise laws and mutual covenants; and that which is ordained by law is termed by them lawful and just. This they affirm to be the origin and nature of justice;—it is a mean or compromise, between the best of all, which is to do injustice and not be punished, and the worst of all, which is to suffer injustice without the power of retaliation; and justice, being at a middle point between the two, is tolerated not as a good, but as the lesser evil, and honoured by reason of the inability of men to do injustice. For no man who is worthy to be called a man would ever submit to such an agreement if he were able to resist.[29]

Epicurus, in the fourth century BC, also notes, in his Principal Doctrines:

31. Natural justice is a pledge of reciprocal benefit, to prevent one man from harming or being harmed by another.

32. Those animals which are incapable of making binding agreements with one another not to inflict nor suffer harm are without either justice or injustice; and likewise for those peoples who either could not or would not form binding agreements not to inflict nor suffer harm.

33. There never was such a thing as absolute justice, but only agreements made in mutual dealings among men in whatever places at various times providing against the infliction or suffering of harm.[30]

Renaissance developments

The first modern philosopher to articulate a detailed contract theory was Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) in his Leviathan (1651).[31] Later, John Locke's conception of the social contract differed from Hobbes' in several fundamental ways, retaining only the central notion that individuals in a state of nature would willingly come together to form a state.[32] Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), in his influential 1762 treatise The Social Contract, outlined a different version of social-contract theory, as the foundations of society based on the sovereignty of the "general will".[33]

Prominent 17th- and 18th-century theorists of the social contract and natural rights included Hugo de Groot (1625), Thomas Hobbes (1651), Samuel von Pufendorf (1673), John Locke (1689), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762) and Immanuel Kant (1797), each approaching the concept of political authority differently. Grotius posited that individual humans had natural rights. Hobbes famously said that in a "state of nature", human life would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short". In the absence of political order and law, everyone would have unlimited natural freedoms, including the "right to all things" and thus the freedom to plunder, rape and murder. There would be an endless "war of all against all" (bellum omnium contra omnes). To avoid this, free men contract with each other to establish political community (civil society) through a social contract in which they all gain security in return for subjecting themselves to an absolute sovereign, one man or an assembly of men. Though the sovereign's edicts may well be arbitrary and tyrannical, Hobbes saw absolute government as the only alternative to the terrifying anarchy of a state of nature. Hobbes asserted that humans consent to abdicate their rights in favor of the absolute authority of government (whether monarchical or parliamentary).[citation needed]

Quentin Skinner has also argued that several critical modern innovations in contract theory are found in the writings from French Calvinists and Huguenots, whose work in turn was invoked by writers in the Low Countries who objected to their subjection to Spain and, later still, by Catholics in England.[34]

Application

The social contract can be used as a theoretical object to analyse the capacity for a population to accept change, upon which the change exerts 'pressure'. In an analysis of the consequences of the Gulf Cooperation Council states changing energy prices, the social contract defines the capacity for change. Higher energy prices for resident households can have an adverse impact, meaning that the consent of the participants in the contract needs to be maintained, because before energy price increases, prices for residents were kept low by charging higher prices for exported oil.[35]

Criticism

An early critic of social contract theory and friend of Rousseau's was the philosopher David Hume, who in 1742 published an essay "Of Civil Liberty". The second part of this essay, entitled "Of the Original Contract",[36] stresses that the concept of a "social contract" is a convenient fiction:

As no party, in the present age can well support itself without a philosophical or speculative system of principles annexed to its political or practical one; we accordingly find that each of the factions into which this nation is divided has reared up a fabric of the former kind, in order to protect and cover that scheme of actions which it pursues. ... The one party [defenders of the absolute and divine right of kings, or Tories], by tracing up government to the DEITY, endeavor to render it so sacred and inviolate that it must be little less than sacrilege, however tyrannical it may become, to touch or invade it in the smallest article. The other party [the Whigs, or believers in constitutional monarchy], by founding government altogether on the consent of the PEOPLE suppose that there is a kind of original contract by which the subjects have tacitly reserved the power of resisting their sovereign, whenever they find themselves aggrieved by that authority with which they have for certain purposes voluntarily entrusted him.

— David Hume, "On Civil Liberty" [II.XII.1][36]

Hume argued that consent of the governed was the ideal foundation on which a government should rest, but that it had not actually occurred this way in general.

My intention here is not to exclude the consent of the people from being one just foundation of government where it has place. It is surely the best and most sacred of any. I only contend that it has very seldom had place in any degree and never almost in its full extent. And that therefore some other foundation of government must also be admitted.

— Ibid II.XII.20

Natural law and constitutionalism

The legal scholar Randy Barnett has argued[37] that, while presence in the territory of a society may be necessary for consent, this does not constitute consent to all rules the society might make regardless of their content. A second condition of consent is that the rules be consistent with underlying principles of justice and the protection of natural and social rights, and have procedures for effective protection of those rights (or liberties). This has also been discussed by O. A. Brownson,[38] who argued that, in a sense, three "constitutions" are involved: first, the constitution of nature that includes all of what the Founders called "natural law"; second, the constitution of society, an unwritten and commonly understood set of rules for the society formed by a social contract before it establishes a government, by which it does establish the third, a constitution of government. To consent, a necessary condition is that the rules be constitutional in that sense.

The theory of a tacit social contract holds that by remaining in the territory controlled by some society, which usually has a government, people give consent to join that society and be governed by its government if any. This consent is what gives legitimacy to such a government. Other writers have argued that consent to join the society is not necessarily consent to its government. For that, the government must be set up according to a constitution of government that is consistent with the superior unwritten constitutions of nature and society.[39]

Contracts must be consensual

According to the will theory of contract, a contract is not presumed valid unless all parties voluntarily agree to it, either tacitly or explicitly, without coercion. Lysander Spooner, a 19th-century lawyer who argued before the Supreme Court of the United States and a staunch supporter of a right of contract between individuals, argued in his essay No Treason that a supposed social contract cannot be used to justify governmental actions such as taxation because government will initiate force against anyone who does not wish to enter into such a contract. As a result, he maintains that such an agreement is not voluntary and therefore cannot be considered a legitimate contract at all. As an abolitionist, he made similar arguments about the unconstitutionality of slavery in the US.

Individuals are not better off under states

In their book Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy, the philosopher Karl Widerquist and anthropologist Grant McCall criticise social contract theory on the grounds that not all individuals are better off than they could reasonably expect to be in the state of nature, thereby removing the justification for giving up liberty in exchange for welfare.[40]

See also

Constitutional frameworks

Texts, moral philosophy, and critiques

Other contracts and early-modern political theology

References

Further reading

External links

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