Social Contract Theory and Its Critics
Adam asked: “Rabbit hole on social contracts”
The idea and its lineage
Every social contract theory makes the same three moves:
- Imagine people outside political authority. Hobbes’s state of nature, Locke’s, Rawls’s “original position.”
- Ask what they would agree to. The answer is engineered by how you describe step 1.
- Treat that agreement as the source of legitimacy. The state may do what people would have consented to, and no more.
A map of arguments · not a chain of succession
Change the starting point. Change the agreement.
These thinkers use different kinds of agreement to answer different questions. Read across each entry: the premise helps explain the conclusion.
01 Political authority and public law
- 1651
Hobbes · Leviathan
- Starting point
- People need security against violent conflict.
- What follows
- An effective sovereign provides peace.
- 1689
Locke · Two Treatises
- Starting point
- People have rights before government exists.
- What follows
- Government is limited and must protect those rights.
- 1762
Rousseau · The Social Contract
- Starting point
- Citizens associate under a general will aimed at the common good.
- What follows
- Legitimate law expresses collective self-rule.
- 1793
Kant · Theory and Practice
- Starting point
- The original contract is an idea of reason, not a historical event.
- What follows
- Laws should be tested against possible public consent.
02 Justice, rights, bargaining, and morality
- 1971
Rawls · A Theory of Justice
- Starting point
- Choose principles without knowing your place in society.
- What follows
- Fair terms for the basic structure of society.
- 1974
Nozick · Anarchy, State, and Utopia
- Starting point
- Individual rights constrain what others and the state may do.
- What follows
- A minimal state; a rival to Rawls, not the same contract argument.
- 1986
Gauthier · Morals by Agreement
- Starting point
- Rational bargainers seek mutually advantageous cooperation.
- What follows
- Moral constraints justified through agreement.
- 1998
Scanlon · What We Owe to Each Other
- Starting point
- Ask which principles no one could reasonably reject.
- What follows
- A test of moral justification, not a blueprint for the state.
The question behind Acemoglu’s objection: when does an argument about what people would accept become a substitute for asking actual people?
The step-1 description does all the work. Hobbes describes the state of nature as terrifying and gets an absolute sovereign. Locke describes it as inconvenient but tolerable and gets a limited government. Rawls puts you behind a veil of ignorance and gets redistribution. Nobody in any of these stories ever signed anything.
Why Rousseau is the sharp end
Acemoglu names “the Rousseau end of it,” and that is the precise place to press.
Rousseau distinguishes the general will (volonté générale) — what the people collectively will when aiming at the common good — from the will of all (volonté de tous), the mere sum of private preferences. The general will is not a vote count. It is the right answer, and a majority can be wrong about it.
That produces the notorious line in Book I, Chapter 7: whoever refuses to obey the general will “shall be compelled to do so by the whole body,” which “means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free.”
Acemoglu’s structural complaint is exactly this: the general will is defined to outrank any actual agreement a real community reaches. So when a community’s shared values conflict with what the theory says the general will requires, the community loses by definition, not by argument. The hard question — how do we handle people who disagree with us, including intolerantly? — never gets asked.
What he is proposing instead
From the transcript, his positive view has two layers:
- A floor: meaningful individual freedom, which he treats as the one non-negotiable, because “any kind of improvement in the human condition requires individual initiative.”
- Above the floor: genuine consensus-building, with “enough elbow room to people to form their own community-level agreements.”
He is explicit that this is not grounded in an external standard. Cowen presses him on it three times and he answers “I don’t have one.” That is a real philosophical cost and he pays it deliberately — see Rorty, Objectivism, and Moral Progress and The Book Problem.
The strongest objections to his objection
Worth holding, because he does not answer them in this conversation:
- Rawls already did this. Political Liberalism (1993) introduces “overlapping consensus” precisely to handle deep disagreement — the idea that people with incompatible worldviews can converge on shared political principles for their own different reasons. That is a consensus mechanism, not a book of absolutes. Acemoglu says Rawls “goes into that direction” anyway; the transcript doesn’t show why. The book does — see below, and the answer is that he does not deny the later Rawls so much as absorb him.
- The contract is the consensus device. A contractarian can say the hypothetical agreement is not a substitute for consensus but a model of what consensus under fair conditions would look like.
- Without an external standard, what stops a community consensus that is monstrous? His answer is the individual-freedom floor. Whether that floor is thick enough to do the work is the whole argument.
From the book
The whole of Chapter 3 is titled Liberalism Without Social Contract, and it is the chapter this page was guessing at.
What he rejects, precisely. Not the conclusions of any particular contract theory — the standing of a hypothetical agreement to settle anything:
“The root problem is that social contract theories, interpreted as the basis for general ethical rules, go against self-government. They don’t seek the actual consent of individuals and communities to public choices by a process of deliberation, communication, and debate. Rather, they attempt to circumvent any opposition by invoking high-level precepts without broad buy-in from the population.”
Rousseau gets the sharper version, and it is structural rather than about any specific general will:
“In every application of the social contract lies a contradiction. If it is the general will that supports true freedom, then true freedom must entail violations of individual freedoms conceived or misconceived differently from those enshrined in the general will… Under the general will, however, there is no room for deliberation or debate, and people cannot have any recourse against the general will.”
What he keeps. The chapter’s positive move is that contractarian arguments are perfectly good arguments — they are just not consent. Rawls’s own alternative reading of his project is quoted approvingly and then bounded:
“such reasoning should be used mainly in the context of deliberation and cannot justify actual policies or impositions of values on people, for example, becoming the basis of laws and how policymakers judge different options.”
By the chapter’s end, philosophy is demoted to an input and the deliberation is the thing:
“One can conceive of the role of political philosophy, including ideas based on treating others as we would want them to treat us, or contractarian arguments, especially those based on liberal principles like John Rawls’s, as providing input into building such principles via debate and deliberation.”
And he shows his work. The chapter’s two worked examples of consensus actually happening are the 2018 Irish abortion referendum, preceded by the Citizens’ Assembly, and the US path to the Respect for Marriage Act (2022) via the 2012 Maine, Maryland and Washington referenda. Both are cases where a genuinely contested value question was settled by argument among real people over time rather than by a principle derived in advance. That is what “real consensus among real people” means in his framework, and the interview never supplies it.
The floor is in Chapter 10, not here. The interview’s “elbow room” phrasing makes the floor sound undefined. It isn’t — Chapter 10 names it: freedom of expression, freedom to acquire education, equality before the law, and the right to exit the community. See Working-Class Liberalism and Community Elbow Room.
Reading
| What | Why | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762), Book I–II | The general will, in his own words. Short. | Gutenberg |
| Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), ch. 13–18 | The founding move in its starkest form | Gutenberg |
| Locke, Second Treatise (1689) | Consent, property, the right of revolution | Gutenberg |
| Stanford Encyclopedia, “Contemporary Approaches to the Social Contract” | Best single map of the modern debate | SEP |
| Hume, “Of the Original Contract” (1748) | The classic demolition: no one consented, and consent isn’t why we obey | essay |
| Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (1997) | The other major modern critique — that the contract described a deal among some people, about everyone else | — |
Working notes — what is unverified
What I’m confident about: the lineage, the general-will/will-of-all distinction, the “forced to be free” passage, and that step-1 framing determines the output. Standard material.
Checked against the book, and the guess was wrong. Draft 1 said “someone should read What Happened to Liberal Democracy? and check whether he names lexical priority.” Someone has. He never does — the word does not appear, and the priority ordering is never discussed as an ordering. His target is contractarianism generally, exactly as the fallback reading had it, and specifically the presumed-consent move rather than any principle derived from it. The From the book section replaces this. John Rawls carries the detail.
The consequence for this page is that it and The Book Problem do not merge into one argument. They were only going to merge if lexical priority turned out to be the target; it isn’t.
Where I think he’s weakest — still stands, and the book sharpens it. He objects to a rulebook, then names a floor that outranks everything else. Chapter 10 makes that floor explicit and four items long (expression, education, equality before the law, exit), which is more than the one line the interview implies, and it is asserted rather than deliberated. A four-item book is still a book. What the book adds in his defence is that the floor is justified instrumentally throughout — Chapter 2 argues rights are warranted because they enable experimentation and collective knowledge, “not because of a notion of natural rights.”
Draft 2 should add: what “community-level agreements” concretely means in his framework. This is now answered from Chapter 10 rather than constructed — see Working-Class Liberalism and Community Elbow Room.
Source and its limits. Checked against the audiobook edition (Penguin Random House Audio, narrated by John Lee), machine-transcribed, so references are by chapter and quotations are transcribed speech. Re-check wording against print before quoting as exact.