Contractarianism Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Contractarianism is a theory of the development of social institutions and political morality based on the consent of free and equal people. It is primarily associated with both the descriptive and prescriptive elements of liberal political theory. Descriptively, it aims to explain the origins of political authority and why people form political communities. Prescriptively, contractarianism provides an account of the legitimate functions of the state and the conditions of political obligations. Its most well-known historical exponents are Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Its contemporary adherents include John Rawls and David Gauthier.

Contractarianism is an egalitarian approach to political morality because all individual interests are taken into account in the bargaining process. It provides a conventional view of politics and justice in which the state is created to advance individual interests, and it contrasts with naturalistic or organic accounts of politics. Despite these foundations, contractualists differ significantly as to the legitimate functions of the state and the extent of one’s obligations in political society. Contractarianism is also the subject of significant critical treatment, including pluralist, associative, and feminist theories of political morality.

Contractualists theorize social cooperation and political institutions as systems of mutual advantage because rational people can be expected to consent only to arrangements from which they benefit. According to Hobbes, life without political institutions is insecure, violent, and underdeveloped. Sovereign individuals pursuing their own interests will inevitably come into conflict with one another, and without a coercive third party, find themselves in a ceaseless “war of all against all.” In time, their interests and rationality will lead them to form a contract among each other to mutually transfer their natural rights to self-preservation, creating the sovereign state charged with maintaining the conditions of social peace. For Hobbes, the contract is constitutive of society, politics, property, and justice; it is also the precondition of people’s capacities to pursue any human goods beyond survival. However, Hobbes’s theory is not fully liberal because the social contract creates an absolute state as opposed to a constitutionally limited state.

Locke’s state of nature, in contrast to Hobbes, is a much more developed situation and comes to include a fully functioning market economy. It is only after time, as inequality deepens and property becomes less secure, that individuals enter a social contract to create political authority to avoid the inconveniences of the state of nature. However, because individuals enter into the social contract in unequal circumstances, the contract solidifies differences in advantages by protecting preexisting natural property rights. In this respect, contractarianism is widely criticized for unduly reflecting baseline inequalities in terms of social cooperation. It is seen as a mutually advantageous agreement between producers that leaves nonproducers and those lacking a threat capacity, such as the severely disabled, to the system of production outside the scope of political justice. However, not all contractualists understand the social contract in this way and seek to broaden its scope and transformative effects.

Rousseau’s social contract criticizes the design of Locke’s contract, which protects natural property rights and locks in initial advantage. Rousseau’s contract is more deeply transformative. He argues that the social contract cannot attempt to preserve the freedom humans experienced in the state of nature as isolated and independent individuals, rather it must reconcile the “chains” of a coercive political society with a new sort of social freedom. To be free in society, people must subsume their individual wills to a common or general will, which is the outcome of a contract or an agreement among others. Sovereignty is created when people contract together to create a general will that concerns the common good. When a person disagrees with the general will, this individual is, in fact, mistaken and must be made to conform to its precepts. In reconciling social rules and coercion with individual liberty through the social contract, Rousseau famously suggests people can be “forced to be free.”

John Rawls’s version of the contract also seeks to eliminate initial bargaining advantages in shaping political agreement. Rawls’s contract is explicitly hypothetical and imagines people seeking agreement on principles of justice in the “original position.” In the original position, people deliberate behind a “veil of ignorance” such that they know nothing of their own personal traits, including their gender, ethnicity, capacities, or social class. This situation creates an equal baseline and compels impartial reasoning. From this contracting position, Rawls argues that people will agree on strong egalitarian and redistributive principles of justice.

Bibliography:

Gauthier, David. Morals by Agreement. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan, edited with an introduction by J. C. A. Gaskin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Locke, John. Second Treatise of Government, edited with an introduction by C. B. Macpherson. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1980.
Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1971.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. “On the Social Contract.” In The Basic Political Writings, translated by Donald Cress. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987.