In Our Time - The Social Contract

Episode Date: February 7, 2008

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Social Contract and ask a foundational question of political philosophy – by what authority does a government govern? “Man was born free and he is everywhere in chains”. So begins Jean Jacques Rousseau’s great work on the Social Contract. Rousseau was trying to understand why a man would give up his natural freedoms and bind himself to the rule of a prince or a government. But the idea of the social contract - that political authority is held through a contract with those to be ruled - began before Rousseau with the work of John Locke, Hugo Grotius and even Plato. We explore how an idea that burgeoned among the 17th century upheavals of the English civil war and then withered in the face of modern capitalist society still influences our attitude to government today. With Melissa Lane, Senior University Lecturer in History at Cambridge University; Susan James, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London; Karen O’Brien, Professor of English Literature at the University of Warwick.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, forward slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, man is born free and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself a master of others and still remains a greater slave than they. Thus, dramatically, begins Jean-Jacques Rousseau's influential work of political philosophy, the social contract. Rousseau was trying to understand why a man would give up his natural freedoms and bind himself to the rule of a prince or a government. It's among the oldest questions in political philosophy, but the argument flourished, particularly in the 17th and 18th century, as France and Britain were racked by civil strife and revolution,

what another great social contract thinker Thomas Hobbes might call the war of all against all. With me to discuss the social contract, a Susan James, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College University of London, Karen O'Brien, Professor of English Literature at the University of Warwick, and Melissa Lane, Senior Lecture in History at Cambridge University. Melissa Lane, at the heart, at heart, who is the social contract between? What's distinctive in the social contract of the 17th century, beginning with Grosius and moving on to Hobbes and Rousseau, is that the social contract is among individuals.

Previous theorists had talked about a contract, for example, between a king and the people, for example, some of the Huguenot resistance theories. But Grosius begins with the idea that individuals have natural rights, and that they have to establish a political society by giving up some of those natural rights and then moving on to establish political authority. Can we just go about and find a taproot in Plato, which just might give it some sort of perspective?

I know we're talking about nearly 2,000 years before Grochers, but nevertheless, in Crito, when Socrates refuses to flee his cell, although he's urged to and go to another city when he's been condemned to death and therefore condemns himself to death, he brings up this point, doesn't he? He does. He imagines that he's speaking with the laws of Athens

and that the laws of Athens had said to him, you must either persuade or obey, so that you, in staying in the city, you have made a kind of contract with the laws, that either you'll persuade them to change an unjust law, or if you fail to persuade, that then you'll obey. So there are those ancient roots, and of course also very important here are the biblical roots, also in the Hebrew Bible, the idea of a covenant originally between a people and God, but also in some ancient Near Eastern thoughts between a people and a sovereign, and I think also plays a crucial role

going into the 17th century. But just to pick once more at Kreit, Plato, the interesting thing is the consent. He has consented to live in this Athenian state and enjoyed the benefits of it. And now he's got, as it, were, the wrong side of it, and therefore he must still give his consent to how the state operates.

Yeah, that's what he claims. And one of the interesting motifs there is, in what sense has he been said to give in his consent? Because we don't see anyone actually kind of signing on the dotted line. But he says that the fact that he didn't leave, that he accepted the benefits, as you say, that he could have fled to other cities and left and didn't,

those should be taken as signs of consent. And that again will come back in the 17th century when Locke and others tried to establish a basis for tacit consent. Well, let's go back to Grosius in the 16th century. And here's the idea of law and rights and natural rights. Can you take us through that again? I interrupted you there. Well, what's distinctive about Grosius,

actually in the early 17th century when he begins writing, he's born in the late 16th century, is this idea of natural rights that Grosius says we actually each have natural rights and those are, we have them in order to preserve ourselves. This is an ideology who doesn't bring proof to bear on this, does it? He doesn't bring proof, but what he's trying to do is to establish a basis for moral consensus

in the face of religious diversity and the rise of natural science. So he's trying to find a very minimal basis for a moral beginning for society, a kind of natural law that everyone could potentially accept. And what's really unusual about Grosius is that he even goes so far as to say, even if we were to concede what we can't concede

without the utmost wickedness, that there is no God, these laws would still hold. And that was one of the very distinctive features of his thought. Against what background did he bring out this idea? Was it thought of to be a revolutionary idea? Was it just quietly accepted in a very limited circle? did he get in trouble as a controversy. Can you just tell us more about

this theory of rights? Well, it is a very incendiary idea and actually, I mean, Groch's Why is it incendiary? It's incendiary because it suggests that power ultimately can go back to individuals if the political society that they've set up forfeits

the purpose for which it was originally established, which is to preserve themselves. The people are sovereign and the individual people are sovereign. So they begin as sovereigns, Grosius says they're suey they're under their own jurisdiction. And that was a very novel idea that the people have the original jurisdiction and that jurisdiction could potentially also return to them. So they have rights because they're individuals? They have rights because they're in society. They're righteous

because they're human beings. They have rights as human beings, but there's a delineation of those rights because of what it's possible for everyone to accept morally. So everyone has to accept that each person is entitled to try to preserve themselves, and therefore they shouldn't try to do harm to others or to interfere with them, and they should punish any breach of someone else's rights that should come about. Thank you very much. Susan James, in 1651, the English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes

published what most political philosophers regarded as a very great book, Leviathan. It envisaged how a society might emerge from a so-called state of nature. Can you explain what he meant by the state? of nature and what context that book came out of? Well, Hobbes is trying to, in a way, trying to oppose the account of the basis of society that Melissa has just given. And he is imagining, he is trying to persuade us that we have an absolutely unqualified reason to obey the law in all circumstances. And the device that he uses to do that is what he calls the state of nature. That's to say a condition in which there is no law.

and people have no political organisation whatsoever. Hobbes thinks that in that condition the only right that people have is a right to do anything they can to preserve themselves. And he also builds in a psychology. He thinks that people's dominant passions are on the whole aggressive and nasty ones, that they'll compete with each other absolutely as far as they can, that they'll do anything to protect what they regard as their own, and that they'll go after what he calls glory,

that's to say reputation, they'll try to be admired. And he thinks that people acting on those passions in a competitive situation will produce what he calls a state of war. Everyone will just be at loggerheads with one another, battling for power and security. And life will be poor, solitary, nasty British and short. Exactly, yes, exactly. But the thing about that condition is that it will be

really terrifying and so people will be dominated by fear, fear of death, fear of each other, really fear of everything. And Hobbes thinks that that's an important turning point because, as he says, fear is really the passion to be reckoned with. It's the most powerful of all. And once people are in that condition, they'll see that they've got a reason to try to get out of it. They'll have a sort of passionate motivation for trying to improve their situation.

and that'll be the hinge that prompts them to the contract. How far did the psychological start, because the psychological start in his interpretation of human nature, which led him to development of human nature turning into society, as it were, how far was that come from his reading or his observations about the psychology of people, and how far from his experiences of the terrible civil war that was running in England in the 40s, in 1640s and his own exile and the turbulence and violence and so on. Which was predominant at his arriving at this idea? Hard to say, I think.

There are lots of theorists who try to focus on certain sets of dominant passions in this period. And Hobbes is a bit unusual in going for these rather negative ones and saying that at least in the state of nature those are going to dominate. And I'm sure you're right that he is encouraging, in that by his experience of the war. And indeed, he's writing at a time when the king has just been executed, having been tried by a military court. Lots of, the Cromwellian government is just trying to establish itself.

The ex-royalists are saying, why on earth should we obey this government? Because it doesn't have any legitimacy. And so Hobbes is really writing in this situation to try to establish that a government that can protect you is a legitimate one. And what does he think the Leviathan, the state, should do?

What are its powers? Once you've signed up to this, once you've said, I will not live a life that is nasty, brutish and short, I'm not living fairer, I will join up with this. What are the powers of what you join up with? Well, the powers of what you join up with are nearly limitless.

Hobbes' idea is that people in the state of nature will come together and they'll make a contract with each other, a mutual agreement. with each other. So it's the people who agree, as Melissa was saying. One of the things they agree to is that their united body

shall be represented by a sovereign. And in order to give that sovereign the power to represent their collective interest, as it were, they will hand over to the sovereign all their power. And now, do you please? and the point of that is that the sovereign can only protect them

if it can make the law and enforce the contract and for that Hobbs says it needs the sword yes and it can be absolute so you can actually vote yourselves into absolutism in that sense but we might come back to that in a moment I'd like to go to Karen and Brian next the next significant book in this social contract theory tradition is locks the second treaties of government in 1689 though he might have printed earlier How did his views differ from those of Hobbs? Well, there are some interesting similarities and far more important differences.

One interesting similarity is that, like Hobbs, Locke thinks of power in abstract terms. In other words, power isn't something that people naturally have as kings, as members of elite families or dynasties. Power is a function and a function that can be delegated by the people. And a way to reimagine the political order and to reimagine that function of power is to think back historically or hypothetically to the notion of a state of nature. So both Hobbes and Locke try to imagine man as he might have been

in a state of nature. We've just heard that Hobbs' vision of the state of nature is a pretty aggressive, nasty, brutish and short one. Whereas Locke in imagining a state of nature imagines it, if not pleasant, humane and long, then certainly a condition of natural freedom and equality in which men use their rational capacities, obey a natural law,

and that natural law encourages them to preserve themselves, preserve the good of the community, and respect each other's property. He thinks the state of nature does have a law, as I understand it. He does have a law, and that law is based on reason. It is based on reason. We have a faculty of reason, and that reason allows us to know what God's purpose for us is on this earth. So it's reason backed by God, a reason in the context of God,

that makes a lock state of nature, which is totally different, massively different. It's massively different. But nevertheless, I think this idea of, Trying to imagine a state of nature is very important in terms of imagining that moment, and it's not truly a historical moment, but it's a terrific way to reconceive the political order. That moment when people decide to enter into what Locke calls a political society. Now, what propels people into a political society is the fact that the state of nature can degenerate. People can become competitive.

They can try to seek to gain absolute power over each other. They can seize each other's property. And therefore, when things have started to go wrong, that's the point at which, men may decide to enter into a political society via a process of social contract. And by bringing in God, there was a power superior to the government, to the sovereign, to whom the people could appeal, and by appealing, as it were, against the greater power, could get rid of their government? They can appeal to God, but for Locke, it's generally only in the last instance.

So, for example, when people have entered into a political society through a process of contract making, they delegate their rights and their powers to a government so that the government will enforce those rights on their behalf and act for the general good. Now that's all fine if the government does act for the collective good of the people but clearly there are cases where a government may not act for the good of the people may act against their good and violate their rights and it's at that point that the people have to decide

are we going to tear up the rulebook, are we going to get rid of this government and create a new government. And it's very difficult for people to know exactly when moment has come because that inevitably involves violence and civil war. And as a kind of last appeal, a way of making that judgment, Locke suggests that, yes, in the end you have to listen to the voice of God in your conscience and make that decision. But Locke himself, just as Hobbes himself was involved in civil war, Locke himself was against the divine right of kings, which reinforced his theory in the sense

that the deal you made was not irrevocable, the deal with the sovereign the government. He was deeply against the divine right of kings and the initial impetus for him writing, the second treatise of government was, or the first treatise of government was to demolish a rehabilitated version of the divine right of kings. But he was also against the Hobbesian version of that right against absolutism. He said that one thing you can't do if you enter into social contract is to agree to give your ruler absolute authority, because an absolute ruler is really outside of the law. It's a kind of lawless power, and that's essentially what Locke says is that's giving a power to a lion,

instead of giving it to, because you're afraid of Polkats and foxes. So that's a completely illegitimate kind of power. So there's a critique of both the divine right of kings and of absolute authority in Locke. Because Lohms just to be maybe rather too clumsily clear, Holmes was saying once this deal is made it is irrevocable. You have to obey the sovereign. And Locke is saying it's through consent.

The idea of consent plays a big part in his thinking. And therefore you can withdraw your consent. Susan. It's irrevocable as long as the sovereign can protect. you. The sovereign has the job of protecting. Yes, sorry, in Hobbs's case. So it does have that condition built into it. Anna. Melissa, sorry? And it's worth adding to that that in Hobbs' case, he had been a partisan of the exiled crown prince in waiting during the Civil War, and he was seen as a royalist. But then when he comes back to England and publishes Leviathan in 1651,

part of the reason that that's so incendiary is that he's now effectively saying, now the government in power is the parliament and that's the government that you should now obey because that's the government which now is able to protect you. So although he's arguing for absolutism initially, the absolutism could be the absolutism of the parliament

in a way as much as the absolutism of the king. In the 18th century, most dramatically giving the title of this program, Jean-Jacques Rousseau published the social contract in 1762, and we had the dramatic opening lines at the beginning of the program, Susan James.

What does he actually mean by it and what in brief is he setting out to do in the social contract? Rousseau thinks that there's a conflict between the obedience that you owe to the law in a society and your freedom. The problem is how to reconcile these. He looks around him at societies which purport to be full of free people and he says actually these are full of slaves. these are full of people who mistake what their freedom is. They haven't found the right solution to that problem. And so the question Rousseau asks is,

how can you solve that problem? What do you mean by freedom? Well, Rousseau thinks that our natural freedom is a freedom to do anything that we want to be under our own will, to be guided by our own will. And that in society, when our interests come into conflict, To some extent, we are bound to lose that. The question is how we can regain something that is as like that as possible,

what Rousseau calls civil freedom. And so he wants to imagine a kind of society where people can be under their own will. And to do that, he appeals to a sort of tried and trusty, Republican model of popular sovereignty, the idea being that if everybody is involved in making, the law, then they legislate the law for themselves, and in obeying it, they only obey themselves so that they're not really under the will of anybody else, although they are obeying the law.

Mrs. Laine, can you develop that a bit, this idea of the general will and why Rousseau thought that was so central? The central departure of Rousseau from Hobbes on this is that he says we can't alienate our will, so we can't give our will irrevocably to a sovereign and let the sovereign and tell us what to do. Instead, as Susan was saying, we ourselves have to be part of that legislative body. Now, the difficulty for Rousseau was in imagining how could that actually come about. How could the people actually share a common will, not just technically, but actually? And he thought that was probably only possible in some very small and special societies, such as Geneva, the city of his birth, which was a republic. And indeed, the social contract is written as a sort

of Pian to Geneva. But the irony is that the Genevaans themselves, see it as incendiary and rejected and ban it in the year that it's published. Karen LeBry, so you've got Hobbes thought that people should sign the social contract because it offered security and lock a promised to reinstate natural rights. Why should anyone sign up to Rousseau's contract? Because it would allow you to regain, as Susan has suggested, a freedom that you naturally have, that in most kinds of societies, you lose because, and Rousseau describes this in,

an earlier work, the process by which a natural society becomes a perverted modern one, in which people have unequal property, possessions he calls them rather than properties in which people have power over each other. And their very sense of themselves is compromised by their

living in that kind of society, what he calls their love of themselves, because they come to regard themselves only as others see them, they become obsessed with reputation and possessions and esteem. And in that process, they lose their inner freedom. And for Russo, that concept of freedom is much more to do with that inner space, that inner landscape, than with rights. But we might regain that freedom by entering through a social contract into a society where we all become citizens,

where we become a higher version of ourselves, dedicated to a common cause, and acting collectively for the general good. And that will be a good reason to enter into a social contract for Russo. Is it possible to distinguish between the three states of nature of Hobbs, between Hobbs and Locke and Russo? I mean, briefly to say how they differed? I think when Hobbes thinks of a state of nature, what he's really thinking about is a total collapse in civil order. A kind of anarchy that comes not before political order, but actually after.

So it is a kind of civil war model of what can happen in a society. Locke is historically based in the sense that he does give evidence for the existence of a state of nature in all kinds of different societies, but it's a kind of ideal state. But certainly a very collaborative state in which people can live together, peaceably for the common good under certain conditions. Rousseau's image of the state of freedom, which is set out in his discourse on the origin and foundations of inequality among mankind, written a few years earlier, is actually a very solitary

idea of the state of nature. Man is naturally a solitary creature, not particularly aggressive, quite capable of living in small family units, but essentially not naturally sociable in the same way. So he starts from a very different hypothetical image of the state of nature. With this account Susan James For the idea that when Rousseau mentions Hobbes in the social contract He mentions him rather unfavourably He says of Hobbs ideas He writes on this showing

The human species is divided into so many herds of cattle Each with its ruler who keeps guard over them For the purpose of devouring them That's right I think that Rousseau says that Hobbs hasn't really Got the idea of a political society at all What he imagines is groups of people who are each ruled by somebody who has the force to repress them

and that Hobbes has sort of hoaxed people, if you like, into thinking that this condition where they're forced to obey the sovereign is one of freedom, but it's not because Rousseau says, how could you be free when you are forced to do something? He says, you know, if you're forced to be forced, then you do very well, but you do even better if you can rebel. Karen O'Brien, that wasn't the only, book. In this amazing year

Rousseau published three books which you have said in your notes add up to the whole thesis. Can you tell us what the other two were? Yes, in the same year as the social contract Russo published her work on education called Emil and the year just before he published a novel called Julie Ula Nuevelle-Elois. And I think

in terms of understanding Rousseau's account of freedom and trying to understand his idea of how one might become a higher self under the social contract. One does need to look at his account of individual socialisation and political socialisation so that Emil explains how you should educate a young man in order to make him an authentic person

and prepare him for citizenship. The novel, one of the most successful novels ever written, certainly of the 18th century, is the story of the thwarted love between a young woman and her tutor. And it's a story about how we can overcome that deep inner isolation we will have through love and how love enables us to become more fully ourselves. So in other words, I think what Rousseau is interested in is the psychological

and educational preconditions for citizenship, because it's very hard to imagine when one reads the social contract how one would actually manage being a citizen in Rousseau's ideal society. You'd have to work so hard, you'd have to do so much national service. It's not just a matter of paying your taxes and paying someone to be your delegate. You actually have to take an active part. and you have to be socialised in a certain kind of way to be that kind of citizen. It's not a model you could simply impose on existing societies. Briefly, then I go to Susan. Then I go to Melissa.

I think that's really the crucial thing about Rousseau is that he recognises that it's extraordinarily difficult and taxing to become a citizen and that the process of identifying your own will with the general will and learning, finding a way collectively to keep those two together is what political society. is really all about. So that whereas Locke has said, well, you know, you just make the contract

and then everything runs smoothly. And Hobbs has said, well, you make the contract and then if you have any doubts, don't worry because the sovereign will force you to obey. Rousseau thinks of the contract as a sort of a process, doesn't he? You know, so that you have to, as it were, keep on working at it.

Melissa. Well, one of the things that plays a crucial role in that process is religion. And it is important to see that Hobbs was primarily afraid of religion because he thought that it could tear society apart. And so he had argued that the sovereign has to have almost complete control also over at least the outward forms of religion. And Rousseau, in a way, also thinks that, but he sees much more the positive dimension of that, that the religion can be a civil religion, and that religion can itself be through festivals, through participation,

part of shaping your psychology so that you can actually become fully a citizen. To what extent can we say that the revolution, the French Revolution was influenced by Rousseau's notions? Ropes Speer was a great admirer, he of the guillotine. So how do you think it worked through to that enormous event? Well, one of the paradoxes is that I think that the French revolutionaries and particularly the Jacobins did see Rousseau as a great source for them, but they probably in many ways got him wrong in the sense that they took it. that you could, as it were, force a general will, that if you simply got rid of all potential enemies, then you would have a general will and one had to simply purge those who didn't agree.

Whereas as we've seen, what we've been discussing is that for Rousseau, the general will has to become almost not exactly organic or natural, but it has to be something that's really there. It's not something you can force from the outside through violence. It has to be created through socialization, education, and participation. So the French Revolution comes and tries to impose it by the sword from the outside and of course grotesquely fails. Is it rather like Athens where people had to do military service and great numbers of them took part in the jury system and so on? It's the French Revolutionary Society.

No, is the Russo. It certainly is. It is. But I think that in terms of Russo's influence on the French Revolution, the French Revolutioners, the Jack of an Faction in particular, were picking upon something inherent in the social contract, which is to say Rousseau says that people should. should be forced to be free. And there's been much debate about what that might mean.

But there is a sinister side to Russo's social contract in the sense that he imagines a society where there can't be any role for individual dissent. People have to be politically reeducated if they don't agree with the general prescriptions of that society. And then during the French Revolution, someone like the Jacobin leader, Dantan, for example, says there can be no factions in a republic. And the terror specifically eliminates people who do not agree. agreed to be forced to be free. So I think that in terms of looking at the

continuities between Russo and the French Revolution, yes, there's quite a lot of misreading involved, and there's a misreading specifically of the classical components of Russo, but nevertheless they were picking up on something that is inherent in Russo and for me is quite sinister. The great irony is that of course Russo never thought that a social contract would be possible in France. He thought that France had gone too far down the road of social division inequality. So trying it in France was probably the last place that he would have thought it should have been tried. As for Marx, Russia was probably the last place,

classically, that the Marxist revolution should have been tried. So, in fact, the place that he thinks most suited to his own society is Corsica. Let's call Rousseau the high-water mark of social contract. But at about the same time, David Hume was publishing, and he, as I understand it, empirically was undercutting the whole thing. It's nonsense. It doesn't how it works at all. We don't have these abstract contracts.

It comes from, you know, brute force and inheritance. And what is this? A decretion of a and so on. Where does that take the argument? Karen Abram. Yes, Hume set this out in an argument a little before Rousseau called of the social contract, but it's a very far-sighted essay in which she says, yes, social contracts historically they didn't occur.

Secondly, consent is not the only basis for legitimate government because actually in most societies, people don't actively consent to the political arrangement. they find themselves in. But that doesn't mean that those governments are necessarily bad or necessarily illegitimate. The most important criterion is really a utilitarian one. What actually works?

What are the effects of the government? Does it deliver justice and peace and stability and commercial prosperity for its people? And secondly, another thing that Hume says about, which does look forward to Rousseau, about the Republican model of the social contract, is to say that forcing people to be citizens rather than people, forcing them to set aside their private desires,

their pursuits of happiness for the general good is really a perversion of human nature. You can't do that for very long. If you try to do that too hard, there might actually be bad consequences. Do you like to take that up? Yes, I think that, as Karen says, that for Hume, the idea that there ever had been

an original contract is something he pours scorn on. He says it would be very strange if something so significant in the whole history of mankind had left no traces of it that we can't find. And he also thinks that actually... But the philosophers were abstracting. They were.

as everybody else, so the 450,000 people didn't sit around the table one day in early ages and sign on the dotted line? Absolutely, that's right. And I think that's right. And so the deeper point in a way that hume is making is that this isn't a helpful way of thinking about society, precisely that that notion of individual rights and that individualized consent having to be the test, he thinks is really not useful. We have to think in terms of a general account of utility and as the basis for social order. He also thinks that the social contract puts the part before the horse because it depends on the validity of promise. To make a contract, I have to be able to make a promise,

but that's already for Hume's social notion. So for Hume, convention is actually deeper than contract. Just the ordinary processes of social life and the establishment of practices of promising has to precede political society. And given the relationship with Adam Smith & Sond at that time in Hume, the economic dimension became very important, was very important to Hume. Is that right, Susan?

Yes, that's right. I mean, obviously, for all these, all these writers, the prosperity of the society that they're envisaging is a very important factor. But for Hume, the kind of utilitarian, as it were, underpinnings of society, take in that commercial expansion and prosperity very much. There's a story that Hume tells about the two farmers to deny this notion of trust. Can you, Minister, do you want to tell us that? Well, this is actually about Hume's idea of the origin of promising.

So he says if one farmer wants help from a second farmer to harvest his field one day, and he would want then to offer to harvest the other farmer's field the next day. But the problem is that if there's no practice of promising among them, then there's no way for one person to bind himself so that the other will have faith and trust and be willing to help today. And so for Hume, it's that sort of idea that gives rise to this convention of promising in order to get us out of that bind. And in some sense, that is kind of similar to what Hobbs, the sort of. of problem Hobbs was dealing with, but Hobbs thought we could only solve that by having a sovereign who could threaten to punish us if we didn't go along with it. Whereas for Hume, people are capable of developing these sorts of abilities to bind themselves morally, even without and outside of a political society. In these, let's stick with Rousseau, but Susan James,

you could refer back to the others, though. We're talking about the social contract and signing after it. We're talking exclusively about men, and in fact, not all men. So can you say how that was, did anybody criticise? that at the time? Was they just taking for granted? Well, it's absolutely right. All these writers talk about a society of people who are free and equal and who come together

and contract. Sometimes it's simply tacit that they seem to be thinking about a certain class of property men who are in fact in the societies that they live in citizens. And sometimes it's more explicit, as in

Locke, that they imagine that kind of equality alongside, various forms of natural domination and subordination. For example, the natural domination of parents over their children and in certain limited circumstances anyway, the natural domination of husbands over their wives. So that they imagine a society where people are not equal and don't all, therefore, enter the contract on equal terms.

That is important. It was a worry that was voiced in the 17th century, but only in a rather kind of glancing way sometimes. For instance, one of the most celebrated women philosophers of the period, Margaret Cavendish writes that she doesn't see since she's not involved in giving her consent, why she should regard herself as obliged to obey the laws, and she thinks that true for all women. And there were radical groups, levellers, for instance,

who thought that this was a problem about a legitimate society and that a legitimate society had to be more democratic and include a wider range of citizens. Karen O'Brien. Yes, if I may add to that, there was also a female theologian, Mary Astell, who wrote a work called Some Reflections on Marriage. And in the preface to that work, she says, if all men are born free, how is it that women are born slaves?

And what she does is she looks very closely at that analogy between the social contract and the marriage contract because under the legal conditions of her time if you married somebody you were entirely subordinate to them as a woman and they possessed all your property and she felt that it was very hypocritical of people like Locke to be arguing for a certain kind of freedom in the social contract on the one hand

and on the other hand to be saying as Locke undoubtedly does in his second treaties that marriage is a mixture of voluntary consent but also natural subordination and to some degree women are natural. subordinate to men. So there were writers who were picking up on that silent omission of women from the social contract and looking again at what Locke says, because Locke says there isn't really an analogy between the marriage contract and the social contract, and Mary Astler saying there certainly

should be. But there's the build-up there, because it's coming in a slightly different line, but in the same sort of cluster of influence to Mary Wilson-craft and what follows from her and so on that. But can I just continue the business of the influence of these, I think, which we've shown their limitations. How influential do you think Rousseau was in, particularly Rousseau, in America? It seems in the American Declaration of Independence in 1776, it seems to be Rousseau and ideas sewn through it. Would you agree with that?

There are a blend of Rousseau and ideas and Loughian ideas, and famously the Declaration of Independence drafted in 1776, declared that all men are created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights. and the case that the declarers of independence make is that the king, the king of England, has broken the deal, broken the contract between the American colonists and himself by violating their rights and by ceasing to protect their interests. And therefore the Declaration of Independence is a somewhat locky and assumption of the right to resist, the right to assume natural rights and to resist British authorities.

subsequently after the American War and after American independence, when a federal constitution had been drawn up and when it was the job of a number of writers to justify that constitution, I think they were again thinking about the Russoen model of the Republic because under the Russohn model of the Republic, there's no real scope for conflict. There's no real way of coping with people who have differing views. There's no real way of saying if people don't sign up

the general will then what are we going to do about them? And James Madison in particular recognised that America was a big place and it was getting bigger and it was very diverse and plural in terms of its population and therefore what he sought to do was to construct a model of republicanism that did incorporate some notion

of pluralism, some notion of conflict and competition and see how you could actually embody those factors of conflict in political parties and in political life in America. So it's a negative reaction to Russo but nevertheless an important one think. Can we, Mr. Nelson, can we come out to Britain in the late 80th and 19th century, where utilitarianism perhaps grew up against the ideas of the social contract?

Jeremy Bentham coming as an art of hume. Can you develop that a little? Yeah. In some sense, I think what happens is that the social contract falls apart in two directions. On the one hand, you have Bentham kind of developing the humline and saying, natural rights are nonsense upon stilts. We can't even begin to give a basis for natural rights. we have to simply look forward to now what is the best utilitarian basis on which to construct and develop a society. And then on the other side in Germany, you have Kant saying, if we're going to talk about natural law, we can't just say it's a general law which is there. How would we establish its validity? Instead, it has to be a law which we give ourselves.

So a philosophical justification. And so in between those two polls, the social contract basis of natural law and natural rights is really left behind. Susan James, do you think that social contract thinking lives on in modern liberalism in any way? Well, in an odd way, it has become extraordinarily prominent again, particularly through the work of John Rawls writing in the end of the last century. Because Rawls goes back. It's very difficult to think of the 20th century as the last century. That's just my head.

John Rawls. Rules goes back quite exciting. explicitly to Locke and Rousseau and tries to reformulate the notion of a contract, not the idea of an explicit promise that people make, but rather the idea of a sort of hypothetical contract, a set of arrangements that if you thought about it rationally, you would agree to,

and which can be used as the basis for getting people to consent to a certain arrangement of justice in society. in particular a certain division of resources. So contractarianism in that diluted form actually has become absolutely central to contemporary debates about political obligation. I think part of the motivation for this is that utilitarianism doesn't give a very strong account of obligation.

It says basically you should have laws that are generally advantageous and their consequences may be a good reason for obeying them. But it seems like a sort of prudential argument. It doesn't give you an account of an obligation to obey them, whereas the idea that you've promised or you've agreed

is thought to generate, and historically it has been argued, generates a much stronger notion of obligation. But this is a kind of rather wild ideological fancy in a way. Karen and Brian, would you agree that it's still influential, do that? I think it's still around, and I think, as Susan is suggesting, it's still very much around in the way that people tend to think about how economic resources and welfare resources are distributed.

And I think that if you think about recent examples of citizenship ceremonies, of patients' charters, those kinds of attempts in British political life to graph some notion of contract mutual obligation onto a system that really never had any contractual foundations. They have had some success and they do try to give people some kind of a stake, a sense of a stake in certainly in the kind of reciprocal arrangement that we think we have with our government, that we pay our taxes and that in return we get certain kinds of welfare through the redistribution of those resources. So I think it's present and I think it's a useful way of thinking about certain limited areas of public life.

Minister Lang, can you illustrate how you think that these ideas have fed into the way that we conduct society. Well, in two ways. I think if we also look to oppressive regimes, the idea of popular sovereignty and that there is no natural license or entitlement to rule of any group of people, but that rule should fundamentally be serving the interests

of the people, I think, has grown out of this tradition and is still potentially an incendiary idea even today and can underpin revolutions. The other one is that the idea of natural and alienable rights, as Karen mentioned in the American Declaration of Independence. And there we see the social contract tradition really

divide, that Grocious and Hobbes thought you have these rights and then you should give them away and essentially establish an absolute or nearly absolute regime. Whereas instead, through Locke and Russo, the idea that we have natural rights, which we now call human rights, that we can't alienate, I think, has become a very powerful, motivating force.

Well, thank you very much. I'm Minister Lane, Karen O'Brien and Susan James. Next week we were talking about the Statue of Liberty. It's suspiciously connected partly to this program. Give me your tide, your poor, your huddle, mass is yearning to breathe free, it says at the bottom of the Statue of Liberty. And thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast.

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