An Introduction to Social Contract Theory
A synopsis of 'Social Contract' (1986) by Michael Lessnoff
I have been sent on a mission to understand social contract theory. Despite my frequent posturing as an anti-liberal thinker, my PhD supervisors inform me that I often make very liberal presuppositions. Chief among those is the assumption that political orders, in order to be legitimate, require voluntary consent from those who live under them. This supposition places me within the social contract tradition of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant and Rawls. Pretty good company, I thought. So, to better understand this tradition - including where I depart from it - I picked up Michael Lessnoff’s aptly titled book ‘Social Contract’ (1986).
Lessnoff’s book is introductory. It covers the major social contract theorists in a sweeping but surprisingly detailed manner. At just 160 pages, Lessnoff does an excellent job at providing both an intellectual history and an even-handed analysis of social contract theory. The book might be introductory, but it is not simplistic.
So, what is social contract theory? It is a theory which justifies and limits the power of the state by analysing politics in contractual terms. The relationship between ruler and ruled is held to be a contractual one, in which each party gives something up in return for mutual benefit. On a standard reading, individuals give up their natural freedom in return for greater security and protection provided by the state. If the state fails to hold up their end of the bargain, our obligation to obey their authority is null and void.
Understood in this way, social contract theory is often regarded as an acutely modern way of conceptualising politics. But as Lessnoff informs us, Medieval Europe was replete with social contract theorists. Feudalism was often conceptualised as a hierarchy of contractual relationships. Peasants owed obligations to feudal lords in return for protection, and lords obeyed the King in return for security.
The first notable social contract theorist with Manegold (great name) who wrote in 1080 that: “no man can make himself King or Emperor, the people raise a man above them in this way in order that he may govern them in accordance with right reason” (emphasis my own). He continues: “if he [the ruler] violates the contract under which he was elected…then the people is justly and reasonably released from its obligation to obey him”.1 Our ‘modern’ understanding of politics has deep Medieval roots.
Social contract theory then lay dormant until being revived during the Reformation and the ensuing Wars of Religion. Catholics and Protestants each used contract-based arguments to justify either rebellion or obedience, depending on the prevailing state religion. By and large however, social contract theory was used as a tool by those seeking to undermine the legitimacy of existing political institutions. Yet one man stands as a “towering exception” to this rule: Thomas Hobbes.
For many, Thomas Hobbes is the social contract theorist. Just mentioning the state of nature invokes Hobbes’ famous phrase that life without the state is “nasty, brutish, and short”. Yet despite widespread recognition, Hobbes’ arguments are frequently misunderstood. He is, in the words of Alan Ryan, the first modern political thinker.2 Hobbes is modern because he regards the state and political authority as artificial constructs rather than being part of the natural or divine order. Government is a human creation and therefore demands a human explanation.
An explanation and justification of the state can be given by understanding what life was like before it existed. This pre-political condition is referred to by nearly all social contract theorists as the ‘state of nature’. For Hobbes, the state of nature is a “war of all against all”. Humans lived in a state of perpetual fear. This isn’t because humans are naturally rapacious creatures who enjoy exercising domination over others - to think that is to misunderstand Hobbes. His argument is far more ingenious (in my opinion) than the realism of Augustine or Morgenthau, which posits a natural drive for domination.
Hobbes argues that humans are fundamentally equal in ability. Even the weakest can kill the strongest. The smartest human being still knows extremely little compared to the sum total of human knowledge. Although there are differences between us, they are so minor that they are inconsequential. It is only our vanity and the comfort of society which leads us to think that we are better than others. But our equality is apparent in the state of nature.
Nature is also a state of total freedom. Morality too, for Hobbes, is a social construction. Our behaviour is therefore unconstrained by any ‘objective’ moral code. We are all free to do what we want and roughly equal in our ability to do it. This would be fine, if not for the fact that our desires are often zero-sum. We frequently want what others already have. Hobbes suggests that under these conditions it is logical for humans to maximise their power as a means for acquiring what they want. Competition inevitably ensues.
The state of nature is, for these reasons, a state of radical uncertainty. Often the best way to get something is try to get it first. Humans are thus driven to preemptive violence in order to guarantee their safety. Any rational person would jump at the opportunity to trade the uncertain freedom of nature for the restricted comfort of civilisation. This is exactly what happens when we (figuratively) sign the social contract. We trade our freedom for greater stability and comfort. Because Hobbes sees the state of nature as such an undesirable condition, he places extreme emphasis on our moral duty to obey the state. Although the state might do things that we do not like, the alternative is simply too horrible to contemplate. We therefore have a supreme moral duty to obey the sovereign, whoever it is.
That was a long time spent on Hobbes, so I won’t go into similar detail on Locke and Rousseau, save to point out their important differences. Unlike Hobbes, Locke believed that morality was inherent to nature, given to us as natural law. Natural law binds us to respect everyone’s “life, liberty, health [and] possessions”.3 As long as we respect these basic rights, we are free to conduct ourselves as we please. Of course, competing interpretations of who owns what invariably arise, so we are need in a “common judge” to adjudicate between claims and uphold our basic rights. According to Locke, therefore, we enter into society to protect our rights, not to have them forfeited. This means that our obligations to the state are rather minimal: it exists to protect us from violence and uphold our property rights, no more than that. Locke gives us a canonical defence of the minimalist liberal state. He has for this reason been criticised as an ideologist for the capitalist class. A criticism, I am sure, that he would regard as a compliment.
Rousseau, on the other hand, was certainly no apologist for the bourgeoisie. He regarded the emergence of the state as a trick employed by a rich to dupe the poor into supporting a system of coercive power that protected their wealth and property. Rousseau was a Marxist before Marx. His version of the social contract is therefore not an actual historical event, but rather a hypothetical ideal - it describes what sort of contractual arrangement would legitimise political authority.
Ideally, when entering into society, we exchange our crude natural freedom for a more civilised freedom. We might lose the ability to whatever we please as individuals, but we gain the ability to act as a collective. A sovereign exercising this collective agency is acting on the general will of the populace. Rousseau’s concept of the general will is vague and ripe for abuse. It seems to imply that any sovereign entity which has followed appropriate deliberation methods can act however it wants, because it is exercising the general will of the people. Indeed, Rousseau even says that the state can force individuals to be free - by which he means obey laws that they themselves would agree to, if only they were more rational-minded. It is easy to see why some critics regard Rousseau’s theory as an apology for totalitarianism.
In this final section I will briefly deal with the social contract theories of Immanuel Kant and John Rawls. Rawls is often described as a ‘neo-Kantian’, so it is fitting to discuss them together.
Kant completes the transition from social contract as an alleged historical event to social contract as a completely hypothetical ideal. For Kant, the social contract is an “idea of reason”. It regulates not only the legitimacy of the state, but individual laws as well. If, under idealised conditions, fully rational people could accept the existence of the state and agree to be bound by certain laws, then the social contract has demonstrated their legitimacy. Furthermore, Kant believed that morality was co-extensive with rationality. So if we have a rational reason for accepting the state, it follows that we have a moral duty towards it as well. For Kant, a fully rational person is also a completely moral person, and it is this sort of idealised version of ourselves that we ought to appeal to when justifying the power of the state.
Kant spends relatively little time discussing the social contract as compared with his predecessors, or, indeed, compared to his most consequential adherent: John Rawls.
Rawls picks up on the idea that the social contract can be a purely regulative idea of reason - a ‘heuristic device’ used to show that certain political institutions are legitimate if considered from an ideally rational perspective. His own stated aim is to “carry to a higher order of abstraction” social contract theory “as represented by Locke, Rousseau, and Kant”.4 I have written extensively about Rawls, including a video explainer, so I will only touch on him briefly here.
In short, Rawls suggests that if we imagine individuals trying to decide upon what sort of society they would like to in, they would be able to agree if we restricted their knowledge as to what position they themselves would occupy within that society. Rawls calls this the “veil of ignorance” - our first signers of the social contract, if you like, are ignorant of their sex or gender, ethnicity, socio-economic position, and natural talents like intelligence or athleticism. By imposing ignorance, Rawls believes the conditions for deliberation are fair and will yield principles of justice that reflect this procedural fairness - hence the name of his theory, justice as fairness.
But why would we, people all too aware of our positions within actual society, find the veil of ignorance convincing? Rawls suggests that citizens of liberal democracies would find it convincing because it reflects our deeply held moral intuition that everyone is, in an ethical sense, free and equal. By imagining everyone as equal and considering what these hypothetically equal agents would agree to, we are able to arrive at principles of justice which clearly reflect our deep moral intuitions about society. Rawls’ theoretical abstraction is therefore built on empirical assumptions about what people actually believe. He is simply designing a thought experiment that purges us of bias and articulates more clearly our already-held ethical intuitions.
Even the most strident anti-liberal must admit to the theoretical elegance and coherence of Rawls’ theory. It deserves its status as the most forceful and convincing restatement of liberal principles in the last one-hundred years. Personally I find Rawls’ account to be ingenious and the best example of the social contract tradition. That is not to say that I agree with him on everything. I do not. I shall have more to say about that in future articles.
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Cited in: Social Contract, Lessnoff, M 1986, p. 12
On Politics, A History of Political Thought from Herodotus to the Present, Ryan, A 2012, p. 412
Cited in: Social Contract, Lessnoff, M 1986, p. 61
A Theory of Justice, Rawls, J 1999, p. xviii