It’s been something of a privilege to watch better minds than mine tackle the issue I raised in this post about my friend Joe and the ‘social contact’.
The issue was fairly simple: How do you counter the idea that the Government can get you to do anything it wants because, by remaining in the country, you’re implicitly agreeing to abide by a ‘social contract.’
IanB got stuck into the idea that you can ‘just leave’ because this is the standard response that you always get from collectivists – “if you don’t like it, leave”
This argument creates the illusion of a contract being voluntarily agreed with. You go into a pub, you’re agreeing to abide by the rules set out by the landlord. You come into my home you’re agreeing to abide by the rules that I set out.
But being born into a Nation and living in a Nation is not the same as ‘going into a pub.’ Under international law you cannot deprive someone of their nationhood. He concluded that the Social Contact would be valid if you could leave the state whilst physically remaining where you were. As in, Milton Keynes deciding to secede from the United Kingdom. If this were possible then the collectivist’s argument holds up. If it’s not (which it’s not, not anywhere) then it does not.
This question of personal sovereignty was tackled by Jock Coats, who writes that a ‘Social Contract’ is inherently totalitarian unless it can be explicitly agreed to by individuals, and reasserts what IanB said about ‘leaving’ meaning being able to reject the social contract without physically leaving the geographic bounds of the state. He explains how the principle of self ownership is the only one that can be universally applied (without creating two classes of people, ones who are owned by others – or slaves, or ones who own others – the state), and that a ‘social contract’ denies the possibility of self ownership. Very clever stuff.
Counting cats takes a different approach by ripping apart the idea that you can ever be said to be agreeing to a contract that you can’t actually read, or see before you sign it. The more repressive a Government, the less information people have about the contract they’re signing when they elect each successive Government. In other words, you can have a social contract but only one that ensures complete freedom, because this is the only circumstance under which individuals within a state can be said to have a full, comprehensive understanding of what ‘signing the social contract’ actually means. If you’re forced to sign a contract you cannot read, is that enforceable?
Finally, Costigan Quist drives the final nail into the coffin of the social contract, pointing out what should have been screamingly obvious from the start – there is no social contract. It’s just a metaphor, and one that doesn’t actually hold up. He points to the exceptions of non-violent direct action, to conscientious objection – all things tolerated and allowed under a modern western democracy, but that the ‘social contract’ does not allow for. At this point the whole thing just quietly falls apart, and forms the basis of a very simple and effective retort to even the most stubborn lefty.
I quote,
As a rule of thumb, when your political philosophy comes up against reality and fails to explain it, reality is declared the winner.
This summary of the debate doesn’t really do justice to the comments people have left on these 5 posts, and in most cases calling them comments is a bit of an insult. This is what makes blogging worthwhile and shows that blogging is sometimes at home to Mr Reason and Mrs Logic and not just bluster, gossip, rhetoric and dogma.
Scott said...
5 Aug 09 at 3:00 pm
If you have to abide by the terms if your are in a pub, and abide by the rules in a house, then surely we have to abide by the rules by the sovereign of the land. The only problem I can see by the “social contract” is that it is undemocratic.
wit and wisdom said...
5 Aug 09 at 3:04 pm
Blimey, I’ve come late to this debate and I confess to not having read any of the other blogs but I fear you might be being oversimplistic in your desire to be ‘liberal’. There is surely an implicit contract in society but it is between the people within that society rather than between the state and the people. The old argument comes into play here that there is no state as such there is only the means we have set up to govern ourselves so it is us – warts and all!
I have always liked Thomas Hobbes above all political philosophers because he seems to have established the fundamental truth which underlies all the other tinkering on top, namely that an ordered society requires authority and the only argument is about what form that authority takes. We are lucky that our ‘authority’ in this country is hedged and limited by a vibrant civic society.
I’d say that we do have a social contract but it is mistaken to assume that the ‘state’ is a part of that contract.
For ‘state’ you could read ‘European Commission’ for a useful analogy.
Barry Stocker said...
5 Aug 09 at 3:21 pm
The idea of a contractual basis for government can be found in John Locke, usually regarded as one of the prime figures in Classical Liberal/Libertarian thought.
The idea that freedom, in part at least, comes from the right to leave the territory of the state comes from John Locke, and I think it’s worth repeating that Locke is a prime reference in Classical Liberal/Libertarian thought.
The point of a contractual basis for government in Locke is to emphasise that government is legitimate by consent and that we have the right to overthrow it if it breaks the contract. In Locke, government breaks the contract where it does not defend the basic right Locke thought of as natural: life, liberty, property. Government also breaks the contract where it does not make laws through consent, expressed in a representative body.
The idea for contract come from Hobbes whose view of government was less liberal than Locke, but with the idea of contract he did establish the idea that government in its origin comes from law and consent, not force.
Rousseau was the other major classic contract theorist. Clearly, not all of Rousseau’s ideas are liberal, he was not a friend of free trade and free markets for one thing, still in describing the origins of government in voluntary agreement he was saying something compatible with liberalism.
In recent contract theory, John Rawls is associated with left liberalism, but has also been read with some sympathy by libertarians like Will Wilkinson of the Cato Institute. He does provide a basis for civil disobedience in his theory, and while inclined to egalitarianism he does say that basic individual liberties must always come first and can never be violated.
And in recent contract theory, there has also been Robert Nozick, a leading libertarian thinker, not just a libertarian but a minarchist/night watchman state theorist who thinks the state only exists to enforce contracts and punish violence. Nozick, like Rawls, does not think there was a real historical moment in which a contract was signed. The point is to clarify what it means to have government by consent, which is something contractual, because contract is a voluntary agreement. What Nozick is appealing to, is the idea of an implied contract, which puts obligations on government as well as individuals. Where the contract is broken, in the account of Nozick, and other contract theorists, we can engaged in civil disobedience or even violence against the state. How is that slavery or totalitarianism?
Of course it’s true that if there is a state of any kind, it has coercive power so there is always a risk that it could try to enslave us and become totalitarian. From an anarchist point of view it might seem appropriate to say that the state enslaves us now, but that would leave the question of how we distinguish between living as a citizen in a constitutional democracy from living in a totalitarian state, or living as the private property of a slave owner. The difference seems very clear to me, as it did to most Classical Liberal/Libertarian thinkers. It was Rousseau who said that ‘man lives everywhere in chains’, so anyone who says we are ‘slaves of the state’ now, in a constitutional democracy, might find themselves with unwelcome company. The coercive power of the state exists so that we can be free of non-legal coercion by other bodies, so that some umpire exists with the power to ensure that the rules necessary to a free society are obeyed.
There are Classical Liberals/Libertarians who are contract theorists and there are some who prefer utilitarianism, natural law, spontaneous order and so on. Where is the benefit in talking as if contractualism was the necessary enemy of individualistic market liberalism? Anarchists could accept utilitarianism, natural law or spontaneous order but probably not contract theory. OK if you’re an anarchist condemn contractualism, but make it clear you’re an anarchist and don’t talk as if contractualism is in contradiction with classical liberalism/libertarianism.
Tom James said...
5 Aug 09 at 3:27 pm
As regards the value of civil liberties:
“Since the value of freedom rests on the opportunities it provides for unforeseeable and unpredictable actions, we will rarely know what we lose through a particular restriction of freedom.
Any such restriction, any coercion other than the enforcement of general rules, will aim at the achievement of some foreseeable particular result, but what is prevented by it will usually not be known
….
And so, when we decide each issue solely on what appear to be its individual merits, we always over-estimate the advantages of central direction.”
–Friedrich Hayek (Law Legislation and Liberty, Vol I, p56-57)
Stu said...
5 Aug 09 at 4:18 pm
I’m glad to see so many of your readers have a firm grasp of rule #6, Charlotte
Newmania said...
5 Aug 09 at 4:44 pm
Anyway back to bluster, gossip, rhetoric and dogma .
A Nation is is better understood as an ’imagined community’ . In most cases the Nation or at least important elements of it , language ,culture myth predates the State .here were pubs before there was a state to stop you smoking in them . Harrumph.
A Conservative would not accept that there was a clear distinction between the man and his cultural context or if there is it is nothing to do with politics which should get its grubby fingers out of our souls . For all public purposes then it is an inescapable given.
An Orwellian mis application of the contract metaphor has been the mainstay of the New Labour drive towards collectivism .They have replaced the word ‘equal’ with the word “Fair” which applies usefully only to small scale contracts between individual s and groups. Typically “fair” would be used of a game in which the the outcome of dispute might be “fair “. In these cases the contract (entry to the game ) has indeed been freely and knowingly entered into .
Having insinuated a language of voluntary contract into social debate ,New Labour can then ask the question , is it fair that x “children ( meaning their parents of course) are “in poverty “ ? They can conclude that it is obviously “fair “ that the state removes your money and pays what you contractually owe on your behalf . By not doing so you would be refusing to honour a commitment you notionally have already entered into .
Implied social contacts then are always a language of coercion(obviously they are abstractions a have no reality). Once you accept that you have such a relationship with all and any people chosen by this or that politicians you have already submitted your freedom to decide on whether you ”owe” anything or not . In The confusion between unfortunate , unpleasant or insufficiently comfortable New Labour ask a question with the answer already integral to its terms . The state is simply the arbiter of the contract and can produce unending claims upon your freedom
Is poverty pleasant …well no , should I do something about it , well perhaps , I may well decide to . Should my hard earned money be removed by threat of imprisonment and delivered to charitable causes amongst others whatever I think , well thats a rather different question.
The problem for the Liberal Party is that it usually embraces collectivist assumptions and when it questions seems it have no language or feeling for the real community of the Nation ,a community it usually wishes to dilute if not destroy by its international and brutally rationalist mechanical view of man.
Newmania said...
5 Aug 09 at 5:15 pm
The difference seems very clear to me, as it did to most Classical Liberal/Libertarian thinkers
It need have nothing to do with Liberals and everything to do with Conservative pessimism .The fact that any order is than none ( The King’s Peace / The Tsar as Shepherd ) is obviously true but I like your point that primordial freedom was in fact slavery for most. That is a fact though not a model and facts sit uncomfortably with Liberals as well as anarchists .
You might draw a distinction between the modern State and the Nation , messy as they are part of each other but a People are able to organise themselves without the modern State to at least some extent and the extent to which the Ste is only the ritual expression of the Nation is the extent to which a Conservative would actively approve of it . Take markets for example, they have to abide by laws to operate monopoly legislation and the State provides those laws. It need not though.
There have been numerous markets that governed themselves by formal of traditional means without this help in the past though so the polarity between State and anarchy is quite false . The extension of the State as the ritual expression of a Nations civil order and its modern function as the author of society itself is not right .
Oranjepan said...
5 Aug 09 at 6:58 pm
I got my arse into gear and took a slightly different tack. I take a pragmatic approach that any social contract is a legal exchange necessary for the flourishing of liberty.
DavidNcl said...
5 Aug 09 at 7:37 pm
You could also try google
Lysander Spooner social contract
DavidNcl said...
5 Aug 09 at 7:41 pm
What we could do with is some sort of enumeration of trite / facile anti-libertarian stances and killer arguments that pwnnnn! them.
That would still leave the deep, hard arguments – but you can refer those to Ian.
John Kell said...
5 Aug 09 at 8:49 pm
Discussing the “social contract” without mentioning democracy. That’s… interesting.
I first saw this discussed a few days ago in the context of taxation: what the proponent of the argument that ID cards were like tax failed to address is that we are relatively content, in principle, with paying tax (and if enough of us were not, it would show in the polls; there are arguments about how much, and on what, but the broad principle is accepted) but there is less of a consensus regarding ID cards. OK, our democracy is flawed and crude, but to ignore the very idea is nuts, and results in crazy arguments like “ID cards are like tax in principle”.
Perhaps “social contract” ideas are those that are so consensual that there is never any democratic debate around them: you pay tax; you obey the law of the land; you accept that there are bodies that are entitled to enforce the above (even if we quibble about exactly how it is done). The detail of those systems relies on (deeply flawed) democratic processes to make them work, but the principles are rather beyond argument.
So on one level it seems a wholly fatuous discussion. Labelling certain things part of a “social contract” certainly seems redundant; they might more accurately be called “uncontentious issues within our democracy”.
But to decry the notion of a social contract entirely would be dangerous, as it is to question the general acceptance of these largely uncontroversial notions. We can all think of instances in which we would prefer not to be bound by them: I would prefer not to have to give up a third of my earnings in tax; there are times when I would like to stick a knife in that so-and-so who has just annoyed me beyond measure without fear of reprisal; but it is right that we do not disregard the prevailing view on these issues. In short, we must forsake some of our individual interest and liberty: whether we say that’s under the terms of a social contract, or on pain of reprisal from a democratically-sanctioned state, seems wholly irrelevant.
Ian B said...
5 Aug 09 at 9:41 pm
The part of the argument I tried to concentrate on was that of justification of government power. Various discussions have brought things in like, the social contract must be reasonable and is invalidated if it isn’t, but I tried to address it as progressives have presented it to me- which is basically that any and all government power, without restraint, is justified because (a) you can vote for what you like and (b) you can leave if you want. That is, it is an argument for absolute democracy and the tyranny of the majority.
Now I know that these progressives I’ve argued with are hypocritical- in that if democracy voted in e.g. a racist party, they would not accept that as legitimate, and they’d do everything they could to deny that such a social contract was valid. But nonetheless I tried to keep focus on the argument as it is usually presented, which is as a justification of absolute and arbitrary state authority.
One other thing- there is an argument that the Social Contract is not defined, that it is a nebulous fiction, that it is not written down anywhere. Well all I can find on the Social Contract seems to make clear that it is the laws of the nation, and the meta-laws (constitution) which defines how those laws are made. The social contract is not social convention e.g. it’s rude to pick your nose in church. It is the laws of the land, enforced by the state. As such, it is written down somewhere, for anyone to peruse. Thus the Social Contract would be something like,
“I, Ian B, agree to obey all the laws of the land. I agree to submit to the state and its appointed representatives as defined in those laws. I agree that such political representatives as are appointed under the laws of the land may make or repeal such laws as they so desire by constitutionally specified methods.”
Oranjepan said...
5 Aug 09 at 10:21 pm
No, the ‘social contract’ is not the laws of the land, it is the reason why laws are successful or unsuccessful.
The state may be the agent(s) which enforce those laws in the name of sovereignty, but neither is it above them. Without a social contract to define the essence of secularity and separation between the different sides there would be no code by which any rule of law can be maintained and the civic system (such as it is) would revert completely to a law of the jungle governed by the arbitrary whim of the most powerful.
A distorted sense of what the ‘social contract’ entails may protect the powerful from the weak, but no ‘social contract’ gives no protection to those powerless to help themselves.
I think at least part of the division in the debate stems from confusion between collectist terms like ‘state’ and ‘nation’ (especially by any avowed individualist who prefers to lump them all together according to their own prejudices), while another part stems from confusion between what ‘is’ and what ‘ought’ to be. Finally I think it would also help if we discussed the contents of the contract in more detail rather than trying to navigate blindly though undefined territory.
I start with legitimacy, which in turn requires validity, consistency, relevance underpinned by regular elections. If any of these conditions aren’t completed then the flow of the contract reverses and any authority is weakened until it collapses or is reasserted.
At present Brown is unelected, is applying laws selectively and introducing unhelpful or empty measures. He is failing to accept or live up to his responsibility and is accumulating more problems for himself by going too far in too many areas – he has backed himself into a corner politically and the only way out is for him to go. The sooner the better. The only question is under what circumstance it will happen.
Any new leader will have a honeymoon period as they are given the benefit of the doubt for a period, but if they fail to abide by the terms of the ‘social contract’ then they too will suffer an eventual ignominious demise.
How seriously a government breached the terms determines how long it the pain lasts and how hard it is felt.
Mark Wadsworth said...
6 Aug 09 at 12:27 am
All this waffle about ‘social contract’ vs ‘self-ownership’ is twaddle.
A more sensible dividing line is, as Ian B says, between ‘slaves’ and ‘the state’.
Now, on what side of the line do land and property owners fall? I reckon that they are more akin to “the state” because without “the state” there can be no land-ownership; and once you have a collective of land-owners, you have “a state”.
On the other hand, the tenant class is more akin to being “slaves” as they cannot “leave” in the economic or political sense, they have to go on paying rent (and income tax and all the other crap), because “the state” and “the landowners” taken together demand it.
Finally, I ask myself, who should be paying (in the literal sense of £-s-d) for the day-to-day running of “the state”? The landowners, by paying taxes on land values, or the tenants/salves, by paying taxes on incomes or production?
DavidNcl said...
6 Aug 09 at 5:29 am
Every time LVT surfaces I feel the strong urge to draw my revolver.
The North Briton said...
6 Aug 09 at 2:08 pm
I’d love to leave, but along with statism comes anti-immigration law, hence my not being in America right now driving V8s through nevada.
Mouse said...
14 Aug 09 at 9:18 am
Blimey – we’ve all been enslaved by the totalitarian phoney social contract. What language will we have left for real enslavement ?
The Government can’t get you to do anything it wants, so it is a bit of a non-problem for most people.
But, from the top – you can leave. People do it all the time. It’s just not much fun or very practical. You can move to another country, but they might expect you to sign up to their social contract.
You can do it within this country for example You don’t have to abide by laws – but please don’t act surprised when they are still used against you.
So it is not an “illusion” but the “reality” that stymies the idiocy o9f “self-ownership”.
Jocks Coats idea that we should all individually explicitly agree a social contract is not very practical.
And of course people agree contracts they can’t actually read all the time. Marriage, friendship, Parenthhod, etc.
More to the point they don’t even read contracts they can read – clubs and societies, mobile phone charges etc. The idea of an “unwritten” constitution has been around for years. It being a misnomer, as the UK constitution is partly written, partly altering practice and convention. The USA has a written constitution but, that is far from being the be all and end all of the USA constitution.
The last point is just wrong – conscientious objectionand non-violent direct action are allowed under the social contract. I would argue that even violent direct action is sometimes allowed, as in South Africa under aprthheid.
What exactly is it “liberatians” want from all this “self-ownership” ? The great thing about liberatianism is that it never come up against reality or runs out of explanations. It specialises in explaining why reality has got it wrong.
Ian B said...
14 Aug 09 at 9:29 am
You can do it within this country for example You don’t have to abide by laws – but please don’t act surprised when they are still used against you.
Lefty logic, mindboggling iznit?
Oranjepan said...
14 Aug 09 at 6:01 pm
“Lefty logic, mindboggling iznit?”
Your’s Ian, or someone else’s?