Is society a contract and does it matter?

Printed from: https://newbostonpost.com/2016/09/09/is-society-a-contract-and-does-it-matter/

In an election year, when Americans are in the grip of policy debates and heated discussions as to first principles, the question as to whether society is a contract requires particular attention. This is because our views on social contract theory not only shape our political predilections, but also because they have a direct impact on our views with respect to culture, family, and work.

What is a social contract, and, moreover, why does it command such importance?

Most political theorists trace modern social contract theory to three thinkers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean Jacques Rousseau.

Hobbes and Locke understood civil society as a type of business agreement in which individuals entered into a relationship with one another, at some remote point in the past, for the purpose of obtaining mutual protection and material benefit. Hobbes famously declared that life in a state of nature was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” and that man only had the opportunity to achieve personal security and material success if he came together with others in a voluntary compact.

In Locke’s view, the state of nature provides three inalienable rights: life, liberty, and property. Men are to live according to the “laws of nature,” they transgress those laws when they impede another’s fundamental rights, and such transgressions demand punishment. The source of these so-called rights is nature itself.

With Rousseau’s assertion of the legitimacy of the “general will,” in which political control of society is the direct, unfiltered will of the masses at any given moment, social contract theory assumed a new character. Rousseau believed that the forces of civilization, which sat at the center of the Enlightenment project, prevented the “general will” from prevailing and forged the fetters of modernity. For Rousseau, true progress is only possible where men reject civilization and embrace the rights due to them in a state of nature.

Instead of life, liberty, and property, Rousseau’s theory is predicated upon liberty, equality, and fraternity. These three natural rights became a rallying cry to the apologists of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror that followed. Like Hobbes and Locke before him, these novel rights were based upon a theoretical speculation with unknown and unproved anthropological antecedents.

A reverence for the past and a respect for the future demand that individuals chasten their own desires to conform to standards of decency, honesty, and civility that have developed over the centuries.

But do these abstract theories proffered without a scintilla of factual support tell the whole story? Is society a contract akin to the one’s divined by thinkers of the Enlightenment, and these three philosophers in particular?

In Reflections on the Revolution in France, British statesman Edmund Burke forcefully argued that “society is indeed a contract.” But unlike a commercial-style contract in the manner conceived by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, Burke described society as a “great mysterious incorporation of the human race,” in which the living, dead, and unborn thrive in a “community of souls.” A spiritual enterprise, Burke believed that society was forged by piety and strengthened by the bonds of kinship in which affection for family and community tied each generation together so that men did not become as ephemeral as the “flies of a summer.” This was a contract that transcended commerce and superseded statecraft. It was the fundamental unit of social order and a necessary predicate for the existence of civilization.

In Burke’s view, social contract is not a formal agreement to which our ancestors assented for the purpose of creating an artificial society premised upon mutual protection and material benefit. Rather, as Burke sees it, the true social contract is an eternal constitution in which individuals, looking back to their ancestors and forward to the rising generation, understand that they are the mere custodians of civilization. To that end, custom, convention, prejudice, and prescription become the tools of social conservation, as “the individual is foolish, but the species is wise.”

[A]s members of a community, we are required to balance our individual interests, not only against those of our neighbors, but against those of posterity.

Part and parcel of this conception of social contract is the idea of personal restraint. A reverence for the past and a respect for the future demand that individuals chasten their own desires to conform to standards of decency, honesty, and civility that have developed over the centuries. The precise origins of these sources of civility are not always clear, but through the filter of time, we have come to understand the difference between right and wrong, the distinction of good and evil. A reverence for the past and a respect for the rights of the generations to come are essential elements to the health of any culture. As Richard Hooker wrote in his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, “[t]he reason first why we do admire those things which are greatest, and second those things which are ancientest, is because the one are the least distant from the infinite substance, the other from the infinite continuance, of God.” It is no wonder why Hooker’s thought exercised such influence over both Burke and the American founders, each of whom looked to the past as an indispensable guide.

Clearly then, as members of a community, we are required to balance our individual interests, not only against those of our neighbors, but against those of posterity. The present generation has no right to destroy those institutions which have been built for it by its predecessors, or to squander precious resources, so that the next generation, without its consent, is left impoverished and without a cultural patrimony. Like farm-hands clearing weeds away from a bountiful crop, the present generation is always charged with preserving the best fruits of civilization while engaging in gradual reform. Just as a farmer cannot throw salt upon his fields to forever banish the weeds, zealous reformers must not destroy the fabric of civilization in the name of speedy change or “progress.”

In contrast to the theoretical quid pro quos offered by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, Burke’s idea of society as a spiritual endeavor in which the generations are bound to one another in a primeval contract, a view also held by the medieval Schoolmen and their predecessors, provides a coherent and sound basis for the maintenance of social order. To embrace Burke’s view is to reject the promises of fanaticism and to accept the frailty of human nature and the delicate character of society. Society is, indeed, a contract, but maybe not the contract we learned about in our high school textbooks.

Glen Sproviero

Glen Sproviero

Glen A. Sproviero is a commercial litigator in New York. Read his previous columns here.