The Social Contract: A Concept Whose Time Has Gone - or Returned?

Two and a half centuries ago the French political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote a book called Du contrat social ou Principes du droit politique, translated (roughly) into English as The Social Contract.  Rousseau was one of several theorists who formulated ideas about the relationships among members of a society, and especially between society and the individual, during the European Enlightenment.  Along with Rousseau, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke were powerfully influential in the thinking of America's Founding Fathers and the Framers of the Constitution.


The idea of the social contract was advanced to provide the philosophical foundation for the governance of a nation: it is a framework upon which to build the relationship between the State and the individual, and a key to understanding the basis for members of a society choosing to act collectively through the State, deciding in what ways the interests of the individual should be made subordinate to those of society as a whole in order to benefit everyone.

Throughout American history the social contract has been the focus of tension between the State, which has been given agency to act for society's collective interests, and the individual.  This tension exists largely because of the traditional American emphasis on rugged individualism and personal responsibility.

The belief in rugged individualism often runs afoul of the limitations imposed by nature upon human beings.  There are many things people cannot accomplish without reliance upon their neighbors.  Sometimes this is because a single person is physically incapable of carrying out a task without assistance.  Commonly it is because it is necessary to bring to bear upon a project resources that are not, or even cannot be, possessed or controlled by one person or a small group.

On a small scale at the community level, this can be observed in the building of a house or the raising of a barn by the Amish in rural Pennsylvania or Ohio.

In a more "modern" context, the design and construction of a children's playground in suburbia may bring together adults from the community who contribute volunteer labor and seek donations of construction materials from local businesses.

Of course there are many things we need to do that require collective effort on a much larger scale.  The Interstate Highway System is a favorite example.  Many of us never learned, or learned and forgot, that in the early decades of our republic, there were strenuous disagreements about what government could or should undertake in the way of large-scale projects.  "Internal improvements" such as the construction of roads and canals were considered the domain of state governments, and there was only grudging acceptance of the notion that the national government should get involved in interstate projects.

For a long time I believed the question of how expansive should be the role of government, acting as agent for American society, was settled when the USA embraced the "American System" advanced by the early 19th-Century American Whig Party (the forerunner of the mid-Century Republican Party).  The American System relied for revenue on tariffs, which simultaneously protected American agriculture and manufacturing from European competition, establishment of a national bank to facilitate commerce, and a system of internal improvements (the above mentioned roads and canals) to enable transportation of goods and speed the development of a national mercantile network.

This past weekend I came across stunning evidence that what I had begun to suspect was the abandonment of the social contract was really happening.  An essay was published in the NY Times about a community in rural Arkansas in which there was a backlash against spending money on a new library and a librarian well qualified to run it.  I'm hoping you'll read it, so I am not going to spoil it for you.  I'll just say that it reminded me of how my community library was a place of refuge in my youth, and the writer's account gave me a sense of deep sorrow about where American society is going.

This photo is from a piece about the best places to live in Arkansas.

A community that doesn't want to pay for a library would not make my list.

The essence of the story is that people don't want to pay taxes for anything that will not benefit them directly.  Many years ago I was challenged to overcome that resistance by the need for a new recreational facility in a development whose homeowners' association I served as president for 13 years.  The frustrations of getting people to understand the concept of community were endless.

On a truly national scale I see the same tensions now.  They rise up between those who believe access to basic healthcare is a universal human right, and those who reject that idea.  I see it in the conflict between Americans who recognize that we have long used public dollars to finance a level of education that prepares young people to compete for good jobs, and realize a high school education falls short, and those who had no help paying for college for themselves or their children and are damned if they are going to help anyone else.

I also see it in the strenuous disagreements between people who believe we should act through the agency of the state to ameliorate poverty, and those who believe only private charity should have that responsibility - because unlike government, private charity can sort out the deserving from the undeserving poor - even though private charity has never had the resources to address poverty on a national scale.  Accompanying that fundamental disagreement is the matter of turning a blind eye to the central inadequacy of a private-charity approach to solving social problems: it allows the well-to-do yet selfish among us to contribute nothing to the effort.

Two centuries after Rousseau and the other enlightenment political philosophers, John Rawls came along as the seminal American thinker and writer on issues in social justice.  Rawls seeks to answer the fundamental question of what kind of a society we should be building to try to make American life fair.  In his work A Theory of Justice (1971, revised in 1999), Rawls develops the concept of "justice as fairness," and he explores at great length how members of a society can go about developing consensus on the principles that should govern the way our social structures operate.

Nowadays the phrase "social justice" has been disparaged by those who cling to what I assert is the myth of rugged individualism and the belief that one can pull oneself up by one's own bootstraps.  (Giving just a moment's thought to this metaphor reveals the absurdity of it: bootstraps can be used to pull on a pair of boots, but certainly not to elevate one's position, either bodily or socioeconomically.)

I am cautiously optimistic that the presidential elections of 2016 and 2020 will serve to get more Americans thinking about just what our theory of justice should be.  When I look at the civil rights and great society efforts of the 1960s, and the fires burning at the center of today's Progressive movement, I find hope that we might emerge from the dark passage we have been in since the "me decade" of the 1980s - and once more discover that not only is there room in America for justice as fairness, but that is really what America must embody as its most important ideal.