Let me begin by giving a bit of a historical and philosophical background.
The idea of social contract goes as far back as Plato’s, Republic, but historically its more closely associated with European philosophers like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Their idea was that some sort of tacit or implicit social agreement between governments and citizens was needed in order to establish a stable political society. Without such an established political state we would fall back into a primal ‘state of nature’ a ‘war of all against all, where the life of a person is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’. The social contract would provide polities with stability and continuity.
Hobbes lived in the late 16th and 17th century in the midst of what we now refer to as the scientific revolution beginning with people like Copernicus, Galileo and Francis Bacon, as well as Rene Descartes. Thomas Hobbes’s view of human beings is mechanistic. In his great work the Leviathan he describes us as “engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch—what is the heart, but a spring; and the nerves, but so many strings” and so on. In a primitive state of nature, we tend to be rather selfish and violent machines—hence the need for a social covenant or contract founded on the creation of a common power who will keep us in awe and direct our actions towards the common good—for Hobbes this meant a sovereign or Monarch.
Very much like Hobbes John Locke viewed the social contract as the means through which restrictions could be imposed on persons who were in the state of nature completely free. However, the Lockean state of nature was rather more peaceful than Hobbes war of all against all. One might say that for Hobbes we are compelled towards agreement out of fear of violence by others, but for Locke we rationally opt into the social contract simply because it is in our economic and social self-interest. For Locke, once a social contract is established through government persons give over the power to protect themselves to the state. The Lockean view emphasizes ideas of liberty, equality, and contractual agreement which are expressed through constitutional (contractual) arrangements between independent parties.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, by contrast, thought that sovereignty should not be invested in any one person but rather in the general will of the people. In a real sense Rousseau wanted to put forward a new kind of social contract. Rousseau argues that we were born free and happy living in the wild’s and civilization put us chains. The more civilized we became the more we were dominated by inequality, violence, unhappiness and dependency. Civilization, he argued was thoroughly corrupted: the oppressive feudal system of eighteenth-century France with its decadent and parasitical aristocracy, and even the Enlightenment with its worship of reason, private property and progress were oppressive and actually led us away from truly moral progress. Civilization only serves our vanity and cultivates greed rather than serving our natural everyday needs and desire to be free.
The only way to break these oppressive chains would be for citizens to agree to be bound by a social contract that emphasized strong and direct democracy, periodic assembling and the gradual formation of a more general will or 'will of the people' as sovereign. At this point it is not private or selfish interest that guarantees our freedom but rather the general will. The idea behind all of these early social contract theorists was that human beings, as rational beings, are able to imagine a social contract system that would justify political authority based on individual self-interest or general will.
After WWII there was a shared sense that what needed to be defended was the freedom of the individual and liberal, democratic, institutions. One can sympathise with this since the world was up against Nazi Germany and other fascist, autocratic regimes that were anything but emancipatory or democratic. Therefore, a more contemporary political philosopher, John Rawls recast the social contract as a defence of liberalism and what he called ‘fairness.’ In his book A Theory of Justice, Rawls devises a very interesting thought experiment.
He asks us to imagine we’re all sitting down with everyone at a table but we don’t know who we are—young or old, men or women, black or white, we don’t know our economic status or social standing and so on. We are amnesiacs, or to use Rawls metaphor we are covered by a ‘veil of ignorance.’ The metaphor of a veil is employed to capture the notion of impartiality. Think here of the Lady of Justice statue—she is usually depicted holding a set of scales representing fairness, a sword representing the idea that justice must be enforceable, and a blindfold representing impartiality.
In this ‘original position’, Rawls then asks which principles we would all agree to be governed by. We are like a blank slate upon which will be written the rules of justice and fairness. We want things to work out for ourselves, but we realize that we cannot do this without cooperating with others. We may be self-interested or even selfish but we are now compelled to put our self-interest, our selfish desires behind us for the sake of a more common good and presumably slice up the pie in a more equitable way.
In light of this, we might want to ask whether Rawls’s philosophical defence of liberal democracy is really all that helpful. He asks us to base our social contract on a mythic story of abstract people agreeing among themselves about certain principles of justice. One might counter that we need much more concrete proposals and policies if we are ever going to construct a world built on notions of justice and fairness! But Rawls thinks that before we ever get to the concrete world of policy we have to first philosophically reflect on what justice and fairness presuppose in a free society. What are these necessary presuppositions? Essentially, they are two:
1. Liberty Principle: Everyone shall have basic political liberties: freedom of conscience and speech, voting rights, property rights, freedom from arbitrary arrest.
2. Egalitarian Principle: No economic inequality is to be allowed unless the inequality in wealth works for those who are least well off
Now of course, in the real world, we don’t all gather together in the public square and sign a social contract. But we do elect governments and expect them to deliver on what they promised. In philosophical language, social contracts are performative, not legal or descriptive. In other words, their value is in shaping our social attitudes and expectations towards each other and our government rather than expressly commanding us to do this or that. The problem is that historically so-called liberal democracy’s answer to fascism eventually became neither liberal nor democratic—in other words, the societies over which Western governments ruled became more and more aligned with the interests of a very rich and powerful corporate elite. The latter were not violent: they were okay with elections so long as they could control them, and okay with cultural expressions of freedom—sexual identity, civil rights for women, black and brown people, so long as progress in these latter areas did not fundamentally threaten their exponential accumulation of wealth or their decision-making power. Western governments have reduced the social contract to an exclusively economic contract with winners and losers—the very wealthy and everybody else.
Communitarian-minded thinkers, (as distinct from Rawlsian liberals) argued that the question of justice must inevitably lead us to ask much more basic questions: ‘What is it to live a good life?’ or ‘What is the common good’. Those who hold to liberalism don’t want to answer these questions. What they want instead is to come up with an impartial, rational procedure that people will agree to who might individually hold very different notions of what the good life might be. The liberal will claim that he or she is fully prepared to defend the right of someone who holds views about what makes a good life which they are fundamentally opposed to just as long as the rights of individual liberty are upheld and there is a reasonably fair economic distribution. By contrast, the communitarian would argue that our identity as individual persons is shaped and informed by communal relationships—we are not just political animals but inherently social beings.
If you are persuaded that we are essentially social and cooperative animals you’ll likely be more sympathetic to the communitarian view. If, by contrast you hold to the notion that we are autonomous self-interested (perhaps selfish) individuals who have no necessary social connection with others, you’ll likely opt for the more liberal Rawlsian perspective.
What is Wrong with the Notion of Social Contact?
First off, the notion of social contract as it has been elaborated here is a Western liberal perspective—it presupposes a very particular view of human nature and relation to the planet. Philosophically, Rawls’s Theory of Justice is a product of enlightenment thinking, but socially and politically it emerges from a capitalist economic system based on the sanctity of private property and the unquestioned premise that we are essentially unruly, selfish beings who take advantage of others whenever it suits us.
The social contract as imagined by Hobbes and Locke was their way of justifying land expropriation, exploitation of indigenous, black and brown people and colonial expansion. It divided the world into privileged property owners, and everyone else. In so doing it provided legal cover for what are recognizably unjust social, economic and political relations. By the late 1970s and early 1980s the welfare-state version of the social contract began to unravel as a consequence of a neoliberal paradigm shift and hyper-globalization. The neoliberal program encouraged governments to privatize public goods, lands and services, deregulate corporations and view them as persons with rights—rights that often undermine human, labour and environmental rights.
The result in the present day? Well, the wealth of the world’s five richest men has more than doubled since 2020, at the same time as 4.8 billion people became poorer. Only 0.4% of the world’s largest companies have agreed to pay minimum wages. The poorer half of the world earned only 8.5% of world income in 2022. This inequality is no accident. Contemporary wealth concentration began with extractive colonialism and empire. It has dramatically accelerated as a wealthy power elite began to take complete control of the economy and the polity.
So, the reality is that there wasn’t much that was social, fair or democratic about the social contract in historical terms. Neither do social contracts fare well under autocracy, oligarchy or plutocracy. In the present day the social, political and economic spheres have been almost entirely colonized by a ruling class composed of wealthy corporations and moneyed individuals—in other words, people who are not really interested in social contracts, or for that matter protecting the environment, or sharing wealth or and power.
Even more dangerous, the neoliberal political framework upon which today’s capitalist societies are based, ends with environmentally unsustainable growth models, never-ending wars, multiple economic, environmental and health crises, economic precarity, rising fascism and political polarization exacerbated by nationalist autocratic governments. Since the 1990’s neoliberals have done their level best to privatize the social contract, and end any sort of global collective thinking or social notion that we’re all in this together. Indeed, it was Margaret Thatcher, neoliberal par excellence, who told us all that ‘there is no such thing as society or the social! There are only individual men and women’. On the ash heap of the social contract, Thatcher envisioned the rise of a new individualist paradise, enabled by an unfettered ‘free market’ and corporate-owned governments, whose exclusive priority would be to serve the ambitions and financial interests of a very small moneyed class.
A More Just, Environmentally Sound Social Contract—From Fred’s Perspective
So now, let’s imagine we get to start over again. What would a more just and environmentally sound social contract look like? What would be the fundamental social, economic, political and environmental conditions that might serve as a principled or ethical social contract framework? I think first we must certainly hold to a notion of a common humanity. Secondly, we must situate this notion of common humanity within an eco-social and environmental ethical framework.
The idea of a common humanity is very straightforward. We may all be distinct in terms of language, dress, skin colour, ethnic traditions and political allegiances, but under a notion of common humanity we are all human beings who have emotional, social and practical needs. To flourish emotionally we need love and friendship. But practically we need nutritious food, clean water, affordable housing, good healthcare and education, and the opportunity to realize our native, talents, abilities and capacities.
Thus, there are necessary social, economic and political conditions that should govern our relations with each other and the planet that sustains us: political freedom, economic fairness and democracy. Ideally, we want a world that encourages us to cultivate and uphold certain virtues: kindness, generosity, dignity, love, forgiveness, friendship, compassion, benevolence, humility, patience and truthfulness. For this to happen we need an eco-social framework for action that articulates and legally enforces basic egalitarian and environmental principles. My eco-social and environmental framework for action would demand that we:
1. Adopt economic approaches that reduce over-consumption by rich nations and build tax systems to force corporations and the rich to pay their fair share
2. Abolish monopolies and the billionaire class.
3. Establish an economic protection fund for the least wealthy societies and persons
4. End the extraction and use of fossil fuels, and demand that fossil fuel corporations pay for any environmental damages they have caused
5. Strictly limit the use of chemical contaminants that damage the environment: and enforce polluter pays legislation.
6. End the production of single-use plastics
7. Put in place a food security system that ensures safe and nutritious food for everyone
8. End the use of agricultural biotechnologies that encourage monoculture
9. Create climate-friendly jobs and adopt a just transition approach for workers
10. Adopt inclusive and participatory principles of economic, gender and racial equality as well as direct participation in decision-making through citizen assemblies.
11. End the criminalization of Indigenous and other marginalized groups fighting to protect their lands and waters. A new eco-social contract must be decolonized, and informed by indigenous knowledge, and environmental values.
mechanisms.
Put simply, the ethics of any new eco-social environmental contract must not only be founded on the idea of common humanity, but also an eco-centric worldview that recognizes there is intrinsic value in all life-forms and ecosystems. The question that arises here is whether a global eco-social contract presupposes the end of the nation-state. A paradox begins to emerge: advancing ideas and constructs applicable to all human beings, to a common humanity, run counter to the notion of the social contract originally elaborated within the context of very specific national and political settings.
Despite this problem, we are most definitely at a point in time where holding fast to the anthropocentric perspective presupposed in past social contracts that only value other lifeforms and ecosystems insofar as they are pleasant, useful or profitable to humans, leads inevitably to massive species die-offs detrimental to future humanity. The thesis that non-human nature has intrinsic value regardless of human preferences or valuations is now common—it is no longer just a quaint notion held only by deep ecologists and environmentalists. The rather awkward irony here is that we moderns are rather late to the game: the intrinsic value perspective is something indigenous cultures around the world have recognized for thousands of years.
So…does such a notion of social contract exist anywhere?
Yes. Many nations are now rethinking the social contract in ways that reflect the realities of climate warming, environmental degradation and the scourge of neoliberalism and corporate capitalism. One particular example is called the Earth Charter. It was proposed for the United Nations and endorsed at the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 2002.
The Framework for Action of the Earth Charter explicitly accepts the reality that elements of the ecosphere have co-evolved to form a wondrous and intricate complexity that sustains the web of life. The argument here is that nature has intrinsic value, whether humans perceive this or not. Implicitly, this is also a recognition that we humans are fundamentally connected to and dependent upon other life-forms that exist within this complex web of life. Whatever social contract we come up with must reflect these connections and dependencies if we are to move towards an ecologically sound, democratic and just global community in the 21st Century.
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