← Back to the transcript13 of 18 Rabbit Holes
Social Contract Theory and Its Critics
Adam asked: “Rabbit hole on social contracts”
The idea and its lineage
Social contract theory is a family, not a single recipe. Its members share the idea that political authority — or, for some, morality — is justified by agreement. They disagree about what kind of agreement counts, and the difference matters for Acemoglu’s objection:
- Express consent — an actual promise to join. Locke holds that only this makes someone a full member of a commonwealth: “Nothing can make any man so, but his actually entering into it by positive engagement, and express promise and compact” (Second Treatise §122).
- Tacit consent — agreement read off conduct. For Locke, anyone who holds land, takes “a lodging only for a week,” or is “barely travelling freely on the highway” within a government’s territory has tacitly consented to obey its laws for as long as that enjoyment lasts (§§119–121). Rousseau makes a similar move once a state exists: “residence constitutes consent” (The Social Contract IV.2).
- Hypothetical agreement — what people would agree to under specified conditions, whether or not anyone did. Kant treats the original contract as an idea of reason rather than an event; Rawls’s original position is the modern standard case; Scanlon asks which principles no one could reasonably reject.
Many of these arguments begin by imagining people outside political authority — Hobbes’s and Locke’s state of nature, Rawls’s original position — and asking what would follow. How that starting point is described does a great deal of the work. Hobbes describes the state of nature as a war of all against all and gets an effective sovereign. Locke describes it as governed by natural law but insecure, and gets a limited government. Rawls puts you behind a veil of ignorance and gets principles that permit inequality only when it benefits the least advantaged.
A map of arguments · not a chain of succession
Change the starting point. Change the agreement.
These thinkers use different kinds of agreement — express, tacit or hypothetical, and in Nozick's case none at all — 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 that arises without violating rights, not by agreement: a rival to Rawls and to the contract tradition.
- 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?
Starting from a state of nature does not make someone a contract theorist. Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) begins from a Lockean state of nature but does not rest the state on agreement at all. Private protective associations form; one comes to dominate a territory through what he calls an invisible-hand process, which nobody designs or signs up to; and it becomes a minimal state by prohibiting riskier private enforcement and compensating those it prohibits (chapters 2, 4–5). Its claim to legitimacy is that it “acquired this power and reached its position of dominance without violating anyone’s rights” (chapter 6), not that anyone consented — and the book waves the tacit-consent route away in a line: “tacit consent isn’t worth the paper it’s not written on” (chapter 9). Nozick is a rights-based rival to the contract tradition, which is how the figure above places him.
Where Acemoglu’s objection lands. What he asks for is actual consent reached by deliberation. The approach his complaint fits best is the hypothetical one, where a theorist’s account of what people would accept stands in for asking them. That is his criticism of particular approaches, not a neutral definition of the whole tradition — and a contractarian has a reply, below.
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.”
Rousseau does ask for real consent — once. In Book IV, Chapter 2, the original compact alone “needs unanimous consent”; after that, residence counts as consent and the majority binds everyone else. The outvoted citizen has not been overruled so much as corrected: “When therefore the opinion that is contrary to my own prevails, this proves neither more nor less than that I was mistaken, and that what I thought to be the general will was not so.”
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.”
Note his qualifier — interpreted as the basis for general ethical rules. The objection is to one use of contract arguments, and the next paragraph shows he keeps another.
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), esp. §§119–122 | Consent, property, the right of revolution; express versus tacit consent | Gutenberg |
| Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), ch. 2–6 | A minimal state without a contract: the invisible-hand argument | SEP overview |
| 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 contractarian reasoning used as the basis for general rules, 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.
Corrected 2026-09-18. Earlier drafts opened with “every social contract theory makes the same three moves” and “nobody in any of these stories ever signed anything.” That collapsed express, tacit and hypothetical consent into one move, and it made Acemoglu’s objection sound like the definition of the tradition. The lineage section now separates the three, adds Rousseau’s unanimity-then-majority rule from IV.2, and says where Nozick actually stands. Checked against Locke, Second Treatise §§119–122; Rousseau, The Social Contract IV.2 (Cole translation); and Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, chapters 2 and 5–6, and 9.
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.