Kant and the Social Contract tradition

Abstract

In memory of Pierre Laberge The fundamental idea of the Social Contract tradition is that consent or agreement can justify basic social and political institutions: just societies are based on the consent of the governed, unjust societies are not. As is well known, the tradition has had many forms, notably in political philosophies of the early modern period and in the luxuriant variety of contemporary contractualisms. As is equally well known, a discouraging list of standard difficulties stands in the way of the thought that consent can justify fundamental political and social arrangements. One long-standing dispute is about the sort of consent needed for justification: should it be the actual consent of those involved, or the hypothetical consent that would be given by beings with a distinctive (e.g. reasoned, informed, disinterested) view of the matter? If actual consent is needed, should it be explicit or is tacit consent enough? Neither view of actual consent seems satisfactory for purposes of justification: we consent explicitly to too little, but (as it seems) tacitly to far too much. If, on the other hand, consent is only hypothetical, then it is quite obscure why it justifies. Why should the consent of hypothetical idealised rational agents, or of hypothetical beings in an ideal speech situation, or of persons in an artfully tailored hypothetical Original Position, justify the principles by which we are to live, who have never been any of these supposedly ideal beings, and probably cannot and do not aspire to become any of them? Moreover, even if hypothetical consent could justify, how should we choose among the many versions of hypothetical consent that have been proposed? And if there is a choice to be made, does not this very fact suggest that considerations other than consent are basic to justification? On the surface it seems that Kant too must encounter these difficulties. He is generally taken to be a Social Contract theorist, and a good one. In the most distinguished formulation of twentieth-century contractualism John Rawls writes that ‘My aim is to present a conception of justice which generalises and carries to a higher level of abstraction the familiar theory of the Social Contract as found, say, in Locke, Rousseau and Kant.’ Many knowledgeable writers on Kant's political philosophy during the eighties and nineties spoke confidently of him as a Social Contract theorist.