Relation to others· Society and historydifficulty
The origin of the social bond
Does society rest on an agreement between individuals, or on a community that precedes them?
If society arises from an agreement among individuals, we can renegotiate it, leave it, remake it as we wish; if a community precedes us, we are born caught in bonds and duties we never chose. To take a position is to say whether we belong to a society by consent or by birth.
Contractualism
7Society and political power draw their legitimacy from a pact, real or hypothetical, between free and equal individuals. The social bond is a voluntary construction: individuals found the common order, not the other way around.
Explore this position →Lockeexplicit
No one has authority over another by nature: all being free and equal in the state of nature, no political power can be legitimate without the consent of those who submit to it. From this premise Locke draws a contract of an altogether different kind from 's: one does not surrender one's rights to an absolute sovereign, one entrusts government with a mere trust, bound to an end, the preservation of lives, liberties and estates. Power thus stays conditional and revocable, where the Hobbesian pact was an alienation beyond recall. This is the foundation of political liberalism.
Two Treatises of Government, II, ch. 8 ("Of the Beginning of Political Societies")
Rousseauexplicit
Since no one has natural authority over his fellow and force creates no right, the legitimate order can rest only on a convention. Rousseau seeks the form of association in which each, giving himself to all, gives himself to no one, and « still obeys only himself »: through each person's alienation to the , the subject remains free in obeying a law of which he is co-author. Against , the pact institutes not a master but a sovereign body politic.
Rousseau, The Social Contract, books I-II
The Enlightenmentexplicit
Political society is not a natural order or one willed by God, but a human institution born of the agreement of individuals: its sole source of legitimacy is the consent of the governed, not force, tradition or the divine right of kings. makes it a revocable pact that the people may renounce if power betrays its end; seeks the form in which, uniting with all, each « still obeys only himself » and remains free. Against this founding fiction will set the organic community, inherited rather than contracted: but it is contractualism that gives the age of revolutions its grammar of legitimacy.
Rousseau, The Social Contract · Locke, Two Treatises of Government, II
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Epicurusexplicit
Justice is nothing absolute or natural in itself: it is a compact of utility made so as not to harm one another, varying with place and circumstance. This conventionalist conception, where the just reduces to a contract grounded in common advantage, is an early form of contractualism.
Principal Doctrines, XXXI-XXXVIII (justice as a compact of utility)
Kantexplicit
The civil condition rests on an original contract, not as a historical fact but as an idea of reason: the criterion of a just law is that it could have received the assent of the whole people. The legitimacy of power is grounded on this rational agreement, an avowed contractualism.
On the Common Saying: That May Be Correct in Theory, but It Is of No Use in Practice · Metaphysics of Morals, Doctrine of Right
Lucretiusexplicit
Right and laws descend neither from the gods nor from a natural order: weary of the violence of private vengeance, men of their own accord consented to neighbourly pacts so as no longer to harm one another, and from that agreement justice was born. thus gives, before the term existed, a contractual genesis of civil order, in which the just is a convention of common advantage and not a transcendent command, extending the compact of utility of . This is a naturalist contractualism.
On the Nature of Things, V, 1011-1027 (neighbourly pacts) and 1136-1160 (the founding of law)
Spinozainferable
In the , the state arises from a transfer of natural right: to live in safety, individuals agree to hand the community their power to act as they please. This derivation of the polity from a pact is contractualism, even if Spinoza grounds it in power rather than in a moral obligation.
Theological-Political Treatise, ch. 16 (the foundation of the state, transfer of right)
Organic community
10Human beings are social by nature: the community precedes the individual, who exists and understands themselves only within it. The social bond is not a contract but a living inheritance, woven from customs, institutions, and transmitted traditions.
Explore this position →Hegelexplicit
The state is not a contract by which already-constituted individuals would associate to protect their interests: that would confuse it with civil society and dissolve the substantial into arbitrary choice. It is the actuality of the ethical Idea, first in relation to individuals not in time but in concept, the whole in which alone the universal and the particular are reconciled. Hegel credits with grounding the state on will and freedom, but refuses to make it the arbitrary will of summed individuals rather than the rational will.
Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §257-258 (and the §258 Remark)
Thomas Aquinasexplicit
Taking up 's political animal, Thomas holds society to be natural and not born of a pact: the human being is led by his nature to live in community, since alone he can neither provide for his needs nor develop his reason. The city is therefore not an artifice born of fear, as the contractualists will hold, but the fulfilment of an inclination inscribed in human nature and willed by God, ordered to the common good.
On Kingship (De regno), I, 1 · Summa Theologiae, Ia, q. 96, a. 4
Aristotleexplicit
Against the sophists who held the city to be a mere convention (nomos) opposed to nature, Aristotle derives it from a natural genesis: from the couple comes the household, from households the village, from villages the city, the term that at last achieves self-sufficiency and living well. The proof lies in the : only the human has the speech that distinguishes the just from the unjust, and such a power would be pointless were the human not made for shared life. The city is therefore not posterior to a pact of already-constituted individuals; it is by nature prior, and whoever can do without it is either a beast or a god.
Politics, I.2 (1253a)
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Confuciusinferable
Society is not a pact among free and equal individuals, but an organic order modelled on the family: the state continues the natural relations of kinship and authority. Zhengming (the rectification of names) assigns each his place and duty, the ruler to be a ruler and the subject a subject, as the father must be a father. This is an .
Analects, XII, 11 (let the ruler be a ruler, the subject a subject) · Analects, II, 21 (filial piety extended is already governing)
Aristotelianismexplicit
Far from a contractual artifice, the city is for Aristotelianism a natural reality: man is by nature a political animal, and only a god or a beast could live outside the city. The political community is the natural culmination of simpler communities, the household and then the village.
Aristotle, Politics, I, 2
Confucianisminferable
Since the person exists only as caught within its relations, social order is not built by convention among already-constituted individuals but is restored when each fulfills the function of his name: let the ruler be ruler, the father father, the son son. Such is the sense of the rectification of names (zhengming 正名): naming correctly is no logical game but the precondition of all government, for disorder begins where names and conduct come apart. This way sets aside the contract, which presupposes individuals prior to their bonds, as much as the Legalist solution: it is not punishment that aligns acts with roles, but the shame felt by one who falls short of his name.
Confucius, Analects (Lunyu), 12.11 · Confucius, Analects (Lunyu), 13.3
Humeexplicit
In the essay Of the Original Contract, Hume criticizes the fiction of a founding social contract: no real government rests on explicit consent, and obedience is explained by habit, utility and common interest, not by an original promise. Political order is a customary fact gradually instituted, which distances him from abstract contractualism without making him an organicist.
Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, "Of the Original Contract"
Romanticisminferable
The nation is not an aggregate of individuals bound by a contract, but an organic community, woven of a shared language, history and traditions. Against the Enlightenment's contractualist fiction, Romanticism recovers, at times alongside , the idea of a people as a living whole, prior to its members and not instituted at will.
Herder, Treatise on the Origin of Language
Marxinferable
Marx rejects the fiction of a founding pact concluded among free individuals: society springs not from a voluntary contract but from the relations of production into which men enter independently of their will. The real human community is neither a contractual aggregate nor the bourgeois state, but the concrete association of producers, which marks a clear distance from contractualism.
Grundrisse, introduction (critique of the contract and the isolated individual) · Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (relations of production independent of the will)
Machiavelliinferable
The state is not born of a pact among consenting equals: it is instituted by the force and the of a founder, then maintained by good laws and good arms. Machiavelli precedes contractualism and does not share its source: legitimacy comes from founding and from effect, not from consent.
Discourses on Livy, I.9 · The Prince, ch. XII (good laws and good arms)
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A right seems to require a bearer who exists; future beings do not yet exist, claim nothing, can do nothing for us. Can there be an obligation with no reciprocity and no one to hold it, or does our duty toward them rest on something other than a right?
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No one signed a contract, and staying in a country is not consenting: one might as well say, with Hume, that one consents to the captain by remaining aboard on the open sea. If neither consent, nor fairness, nor utility grounds a general duty to obey, is political obligation an illusion?
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What authorizes the state to inflict on a person what no private individual could: a power ceded by the social contract, or the moral order itself?
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Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.Rousseau · The Social Contract (1762), I, 1
Man is by nature a political animal.Aristotle · Politics, I.2 (1253a)
Natural justice is a compact of advantage, made to the end that men may neither harm one another nor be harmed.Epicurus · Principal Doctrines, XXXI
To find a form of association by which each, uniting with all, still obeys only himself and remains as free as before.Rousseau · The Social Contract, I, 6