Social Contracts

Abstract

There is a long tradition of founding states theoretically on mythical social contracts. Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Rawls and Robert Nozick all provided such theories to justify the kinds of states they preferred. However, none of these theories is tenable. They all begin with imagined states of nature, or of ignorance, and then ask: What kind of bargain would you make in such a state to protect yourself, your family and your possessions from attack? Or, in Rawls’s case: What kind of state would you consider to be both secure and fair, if you had to choose from behind a ‘veil of ignorance’? But the imagined states of nature are nothing like the real ones. More importantly, the social contracts are not much like the de facto social contracts of any existing societies, since they tell us nothing about the rights or responsibilities of many of the most important kinds of agents in such societies, such as their institutions, governments and corporations. I will argue here that the whole mythological approach is wrong. We should work with the realities of the existing social structures, not with creation myths, or veils of ignorance.