Justice, education and the social contract: An interview with Samuel Freeman

Public service programs define one set of terms by which universities negotiate -- and must continue to negotiate -- their social and political contracts with the public. Over the past several decades, these contracts have been challenged by ongoing social and technological change [28, 45], by internal changes in the structure of the university [10, 28, 44], and by the need to assimilate new generations of students and faculty members into campus cultures and the academic marketplace. Other challenges to these contracts include the increasing specialization of academic research and the increasingly diverse and complex publics that request university services. As one example of the latter, the growth of professional associations and other organizations of practitioners, producers, and consumers has created competition for university service between non-place networks of individuals with shared interests and more traditional communities tied to neighborhood, geographic locale, and region [26]. General features of these challenges were noted by Clark Kerr in the early 1960s and constitute a key theme of his enduring treatise, The Uses of the University [28]. However, during the past ten years, concern about the social responsibility of colleges and universities has increased. Within this renewed climate of concern, colleges and universities have been criticized for a lack of sensitivity to considerations in general (including, most recently, considerations regarding the appropriate use of extramural funds), inattention to problems of the larger society, and a lack of commitment to serving the public of under-graduate students [4, 7, 43, 47]. These criticisms have stimulated countervailing pressures within universities to resist external definitions of their purpose, value, effectiveness, and quality. These opposing concerns have increasingly destabilized social and political contracts between research universities and their publics and made the design, administration, and assessment of service programs both more problematic and more important. In this article I examine these larger issues by looking closely at the efforts of one research university to renew its social contract by replicating within the field of education a service program of long-standing vitality and effectiveness in agriculture. A case study of these efforts provides a point of departure for critically examining this kind of replication as an institutional strategy for achieving enhanced service goals. It also illustrates neglected complexities within the more general process by which research universities negotiate social and political contracts with their publics. Clearly, negotiations between universities and their publics involve much more than the design and administration of service programs, and replication represents only one of several strategies within the latter by which universities can try to increase their contributions to society. However, proposals to replicate existing service programs have a special attraction for university administrators, political leaders, and the public. extensions of university research have contributed so much in medicine or engineering, why can't they also improve urban life? Or, as the question was framed at the university examined in this article, If university research has done so much to improve agriculture, then why not schooling? This common sense approach to renewing social contracts between research universities and their publics has a lot to recommend it. Common formulations are grounded in the kind of shared ideology that makes collective efforts possible [20]. As such, they are useful in mobilizing institutional or societal resources necessary to support largescale projects. But the vision of translating service programs from one domain to another also ignores key features of universities and the social and political environments in which they are situated. …

The concept of multiple (economic, ecological, social and political) crisis has arisen from recent tumultuous economic events. This paper uses a feminist perspective to present the concept as a crisis of regeneration of both nature and social reproduction. We intend to go beyond multiple crisis using the notion of a new social contract, to overcome this crisis in a transformative way towards sustainability. A feminist analysis of the concept of social contract is founded on the critique of domination and is based on Carole Pateman's 1998 thesis that the modern social contract is characterized by a ‘separating inclusion’ of women. It also refers to Val Plumwood's critique of the separated and autonomous self, which is part of all classical conceptions of social contract. We argue that overcoming the multiple crisis requires overcoming structures of separation and re‐envisioning concepts of the individual, by discussing the German example of a ‘Social Contract for Sustainability ’ (2011). If the notion of social contract is to become a catalyst for transformation processes leading to sustainability, it cannot be overarching but has to be developed as a multitude of small new social and local contracts.

• The term “social contract” is increasingly used in social science literature but is rarely well operationalized. • We define social contracts as agreements between societal groups and the state on rights and obligations toward each other. • The notion of social contracts helps to compare state-society relations in different countries and at different times. • After independence, MENA countries had similar social contracts, which were then challenged by the Arab uprisings in 2011. • Since then, social contracts in MENA countries have developed in different directions. The term “social contract” is increasingly used in social science literature to describe sets of state-society relations – in particular with reference to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Nevertheless, the term has thus far remained insufficiently conceptualized and its potential to inform a systematic analysis of contemporary states has been underutilized. This article contributes to the filling of this gap. It defines social contracts as sets of formal and informal agreements between societal groups and their sovereign (government or other actor in power) on rights and obligations toward each other. We argue that social contracts are partly informal institutions, which are meant to make state-society interactions more predictable and thereby politics more stable. Their effectiveness depends on their substance (deliverables exchanged between government and society), scope (the actors involved and the geographic range of influence) and temporal dimension (beginning, evolution, and duration). Social contracts can differ substantially in all three dimensions. This approach complements established theories of comparative politics and sharpens the perspective on state-society relations. It helps to (i) compare state-society relations in different countries, (ii) track changes within one country, (iii) find out when and why social contracts are broken or even revoked, (iv) uncover how external players affect state-society relations, and (v) analyze how state-society relations can be Pareto improved. Against this background, this article shows that after independence, MENA countries had quite similar social contracts, which were based on the provision of social benefits rather than political participation. We argue that they degenerated steadily after 1985 due to increasing populations and budgetary problems. The Arab uprisings in 2010–11 were an expression of discontent with a situation in which governments provided neither political participation nor social benefits, like employment. Since then, social contracts in MENA countries have developed in different directions, and their long-term stability is questionable. We address the question of how they can be transformed to become more inclusive and therefore more stable.

Abstract: The social contract and state of are accepted legitimating myths in the liberal democracies, yet do not correspond to reality. In contrast, a theory of natural law (lex naturalis, the law of the jungle) combined with ius naturalis (natural justice - right reason in accord with the law of nature) is internally consistent and externally verifiable and thus an adequate description of reality - natural law is a consistent and complete system with more than purely formal value. Yet, natural law theories were rejected by late modernity in favour of pure positivism and voluntarism - with disastrous consequences. Natural law arguments are the basis of the individual rights underlying the social contract model of liberal democracy and so the rejection of natural law should entail the rejection of social contract theory. Contemporary theorists such as Dworkin, Rawls and Nozick struggle to this very day with the concept of the social contract and state of without however consciously developing or deploying any theory of natural law and are thus doomed to irrelevance and failure because both the social contract and the state of are ahistorical myths. A reconceptualisation of the foundations of the state requires recognition of the validity of natural law and the rectitude of the Aristotelian view that the state is inevitable and a natural phenomena. The social contract is no answer to the problems of state formation or legitimation. Liberal democracies would more consistently and coherently legitimate themselves by reference to laws founded not on a mythical social contract but which reflect the facts of human nature.The Social Contract: A Basic Contradiction in Western Liberal Democracy 1I. Natural Rights 5A. Foundation of natural law in intellectual realism 5B. Human rights 111. The central function of human rights is political legitimation 122. The idea of human rights is necessarily ambiguous 12a. Universal terminology is a source of ambiguity in human rights 12b. The multiplicity of theoretical sources of law is the source of the ambiguity inherent in human rights 13c. The multiplicity of legal sources also at the root of the ambiguity of human rights 13d. The quest for political legitimacy based on human rights as unworkable because of the ambiguity inherent in the idea of human rights. 13II. Social Contract Theory 14A. The State of 15B. The Social Contract 15III. Contemporary Social Contract Theorists 18A. Ronald Dworkin 18Dworkin on Natural Law and Positivism 19Principles and Policies 20Intensive Reiteration to Exhaustion of a Fundamental Principle 21The Inductive Deductive Method 21Dworkin on Law and Economics 22Conclusion: A Potentially Powerful Synthesis as yet Undeveloped and Rife with Contradictions Due to Absent Resolution of Conflicting Presuppositions 23B. John Rawls 231. The original position 232. Rawls and the School of public choice 273. Rawls Contrasted with Aristotle 27Origin of the State 27Human Inequality 28The Theory of Justice 29A Catholic Inspired Synthesis of Rights Theory and Jus Naturel? 30IV. Libertarians 31A. Introduction: Commonalities between different anarchisms 31Points of divergence among anarchisms 32B. Anarcho-Capitalistes (libertarians) 331. Nozick - the political theory of anarcho-capitalism 341. Nozick's Ultraminimal State 362. David Friedman - the economic theory of anarcho capitalism (libertarianism) 383. Conclusions: 40a. Anarcho-capitalism is unrealistic 40b. No dissolution of private property 41c. Privatization of state functions. 41d. A negationist thought 41V. Criticisms of the Social Contract 431. Criticisms of the Social Contract from within its own terms 43a. The state of nature is an impossibility 43b. The Social contract is but a fiction 432. Criticisms of the Social Contract from outside its own terms 44a. The Necessity of Government 45b. The impossibility of an end of history 45VI. Conclusion: Explaining the success of the theory of Social Contract Theory 45

The article examines the essential characteristics of the social contract as a practice of supporting the population in the Altai Krai. It identifies the fundamental features of the social contract within the region's support system and discusses the main issues and prospects for the implementation of the social contract in the lives of the Altai Krai population. Additionally, this work explores the social contract as an opportunity to overcome poverty in a depressed region of the Russian Federation. The data obtained during the sociological research provided a comprehensive understanding of the social contract as a practice of supporting the population: both objective and subjective components of this type of support were identified. The article presents the results of the authors' sociological research conducted from 2023 to 2025. The methodology of this work is based on a combination of a systemic approach and structural functionalism. The research on the social contract is grounded in a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods. The qualitative method is represented by expert surveys in the form of in-depth interviews (n=15), while the quantitative method is represented by a mass questionnaire survey conducted both in a remote format and in a classical, face-to-face format (n=137). The data obtained from the empirical sociological research served as the foundation for characterizing the social contract as a practice of supporting the population in the region. Furthermore, the data allow for the characterization of the difficulties encountered in the process of obtaining a social contract, the overall effectiveness of this support practice, which in turn creates opportunities for formulating practice-oriented recommendations for improving and enhancing the social contract. The author concludes that the social contract, as a whole, is an effective and efficient measure of support for the population in the region. The social contract meets individuals' expectations; moreover, in the long term, entering into such a contract reduces the burden on the social sector of the state budget. At the same time, not all citizens who have entered into a social contract have improved their financial situation, which requires specific solutions and refinements. Further research in this area will allow for a better understanding of the essence of the social contract and identify additional opportunities for extrapolating this practice of social assistance to the population. Continued research will also make the social contract as a practice of support measures even more effective and efficient.

Social media, social networks, social technology, social terms, social selling, social business, social enterprise, social era, social capitalism, social computing, social venture, social entrepreneurship, social impact, social learning, social investment, social responsibility, social web, social intelligence…okay, you get the picture. We are becoming enveloped in an increasingly social world characterized by fluid models of openness and collaboration in organizational behavior. This transformation emanates from the works Hobbs, Locke, and Rousseau, all philosophers who believed that social contract theory consisted of a set of rules that regulated behavior, which rational people would accept, on the condition that others accept them as well. The collection of articles in our current issue is evidence this profound change is underway. New social contracts are emerging. Each of our featured articles is focused on a group that has been standing in the shadows of social interactions. Individuals belonging to these groups have been disenfranchised from the social contracts enjoyed by more mainstream group members. The common theme among the articles appears to be the needs and efforts of disenfranchised groups of the 20th century and their supporters to renegotiate the social contract. In her article, “The Phenomenon of Later-Life Recareering by Well-Educated Baby Boomers,” Rice draws attention to the growing trend among Baby Boomers over age 59 who are wishing to step up in their careers. This emergent group of mature adults is defying characterization that is typically regarded as being too old for entering a new career or for advancing in existing careers. These individuals are renegotiating a social contract with social organizations of a formal or informal context within the larger society. Members of the LGBTQ community are renegotiating the social contract with the larger society to gain new recognition as individuals and partners within multiple organizational contexts. In his article, “Policy Characteristics for the Prevention of Workplace Bullying Anteceded by Heterosexism: A Delphi Study,” McCalla raises important questions as to whether organizations need to establish protective policies in workplaces for specific groups such as LGBTQ employees. In their article, “The Psychology of Transference: Gender and Access to Training—The Mechanisms of Disadvantage,” McIntosh, Prowse, and Archibong explore the pathways taken by working women who do not wish to choose between career and family and are renegotiating the traditional social contract regarding motherhood. Women with children may lose valuable opportunities for advancement as an outcome of an active family life. The symposium articles for this issue continue our focus on social contracts In the article, “Manipulative Monkeys: Research as Design,” Underdahl examines, through an extensive literature review, primate behavior, so that we see examples of negotiated social contracts emerging in humanities' direct ancestors. In the review of “Still Alice, an Independent Film,” Veazie explores Early-Onset Familial Alzheimer's Disease. We follow Alice, a 50-year-old woman who has Alzheimer's, as she struggles to keep her identity intact. Alice sees that she must renegotiate her social contract within her family and professional construct. She is a brilliant thinker pre-Alzheimer's and comes up with a radical response that aligns with her pre-Alzheimer's goals and attributes. Gavin's article, “The Importance of Place,” examines life experiences through the organizational ethnographic lens. These ethnographic studies are about discovering who we are at a particular time and place. Gavin reflects on how culture emerges within an organization and becomes the informal social contract. Finally, we have a lively article by Shean, “Mindless Learning vs. Critical Thinking: Educators Must Teach How to Think.” Shean believes that “dumping information” on students using rote memory techniques and treating their minds as repositories cause these students to eventually lose complete interest in school and learning. He explains this type of social contract as a constraint on active learning. He contrasts this with the students who use a new social contract, which includes critical thinking expectations and skills based on learning how to think and how to evaluate these thinking processes. My hope is that these articles serve their intended purpose and have our readers pause and reflect on other contracts being renegotiated. Based upon the contributions of the scholars featured in our current issue, one thing we know for sure is that the transformation is under way.

Adapting to climate change impacts requires a coherent social contract in which different actors agree on a clear distribution of roles and responsibilities. It is hence important to understand what roles and responsibilities different actors in a city or other social system expect and how they negotiate to ultimately arrive at a shared vision for a coherent social contract on adaptation for the coming decades. An urgent requirement is to understand the imagined social contracts on expected roles and responsibilities, which is particularly relevant in cities where very diverse social groups come together. However, there is limited empirical evidence on these expectations as they are often tacit and hard to capture across large populations and heterogeneous groups. Here using the concept of social listening in combination with Twitter data we assess the social contract on flood risk management in Mumbai. Social media data offer a new data source to inductively capture and assess the exchange and negotiations of roles and responsibilities of different actors such as public sector, citizens, civil society and private sector, including nuanced sentiments and opinions. In order to understand the imagined social contracts by different actors in Mumbai, we captured all flood risk related tweets over the monsoon season of 2021 (~70,000 tweets). We collected data through specific hashtag and keyword combinations. We manually coded the tweets in order to show the major themes in the dominant debate on flood risk management and filtered the most relevant tweets for the social contract analysis. The tweets were subsequently coded and analysed more comprehensively (e.g. for underlying sentiments).Overall, our results show that there are gaps in the social contract on flood risk management in Mumbai on two levels: first, between different social contracts such as the practiced and imagined or the legal-institutional and imagined and, second, between different imagined social contracts. On the former, we found a large gap between the aspirational and realistic levels of expectations from the public sector. On the latter, we found surprisingly stark contestations regarding the roles and responsibilities towards the poor and most vulnerable populations living in informal and highly flood-prone settlements. Sentiments such as frustration and apathy expressed in tweets explain these gaps and highlight the need to build trust for achieving accepted and effective social contracts for adaptation. The results suggest that laying open these gaps is a necessary first step towards closing them and building a coherent future social contract. Twitter is an upcoming arena to negotiate and express opinions between different actors and hence, an important empirical database for analysing evolving social contracts. We suggest that such social listening approaches using Twitter or other platforms of active exchange can be of great relevance in high-risk contexts, including urban areas, across the globe in which different actors are faced with a high adaptation pressure and diverse competing, or even conflicting perspectives but currently lack a clear and agreed strategy or even vision to jointly move adaptation forward.

To breed an animal with the right to make promises-is not this the paradoxical task that nature has set itself in the case of man? Nietzsche When at the beginning of modernity philosophers were seeking an alternative account of political authority to that provided, for example, by proponents of the divine right of Kings, many of them looked to place at the very basis of society the idea of a contract.' The language of contract was already widespread in political discussions and so was by no means the sole property of social contract theorists.2 However, even though the social contract was not anything anyone remembered, nor even anything that could be found recorded in history, the idea of such a contract caught on and continues to resonate. This is because social contract theory provides a framework for answering questions not only about the way societies are formed and legitimate governments are established, but also about the relation of individuals to the societies to which they belong. The social contract was not just one contract among others. It was sometimes called the original contract. But how original was it? The more original it was, the more difficult it was to explain its own origins. Did the contract rely on preexisting obligations or did it introduce the first moral obligations? Was it a form of words by which one had to abide or was it the agreement that constituted language in the first place? Did it bind one to a preexisting identity or did it produce that identity? Did it commit one to a specific future or was it only through the contract that there was a future at all? On the standard interpretation, the social contract marked the moment when a collection of individuals agreed among themselves to form a societas in the sense of an alliance or partnership. They gave up their natural freedom for the sake of a more secure and more fulfilling freedom. In the process they exchanged an uncertain future for a less open but more definite future, one which they judged to be to their mutual benefit. In Hobbes, this future was defined as a condition of peace that made possible what he called industry.' Although it is true that, in general, promises introduce restrictions that either tie one down to the performance of a specific act or establish an ongoing commitment, I shall try to show that this does not hold for the Hobbesian social contract. I shall argue that the role of the social contract is not so much to secure a specific future, as it is to open the future as such. I shall also suggest that the social contract bound an individual not only to others but also to him- or her-self. This means that, although the institution of promising in general obliges one to be true to one's word, the social contract establishes the conditions for promising to be possible, which includes the provision of language, as well as the securing of the identity of the individual. However, the primary issue, the one to which I will turn first and to which I will devote the most attention, concerns promising itself. For Hobbes, the promise to keep one's promises is the initial principle, the principle of all principles, and the social contract is, among other things, that promise. The social contract so entirely exceeds that which precedes it that it cannot be reduced to a moment within a narrative. Because Hobbes's texts have largely been read as presenting a narrative, in part under the influence of subsequent developments in social contract theory, but also in part under the impact of certain directives within those texts themselves, there will be some tension not only between my reading and more conventional interpretations, but also within my reading. Hobbes's texts are not without ambiguity and, inevitably no single interpretation can accommodate all their facets. Contemporary Hobbes scholarship has perhaps tended to sacrifice what is most radical in the Hobbesian analysis for the sake of maximizing its overall coherence, but the result has been a version of the social contract that offers less to the philosophical imagination than the Kantian model. …

The dynamics of the Egyptian social contract: How the political changes affected the poor

Phenomenon The social contract is an implicit agreement that governs medicine’s values, beliefs, and practices in ways that uphold the profession’s commitment to society. While this agreement is assumed to include all patients, historical examples of medical experimentation and mistreatment suggest that medicine’s social contract has not been extended to Black patients. We suggest that is because underlying medicine’s contract with society is another contract; the racial contract, which favors white individuals and legitimizes the mistreatment of those who are nonwhite. When Black/African American physicians enter medicine, they enter into the social contract as an agreement with society, but must navigate the realities of the racial contract in ways that have yet to be acknowledged. This study examines how Black/African American physicians interpret and enact the social contract in light of the country’s racial contract by investigating the ways in which Black/African American physicians discuss their interactions with Black patients. Approach This qualitative study reexamines cross-sectional data previously collected in 2018-2019 examining the professional identity formation (PIF) experiences of Black/African American trainees and physicians in the Southern part of the U.S. The goal of the larger study was to explore participants’ professional identity formation experiences as racialized individuals within a predominantly white profession. The current study examines these data in light of medicine’s social contract with society and Mill’s (1997) theory of the racial contract to understand how Black physicians interpret and enact the social contract. Participants included 10 Black/African American students, eight residents, and nine attending physicians. Findings The findings show that Black/African American physicians and trainees are aware of the country’s racial contract, which has resulted in Black patients being historically excluded from what has been described in the social contract that governs all physicians. As such, they are actively working to extend the social contract so that it includes Black patients and their communities. Specifically, they engage in trust building with the Black community to make sure all patients are included. Building trust includes ensuring a consistent stream of new Black/African American trainees, and equipping Black trainees and patients with the skills needed to improve the healthcare within the Black/African American community. Insights While it been has assumed that all patients are included in the social contract between medicine and society, historical examples of medical mistreatment and experimentation demonstrate this is inaccurate; Black/African American communities have not been included. In an effort to dismantle systemic racism in the U.S., medical education must teach about its racist past and divulge how some communities have been historically excluded, providing new ways to think about how to include everyone in medicine’s social contract.

Idea of rule based upon (social) contract is present in theory since ancient period until modern times. In this text the authors tend to reveal theory of social contract in a part of Middle Ages, pointing to certain thinkers who contributed to the theory of social contract in their works. They examine some basic elements of developed social contract theory in 18th century, particularly the issue of certain rights of the people to elect potentate (sovereign) and establish limited government. In the period when church has obtained particular role in social life, as well as in performing secular power, the attention was paid to relationship between spiritual and secular heads of the two competing social organizations. It is stressed that during the elapse of time they have started to look alike in terms of ruling technique. The authors conclude that in that period the word was rather about growth of social contract theory than about completed theory of ruling upon a social contract.

‶Don’t Say Neigh, Say Yay”

The three parts of the book investigate the social history of the Egyptian social contract chronologically. The first part examines the social contract under Egypt’s constitutional monarchy, 1922–1952; the second part studies it under Nasser, 1952–1970; and the third part explores the long search for a new social contract between the early 1970s and the 2011 Uprising. Part One of the book,“From Social Reform to Social Justice,” explores the transformation from the liberal social contract that emerged following semi-independence (1922) to a statist effendi social contract that started to take shape after the mid-1930s. Part Two of the book “The Social Contract in Nasser’s Effendi State,” offers significant revisions of our current understanding of Nasser’s social contract. Part Three of the book, “The Tortuous Search for a New Social Contract,” narrates the seeming breaking down yet great persistence of the effendi social contract between the 1970s and the 2011 Uprising.

Even though the term “social contract” has been around for a while, its definition has evolved to fit the circumstances in a particular region. This study examines the idea of social contracts in the dynamic Indonesian environment, with a focus on partnerships between businesses and communities. This study examines the changing social dynamics within Indonesian society by using a qualitative research methodology and conducting a thorough literature review. It investigates how social contracts can address problems with cooperation and interaction between various groups. The findings underscore two significant factors that influence social contracts: coordination challenges within the same group and competition challenges between different groups. To effectively address these challenges, it is crucial to comprehend both intra-group and inter-group dynamics. The study concludes by discussing the Indonesian perspective on social contracts within the framework of existing rules and regulations, emphasizing the necessity of raising awareness and establishing a well-defined social contract framework to promote inclusive development and social harmony. It is necessary to create awareness about how social contracts help maintain inclusive development and the need to live within the means of social harmony based on social contracts established with a clear framework to realize a peaceful society. This study offers valuable insights into Indonesia’s evolving concept of social contracts. It underscores the pivotal role of collaboration between companies and communities in adapting to the rapidly changing Indonesian environment. Doi: 10.28991/HEF-2022-03-04-005 Full Text: PDF

This article is designed to trace the forces influencing the supply and demand for 'knowledge workers'. The effects of technology and restructuring are the most important from industry's standpoint in influencing demand because industry as a whole 'does not do enough' training to help in the supply, based on the comments of experts. The incentives provided by industry through the 'social contract' with workers, as discussed, are as essential as training in affecting the supply of these workers. But because industry does not want to train unless there is a condition of payback in its investment in training, such preparation is left to the high schools and colleges. Thus school-to-work transitions are needed as an important part of what high schools and colleges should offer.