The Social Contract Exists, 6-18-2010

 I recall Margaret Thatcher saying there was no such thing as a civil society. Shades of Thomas Hobbes and Ayn Rand! Why would anyone - particularly a politician - want to assert such an idea? Why would others support such an idea?

My best thinking says Thatcher and her acolytes wanted to do away with the social contract theory underlying Western politics. If you have not read John Locke's Treatises on Civil Government, do so now. Getting rid of the social contract leaves government to the powerful;  ruling so to benefit themselves. Give Hobbes' Leviathan, a read, too, for how sovereignty need not be in the people, but the most pernicious and modern example of what might replace the social contract is Ayn Rand's Objectivism.

We can put faces to these people: Alan Greenspan, the guys designing credit swap derivatives, Rand Paul, and so on.

David Hume has a very good argument against the social contract theory in his essay "Of the Original Contract." 

However, Hume's argument loses its power in this country. We have a written constitution representing the social contract.

At this point, everyone's mind goes to the federal constitution. Not quite the mark, I have in mind. Go look at the state constitutions, and especially their Bills of Rights. Most (I think New York remains the exception) state Bills of Rights have a provision incorporating the Declaration of Independence, The Declaration prescribes the social contract in very Lockean terms.

Alexander Hamilton (see Federalist No. 78) and Scott Douglas Gerber should agree that the federal Constitution incorporates the Declaration of Independence's natural rights theory and social contract prescription. However, the evidence is clearer in the state constitutions, and with clearness comes a sense of the best evidence.

When state courts being interpreting state constitutions as not creating a social contract, then we are in trouble. When the general public fails to preserve the social contract, then we are in danger.

sch

[One thing I did not think of in 2010, perhaps lacking the evidence available now, is the continued presence of an individual under a government is a sign of the social contract. Feet can rescind the social contract, as seen in Russia and other places. The last includes even Why Elon Musk is moving Tesla from California to Texas. sch 11/12/22.]