Why do people enter into legal contracts? Provided that the contract is fair, the parties involved generally feel that their interests are better served if they are bound by the terms of the agreement than if they are not. You might not otherwise choose to present yourself at a particular location at 9.00 from Monday to Friday, but you are prepared to place yourself under an obligation to do so on condition that someone else is obliged to pay an agreed amount of money into your bank account every month. In general, it is worth agreeing to restrict your freedom in some ways in order to gain some greater good.
Several philosophers, including Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and (nearer our own time) John Rawls, have developed political theories in which the state’s legitimacy is based on an implicit agreement, or social contract. Broadly speaking, the citizens of the state agree to relinquish some of their rights, or transfer some of their powers, to a governing authority in return for the latter’s protection and preservation of life, property and social order.
Hobbes’s Leviathan Rational consent to a contract must involve consideration of how matters would stand if the terms of the contract were not in force. In the same way, it is a common feature of social-contract theories to start with an evocation of the ‘state of nature’: a hypothetical pre-social condition of mankind in which the laws and constraints imposed by the state are absent. The state of nature imagined by the English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes is unremittingly bleak and pessimistic. People’s prime motivation, he assumes, is ‘a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death’. Acting in isolation, humans are concerned only with their own pleasure, interest and preservation. Constantly in competition and at war with one another, there is no possibility of trust and cooperation; and with no basis of trust, there is no prospect of creating prosperity or enjoying the fruits of civilization – ‘no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death’. And hence, he famously concludes, in the state of nature ‘the life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’.
‘By art is created that great Leviathan, called a commonwealth or state, which is but an artificial man … and in which, the sovereignty is an artificial soul.’
Thomas Hobbes, 1651
It is in everyone’s interest to work together in order to escape this hellish condition, so why do people in the state of nature not agree to cooperate? Because there is always a cost to pay in complying with an agreement and always a gain to be had from not doing so. If self-interest is the only moral compass, you can be sure that someone else will always be ready to seek an advantage by non-compliance, so the best you can do is to break the contract first. And of course everyone else reasons in the same way, so there is no trust and no agreement: long-term interest is always sure to give way to short-term gain, apparently leaving no way out of the cycle of distrust and violence.
The question then is how individuals mired in such wretched discord can ever reach an accommodation with one another and so extricate themselves. The crux of the problem, for Hobbes, is that ‘covenants, without the sword, are but words’. What is needed is an external power or sanction that forces all people to abide by the terms of a contract that benefits them all. People must willingly restrict their liberties for the sake of cooperation and peace, on condition that everyone else does likewise; they must ‘confer all their power and strength upon one man, or upon one assembly of men, that may reduce all their wills, by plurality of voices, unto one will’. The solution, then, is joint submission to the absolute authority of the state (what Hobbes calls ‘Leviathan’) – ‘a common power to keep them all in awe’.
Rawls and justice as fairness Notable among modern social-contract theorists is the US political philosopher John Rawls, whose A Theory of Justice (1971) was arguably the most influential contribution to the debate over justice and equality made in the second half of the 20th century. Any conception of social justice, Rawls argues, comprises the notion of impartiality. Any suggestion that the principles and structures on which a social system is based are skewed towards a particular group (a social class, for instance, or a political party) automatically renders that system unjust. So how should the burdens and benefits of a society be distributed amongst its members in such a way as to make it just?
To capture the idea of impartiality, Rawls introduces a thought experiment which is basically a modern reworking of the state of nature. In what he calls the ‘original position’, all personal interests and allegiances are forgotten: ‘no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status, nor does anyone know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength, and the like.’ Placed behind this ‘veil of ignorance’ and ignorant of what role in society we will be given, we are obliged to play safe and to ensure that no one group is given an advantage at the expense of another. As in Hobbes, it is purely rational self-interest that drives decision-making behind the veil; and it is the fact that we, when placed in this position, contract into certain social and economic structures and arrangements that makes them distinctively just.
Rawls’s substantive thesis is that the most prudent thing that we, as rational decision-makers placed in the original position, can do to safeguard our own future (unknown) interests is to embrace what he calls the ‘difference principle’. According to this, inequalities in society are justified only if they result in its worst-off members being better off than they would otherwise have been. This idea has generated a vast amount of criticism, positive and negative, and it has been invoked in support of ideological positions across the political spectrum, some of them far from Rawls’s own essentially egalitarian, left-wing position. To take an extreme example, the principle does not preclude a huge windfall for those who already enjoy the lion’s share of society’s goods, provided that it is accompanied by an improvement (however small) for the worst-off. So Rawlsian corroboration could be sought for the so-called ‘trickle-down economics’ pursued by the New Right administrations of Reagan and Thatcher in the 1980s, in which tax cuts for the wealthiest were justified by an (allegedly) consequent improvement in the fortunes of the less advantaged. This claim was disdainfully dismissed by the economist J.K. Galbraith as ‘horse-and-sparrow economics’ – the theory that ‘if you feed enough oats to the horse, some will pass through to feed the sparrows’.
the condensed idea
Society by consent