Let’s begin with some political theory. Aristotle, in his great treatise, the Politics, concluded that there are, basically, only two different kinds of governments in terms of the outcomes for a society -- those that serve the common good, or the public interest, and those that have been co-opted to serve the self-interests of the people who hold political power. Aristotle identified six different types of governments structurally – from monarchies to mob rule – but the most important distinction for Aristotle was between governments that are consensually accepted by the citizenry and are viewed as being “legitimate” because they accommodate to the needs and interests of all the “stakeholders” and, on the other hand, governments that are coercive and rule by force over an unwilling, conflicted, perhaps even revolutionary society.
As the political history of the past two thousand years abundantly confirms, Aristotle got it right. Stable societies of all types are governed by an implicit “social contract” – a set of shared social benefits and reciprocal obligations among the various interests and constituencies. There is also voluntary compliance, for the most part, with the society’s laws and practices.
In contrast, corrupted governments – and there are a great many of them these days -- must rely on intimidation, coercion, and lethal force to obtain the “consent” of the governed. They are, therefore, ultimately unstable. These societies do not have a social contract, or else it has broken down. (The exceptions are repressive societies that are nevertheless united by a menacing external enemy – like the Soviet Union in World War Two.)
The core idea of a social contract goes all the way back to Plato in the Crito, where he argued that, if a society provides the wherewithal for our “existence”, then we have a reciprocal “obligation” to obey its laws. However, the formal term “social contract,” and various theories about it, is mostly associated with the writings of the philosophers Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, some seventeen centuries later.
These three Enlightenment era theorists all relied on a presumed “state of nature,” before there were organized societies. Thus, Hobbes argued that the state of nature was a “war of each against all” and that a civil society serves primarily to keep the peace. The social contract, therefore, requires everyone to submit to an “absolute” sovereign authority – the King. Locke, on the other hand, portrayed the state of nature as peaceful and the social contract as a voluntary undertaking mainly to protect our property, and our “lives.” It can be disbanded at will.
Rousseau strongly disagreed. The state of nature was solitary, and people came together to exploit the benefits of cooperation and a division of labor. However, the invention of private property resulted in competition, greed, and extreme economic inequality. In his famous essay, The Social Contract, Rousseau called for the creation of a new social contract that would be based on direct democracy and the abolition of private property in favor of communal property, a formulation that later became the inspiration for the socialist and communist theorists – and communist regimes -- of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The modern American philosopher John Rawls should also be mentioned. His theory of justice amounts to an elaborately constructed variation on the Golden Rule – “do unto others…” Using a thought experiment about an “original position” behind a “veil of ignorance” (an abstracted version of the state of nature), Rawls posited two principles of “fairness” that he deemed everyone would want for themselves, and for others – basic personal liberty and an acceptance of economic inequality constrained by the rule that the least advantaged would benefit from any “rising tide.” Rawls’ theory of “justice as fairness” has been much debated.
The Social Contract:
Who Needs It?
by Peter Corning