English | 2010 | ISBN: 9004184252 | PDF | pages: 209 | 1,6 mb
The social contract is usually regarded as a quintessentially modern political idea, which telegraphs the root modern principles of popular sovereignty and governmental accountability to the people. By setting classic contract theory in historical context, these essays present a different view. Seventeenth-century contractarianism was a parochial genre, they argue, that addressed problems which disappeared with the advent of modern, electoral politics. A further theme is the parochial nature of the texts; several essays relate Hobbes’s texts, in particular, to the ‘history of the book’ in the seventeenth century.
While my readings show the distance between classic social contract theory and modern electoral politics, in doing so they illuminate problems in the revival of contractarianism in the twentieth century.
Th e impulse to be skeptical of abstract, universal formulations of the social contract, and instead to tie contract arguments to their contexts, reflects a common critique of Rawls’s initial formulation in A Theory of Justice. As he would later acknowledge, the theory in fact builds in his local horizon. Th e essays in Part I of the volume extend this insight to Grotian, Hobbesian, and Lockean contract theories, making the argument that they centrally address the ‘ancien regime’ question of the right to resist tyrants. Part II examines the logic of universal-izing, ‘philosophical’ contractarianism; these essays discuss the role of historical ‘facts’ in Hobbes’s political theory and the origin of mod-ern contract theory’s curious mix of voluntarist and nonvoluntarist reasoning.
No mirrors please!