The Social Contract
The idea of the Social Contract is as old as philosophy
itself. It can be summarised as the
idea that the state is the result of a contract between its citizens, who
realise that though living under the rule of law may not be in their short term
interest, as it restricts and controls them, it is very much in their long term
interest and so they decide to sacrifice short term interest for long term gain
and contrive to create rule of law, the state. We can imagine a “state of nature” in which
there is no rule of law, prior to the social contract, and the post-contract
political society we actually live in.
Notice that this means that the state we all live in is an artificial
one, against nature.
That’s all there is to it really. The theory was considered and rejected in
classical times and it is only in the sixteenth century with the beginning of
the modern era that it comes back into fashion, and indeed becomes entirely
dominant in political theory. First
Hobbes, then Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and then John Rawls, whose theory of
Justice is considered by many the most important work of political theory of
the twentieth century, all use the metaphor of the social contract in some way
and it is hard to find any criticism of it.
Politicians and ordinary people who have never heard of the political
theory also talk freely of our “contract with society” and in other ways that
show that they too endorse the notion that we have an implied contract with
each other that ought to govern or at least influence our behaviour.
The first problem with the theory is an empirical one. There is not the slightest evidence that a
state or proto-state has ever been founded by a contract between its
citizens. History teaches us that
really without exception states are founded by acts of war, which seem
to be the very opposite of contracts.
We can also ask ourselves at an individual level, how do we come by our
nationality, our membership of and allegiance to a state? The answer is by birth. There is no act of consent and we have
absolutely no choice in the matter. We
are citizens of a state just by being born, by simply existing, and choice,
consent, or contract never, ever come in to play.
So I’m not going to talk about finer points of social
contract theory, because there’s no point, it’s not true, and as philosophers
we are only interested in truth . The
interesting question is how come the great minds of modern political theory,
philosophers of the stature of Hobbes or Kant, come to believe almost
universally and without question in a theory which is so evidently untrue? Are they perhaps under the influence of some
illusion, some ideology that prevents them from seeing the truth? You bet they are. It’s called the Enlightenment, and there
are two aspects of it I want to look at tonight which are Individualism and
Rationalism, two sides of the same coin
really which always go together, but which I think it will be useful to
distinguish here. They are views about
the nature of the Absolute, the ground of truth, and they hold that the
individual, and his reason, are the absolute standard against which everything
must be assessed.
Individualism.
The Enlightenment holds that the “man is the measure of all
things”, which is a statement about the nature of the Absolute. Many modern philosophers will say that they
no longer believe in “Absolutes” which they see as old-fashioned and archaic
and inappropriate in our pluralistic age, but if they hold that man is the
measure of all things, indisputably they do believe in an absolute. In any case you can’t do philosophy if you
reject the notion of absolute truth. If truth is not absolute, but only
relative, then as well as being relatively true it is also relatively untrue,
and you can’t have a truth that is untrue, so rejection of the Absolute is
rejection of philosophy itself. Now, if
man, the individual, is the absolute, then it follows that all cultural life is
his creation and is relative to him, the result of his efforts. From this it follows that if the state
exists it too must be a result of something done by the individual, so
individuals must at some time have realised the benefits of living in a political
community and contrived to create it through some kind of contract. In other words the idea of the contract is a
result of the premise that man is the measure of all things, which is an
aspiration of the enlightenment, and not a result of observation of reality at
all.
So what about that aspiration? It seems fine and unobjectionable really,
doesn’t it? But the thinking that gave
rise to it grew out of the development of science, and it’s reasonable to apply
scientific method to it. We can say
that the hypothesis of individualism (more strictly atomism, but I’m going to
stick with the broader term individualism tonight) predicts that the state must
be the result of agreement between its citizens, and we can see if the evidence
supports it or not. We have already
seen that it doesn’t, so the hypothesis must be wrong. But if this
means that the individual is not the absolute what then is? We are so used to thinking of ourselves as
independent individuals, the building blocks of society, that it can be hard to
imagine an alternative view, but one was given by Aristotle, who said for
example that “man is by nature a political animal” and “it is clear the state
is both natural and prior to the individual.
Aristotle would not say such things if he wasn’t aware of an
opposite view (i.e. that the state is artificial and subsequent to the
individual) , and we can take his comments to be criticism of some kind of
social contract theory. By saying that
man is by nature a political animal, he implies that
there is no state of nature, in which we might exist as some kind of “noble
savage”, and this means that the way we live is not artificial, as it is for
the contractarians, but normal and natural, something that I personally feel
more comfortable with. And by saying
that the state is prior to the individual he gives a clear alternative to
individualism which says that actually the state comes first, the individual
second. This might seem
counterintuitive, but it points to a fundamental problem with contract theory,
which is this: how can you make
contracts, if you don’t first have rule of law? Contracts are in general about exchange,
and to have exchange you must first have private property, and if you have
private property you must have a state which guarantees and protects it (that’s
the difference between property and mere possession), so it makes no sense to
say that you contract to create the state because it must have existed in the
first place so that you could make a contract.
The very thing you are trying to explain by the social contract is
presupposed. And it is not just a
circular argument, which would be defective but not necessarily false. It’s worse than that, it's back to
front. It says that the individual is
the cause of the state but actually the state is the cause of the
individual. The individual is not the
same as the particular, the “specimen of humanity”, and properly understood the
individual is both particular and universal united, and a very important aspect
of individuality is the rights conferred (universally) on particular people by
the state such as the right to own property, to be protected from assault,
physical abuse and so on.
So individualism, the belief that the individual is the
absolute or that man is the measure of all things, while it may seem natural to
us, is problematic and there is an alternative expressed in classical philosophy
which sees the individual as created by the state, not vice versa. So here’s a question for discussion. Is there such thing as society? If you are an individualist the answer has
to be yes, because the individual is absolute and anything else cultural that
exists must be made up of relations between individuals, because there is
nothing else, and these relations are what we mean when we speak of
society. But what is society actually? Can you point to it? Does it exist at all? For
my part I’d say no, it doesn’t, it’s
just an abstraction, and whenever I hear someone using the word society or
social (as in “social contract” or “social relation”) or, worst of all, “intersubjective”, it puts me on my guard
because I know I am dealing with an individualist and that I am not going
to agree with them. What do you think?
Rationalism
Now, moving on to rationalism, well, you can say that there
is an obvious problem with individualism which is that there are seven billion
or so of us on the planet, and we are all different, so that’s seven billion
absolutes and clearly that is not much use.
But enlightenment gets round this by saying that it is one aspect only
of the individual that is absolute which is his reason, which is the same for
everyone and common to all (this is why strictly it is atomism rather than
individualism). So let’s have a quick
look at this idea that it is Reason that is the Absolute. After all this seems like something it
would be unreasonable to disagree with, because if reason doesn’t ground
knowledge, what is left? It seems irrational to disagree with this, and like going back to more
primitive, prescientific, superstitious times.
There is actually a reasonable objection to the notion that
reason is the absolute, the yardstick against which everything should be
measured and assessed, and you can find it in ancient political theory in the
concept of the four cardinal virtues (wisdom, courage, discipline, and justice). Now, why are there four cardinal
virtues? Why not three or five, or
twenty seven? The reason is that
everything that exists, at least according to Aristotle, must have four
causes: material, efficient, formal and final; and
these are essential to its existence, which means that if any one is missing
the thing can’t exist, or, turning that round, if it does exist then it follows
that each of the four causes must also exist.
The four causes are all-encompassing, nothing else is needed so they are
also sufficient. In the case of
philosophy, the thing we want most to know is the nature of the good. Now the good exists. This is a proposition modern philosophy has
trouble with, but intuitively we all know it to be true, so it follows that it
must have material efficient formal and final causes. These are the cardinal virtues. Material cause is wisdom, because
knowledge is the stuff of which the good is made, and if there were no
knowledge clearly also there would be no good. Efficient cause is courage, because that
is the energy that makes the good happen and without that energy, that
willingness to risk life for the sake of the good, it couldn’t exist. Formal cause is reason and its virtue of
control, discipline, temperance, whatever you want to call it, because the good
isn’t just an abstract notion, it has shape, and the shape or form is given to
it by restraint and control. The final
cause is Justice, which is the purpose, the telos
or end of the good, and without this too the good couldn’t exist, because there
wouldn’t be any point. The virtues are
cardinal because they stand on their own, they are quite different things and
cannot be expressed in terms of each other.
Now let’s take a look at what Enlightenment does with this. There is no direct Enlightenment criticism of the
notion of the four cardinal virtues and it is hard to see how there could be
because you can’t be an Enlightenment philosopher if you understand them, and
in practice the Enlightement isn’t built on a criticism of classical philosophy,
but on ignoring it and starting again from scratch; but there is clear implied
criticism of it in the notion of the social contract.
Let’s start with the notion of Justice, the concept
political theory most wants to understand. According to social contract theory,
Justice is a result of reason. This
means that justice is no longer a cardinal virtue, because you can’t be a
cardinal virtue if you are the result of something else, you are relative to
and subordinate to that thing.
Justice becomes a part of reason, and you are now down to three cardinal
virtues. In some cases, Rawls being
the best example, Justice isn’t just subordinated to reason. It actually disappears. Rawls’ book is based on the notion that
“justice is fairness”. If this is
correct, then you no longer need the word justice at all because you can
replace it in every instance with the word “fairness” and “justice” simply
disappears. It isn’t correct, because
fairness and justice are quite different concepts. Modern philosophers have a habit of using
the term “justice” as a high-falutin’ term for moral rectitude, or just
fairness, but actually that is not what it means. If you doubt this, just pick up a tabloid newspaper. They are always calling for justice, and
when they do what they mean is that they want someone to suffer. They are calling for blood, for vengeance,
for something do be done by the state to someone they think has transgressed. You can’t “do” fairness which is just a
passive standard, and the fact of vengeance is enough to see that justice and
fairness or moral rectitude aren’t the
same thing. Rawls’ book is called “A
Theory of Justice” but actually it is nothing of the sort, it is just a theory
of fairness. Rawls has done that classic thing which as Daniel Kahneman points out in Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow we all do when faced with a difficult question, which is to substitute an easier one. "What is Justice?" is certainly a difficult question, so it comes naturally to us to substitute an easier one, "what is fairness" and this is just what Rawls has done. His answer can be expressed in four words, a simple rule of the playground for fair division: you half, I choose. And we can ask, who knows more about justice, us, or John Rawls? You might think the answer is John Rawls, who is after all considered the leading 20th century authority on the subject. But actually, he is not aware of the substitution he has made, and if we are aware of the that and understand that justice is not the same as fairness, we can say we know more than him because we at least know one thing about justice, whereas Rawls knows precisely nothing, because all his thinking and writing on the matter is actually about another subject.
Now what about courage?
Courage is the efficient cause of the state, because before you can have
any kind of government, you first have to control a territory in which you can
enforce the rule of law, and this means you have to have armed forces, people
who are willing to risk their lives in order to establish and maintain the rule
of law. Power is the essence of
politics. If you don’t have power, it’s
not politics and politics cannot exist without power, without the instruments
of repression and control, the armed forces, the penal system, the courts and
so on. Without courage, the state and
the rule of law could not exist, that is how important it is. In a word, it is essential, and you can’t
get any more important than that.
So let’s have a look at how Social Contract theorists think
about power. At the modern and weakest
extreme, thinkers like John Rawls ignore power altogether, and there is no
mention of it at all in Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, which is another reason you
can say it is not a work of political theory, because you can’t have a
political theory that leaves out the most important aspect of the political,
power. Less wooly thinkers like Hobbes
on the other hand do clearly understand the importance of political power,
because for Hobbes “a covenant without the sword is of no force to bind a
man”. This is fairly typical of
contractarian thinking. In an ideal
world where everyone was rational and negated their personal interests in
favour of the general, so the thinking goes, you wouldn’t need power, or
government at all really; but that is a
utopia we will never reach because people cannot be trusted to behave
rationally all the time without some external encouragement, so power is an
unfortunate necessity. It’s there, but
subordinate to reason and resulting from reason, and as to where it comes from,
well this isn’t really addressed but the implication is that the people who put
their lives on the line to create that power are just the hired help, and they
do it because they are paid to. This
really isn’t good enough – would you risk your life in return for wages? It doesn’t make sense. And there is a logical fallacy here. Just because you identify a “need” for
something doesn’t mean that that thing exists or that that need is
satisfied. I need a helicopter and a
yacht, but unfortunately that doesn’t mean that I have them.
Whatever way you look at it the virtue of courage has
gone. In Rawles it is totally absent,
and in Hobbes, Rouseau and the rest, it is subordinate to reason, resulting
from it, and therefore is no longer a cardinal virtue. So in modern contractarian thinking both the
efficient cause of the good, Courage, and it’s final cause, Justice, have
either disappeared altogether, or have been so effectively subordinated to
Reason that they no longer function as cardinal virtues. So can you see what has this means? What is a philosophy like that has
abandoned efficient and final cause?
Well the final cause is purpose, telos, so you can say that without
this, philosophy has no purpose, and because purpose is also meaning you can say
with some accuracy that this philosophy has become meaningless. And efficient cause is power, so a
philosophy that lacks efficient cause is impotent; so modern contractarian thinking is
pointless, meaningless, and impotent; and that is in fact the general
perception of modern philosophy, not just as seen from the outside but also the
view of many of its practitioners most of whom have long abandoned the idea
that philosophy has any purpose beyond academic exercise.
So if you like the idea of philosophy that is pointless and
impotent, modern philosophy with its contractarian views is for you. If you think on the other hand that it
ought to have a purpose, a meaning, and power, then you need to reject the
notion that Reason is the absolute, that man is the measure of all things, and
say instead that the Absolute is the Good, and that it has four pillars in the
cardinal virtues which must be part of any political theory. Reason is indeed one of them, but you need
the rest as well. And by the way there
is a view these days that political theory is a kind of special interest in
philosophy; but if political theory is
an account of justice, and justice is what gives meaning to the good, it’s
pretty clear that it is essential and perhaps the most important aspect of philosophy of all. It’s
a real problem then that the big hitters in modern philosophy all adopt the
notion of the social contract, because it means their ideas are worthless and
we really need to start all over again if we want to understand the
political. There is one philosopher in
the modern era, and to my knowledge only one, who does try to build an account
of the state that includes the cardinal virtues, and who rejects the notion of
social contract out of hand, and that is Hegel in the Philosophy of Right. There’s nothing else apart from the ancient
classics, so I guess that is where you have to start.
