Session 8
What is a successful social contract?
What is a social contract? And why does it matter?
Chris Pierson
University of Nottingham
We tend to use the expression ‘social contract’ to describe a whole series of policies and practices
through which states and other actors seek to moderate the outcomes of otherwise ‘free market’
exchanges. Hence, the ‘social dimension, the ‘social model’, ‘social Europe’ and so on. In this short
intervention, I want to take us back to the more fundamental question that underpins this usage: just
what is a social contract?
In modern political theory, the social contract has a long history that runs roughly from Thomas Hobbes’s
Leviathan in 1650 to John Rawls’s Theory of Justice in 1971. Though particular formulations vary, it
always involves the idea that, at some point and in some way, we have, as individuals, to agree to the
terms under which live together, normally within states and under laws. We have to contract in. And, in
the end, what justifies these laws and the authority of the states that enforce them is that we have
agreed to these terms of social co-operation. Few have ever claimed or believed that the social contract
is a real contract. We (whoever ‘we’ might be) have never come together to form a state or agree on the
laws by which we will be governed. Nor have we, as individuals, ever signed up to state membership. We
are born into compulsory political organizations with established bodies of law that we are required to
obey. We can only defect, if at all, by moving away, potentially losing all we possess, including our
citizenship. But almost all social contract theorists have insisted that the social and political order is only
legitimate because it commands our reasoned consent –either actually or theoretically; in this last case,
because it constitutes a set of social arrangements to which any reasonable person would assent, given
the chance (which, of course, they will never get!).
Thinkers have disagreed violently about what might command that reasoned consent. Hobbes held, in
essence, that we should assent to any political regime that can maintain public order, however
unattractive and unrepresentative it may be. Rawls insisted that reasonable assent was only really owed
to a social order that did everything possible to maximise the opportunities and wellbeing of the least
well-off. The example to which I want to give a little more attention is Rousseau’s famous account in The
Social Contract (published in 1762). Rousseau’s view is opaque in various ways. His particular brand of
genius was not one marked by unyielding consistency. Here I want to concentrate on just one central
insight in Rousseau’s treatment.
It’s this. When we enter into a civil association or a state, we give up our natural liberty in return for civil
liberty. Notoriously this has been read as opening the door to totalitarian democracy and the excesses of
the French Revolution. I leave that question aside here to pursue Rousseau’s crucial insight. If we are to
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live by laws, and to oblige those who live with us to live by these laws, our freedoms must be mediated
by the social institutions we establish to do that. Maybe we could live without states and without laws –
and in the realm of natural freedom. But we don’t. And if we collectively judge that it’s better to live
with social institutions and laws –that is, if society is a good deal– then our freedoms have to proceed
from the terms of that agreement. We may choose to make certain freedoms non-negotiable –say, the
right to bodily integrity or freedom of conscience– but this cannot include exclusive command over
external resources, especially land and nature. This last is not just the view of Rousseau but of so
mainstream a classical liberal as John Stuart Mill, who argued that trade was an irreducibly social act. In
short, our legal order and our property order is something that we create. Some sorts of private property
may be essential to maintaining our autonomy or to creating a social product which we all value. But
‘anti-social’ property is not legitimate because of some right we have to hold this outside of given social
arrangements. Property is socially and legally created and recognised. No natural right can give you the
authority to keep me off your piece of land. Your right to exclude me is only as a good as the social
contract to which we have both to have assented.
Given that our rights, including our property rights, are socially-generated, they must be subject to the
terms of the social contract. And any social contract to which it is reasonable for us to assent must be
one that ensures that the deal for those least advantaged under its terms is one that it is worthwhile for
them to sign up to. Otherwise, our requirement that these people obey our laws is pure coercion. This is
the central insight of Rawls’s Theory of Justice. In a compulsory political association, the terms of social
cooperation must be reasonable for all. Or else all bets are off.
How might this matter? Let’s take two contemporary examples. Property taxes: there are surely
reasonable limits to the taxation of assets but since no-one made the land or created natural resources,
these are pragmatic rather than matters of principle. The proper limit to a land-value tax is the point at
which it starts to diminish returns to the public exchequer. A guaranteed basic income: here’s a proposal
that’s increasingly newsworthy, especially given the recent Swiss referendum. Rather than seeing this in
terms of ‘free money’ or labour market participation, we might look at it in the context of reasonable
terms of social co-operation. What price should we pay to the least advantaged for their compulsory
participation in a system of social co-operation which produces fantastic amounts of wealth –but not for
them.
This is not the last word on the social contract –or Rousseau. But there is a take-away idea. Systems of
social compulsion –state and laws– can only be legitimate if they would and should be assented to by all
reasonable participants. Rather than think in terms of redistribution or moderation of unequal
outcomes, we should perhaps begin with the reasonable terms of social co-operation.
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