RR Phantom
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 |  Subject: The Social Contract: A Convenient Fiction  Sun Jun 07, 2015 9:12 pm | |
| Nothing is more useful to the State than the notion that its rule is justified. As governments cannot forever rule by force alone, it is expedient for them if their subjects sense an air of legitimacy about the prevailing political authority. Prudent governments and their champion intellectuals tell a story of how those in power acquired the right to coerce and how subjects inherited a duty to submit. For centuries in the West, this story was the divine right of kings—god had personally sanctioned the dominion of the monarch and made him unquestionable by subjects of any class. This story was eventually supplanted with the more secular origin story of the social contract. Though originally conceived as a defense of English royal rule, with the disposal of autocratic kings, versions of this theory have become the prevailing justification for democratic and republican governments. Because acceptance of this story is so prevalent, it must be investigated first whether it ever occurred, and second if this is a proper justification for a government’s monopoly on the legitimate use of violent force.
The story starts with a state of nature, a time prior to the conception of political authority and one of total freedom. Thomas Hobbes famously characterized life in this time as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” due to each man’s tendency to quarrel in competition over resources, to secure his survival and for prideful glory. It is a state of “war of every man against every man.”1 Hobbes came to this conclusion, strangely enough, watching men who never lived in a state of nature killing each other to control an already-established political machinery during the events of the English Civil War. The irony was lost on him. As individuals become dissatisfied with this constant warring in nature, they seek to contract with one another in order that they may secure their persons and their property and to “confer all their power and strength upon one man.”2 This contract is “made by covenant of every man with every man,” each explicitly surrendering his rights to one man or group of men.3 And voilà! Legitimate political authority has been born!
John Locke imagined the state of nature differently. Instead of being a time of endless quarrel and misery, it was actually one governed by reason and “without subordination or subjection.”4 Just as Hobbes does, though, Locke explains that eventually all individuals wished to abandon the absolute liberty of the state of nature for the security of civil society. The only way this liberty can be surrendered by any individual “is by agreeing with other men to join and unite into a community for their comfortable, safe, and peaceable living one amongst another” under the political authority of the majority.5 In both Hobbes’s and Locke’s stories, the sovereign, whether it be a single man or a group of men, can only become legitimate by consent not of the sovereign-to-be, which does not yet have authority (to say otherwise is to beg the question), but of each individual who is to be party to the contract.
Consider how unlikely it must be that in the lineage of any government (a fortiori, every government) there was a transitional moment where all men, living in a state entirely absent of political authority, agreed to forsake their natural liberty and equality with no dissenting voices and no forced “agreement” to terms. While some point to Hobbes and Locke as originators of methodological individualism, where phenomena are explained by how they result from the actions of individual agents, the two actually take a holistic approach only occasionally disguised in individualistic language. The fact that no hypothetical individuals are ever mentioned in the story as acting in any way other than the way each other individual is acting suggests that men act uniformly and as a whole. How strange it is, particularly for Hobbes, that there was only consensus and unanimity over the social contract among the men who are so naturally quarrelsome and trifling in every other aspect of their lives.
One of the first skeptics of the story of the social contract was David Hume, who questioned its historical accuracy. Consent of the governed would be a just birth of political authority, he argued, but this is not how existing governments had been born. If Hobbes and Locke looked at the world, “they would meet with nothing that, in the least, corresponds to their ideas.” Indeed, most states as far as we can trace have been “founded originally, either on usurpation or conquest, or both, without any pretence of a fair consent, or voluntary subjection of the people.”6 Franz Oppenheimer described the State arising from economically productive agrarian societies being raided by tribes of hunters or herders. These tribes were originally concerned only with occasional looting, but “it begins to dawn on the consciousness of the wild herdsman that a murdered peasant can no longer plow, and that a fruit tree hacked down will no longer bear. In his own interest, then, wherever it is possible, he lets the peasant live and the tree stand.” When the raiders learn that conquest is more productive than simple, total looting, the State is born and it begins to collect the agricultural surplus as tribute.7 Countless examples—Vikings, Huns, Tartars, Turks, Mongols—can be provided of invading tribes amassing economic and eventually political power through dominion over stationary societies.
Both Hobbes and Locke, however, fail to give a single sufficient example of men voluntarily exiting the state of nature to join a political society. Locke offers to us stories of the foundation of Venice and Rome, where “several men free and independent one of another, amongst whom there was no natural superiority or subjection” came together to form a new political structure.8 “But these cases are not, of course, particularly telling, since they involve, not the foundation of a state by people who till then had had no experience of the political, but the foundation of a new state by exiles from an old one.”9 Perhaps aware of the feebleness of the argument that political order was established instantaneously from a state of nature, Locke also gives a “gradualist, anthropological account” that does not rely on “absurd historical pretensions,” but even this is without historical reference.10 Because both Hobbes and Locke fail to place their fingers on a single instance in which humans lived in a state of nature, the historical credibility of the social contract is dubious at best and likely outright false. Even if the theory of the social contract properly justifies governments that arise contractually from the state of nature, it is most certainly the case that none of the nation-states today were born in this way.
http://miseschrist.com/2014/10/08/social-contract-convenient-fiction/ |
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