Contract Theory in Historical Context: Essays on Grotius, Hobbes, and Locke
Deborah Baumgold
Language: English
Pages: 209
ISBN: B01K93XOOG
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The social contract is usually regarded as a quintessentially modern political idea, which telegraphs the root modern principles of popular sovereignty and governmental accountability to the people. By setting classic contract theory in historical context, these essays present a different view. Seventeenth-century contractarianism was a parochial genre, they argue, that addressed problems which disappeared with the advent of modern, electoral politics. A further theme is the parochial nature of the texts; several essays relate Hobbes’s texts, in particular, to the ‘history of the book’ in the seventeenth century.
While my readings show the distance between classic social contract theory and modern electoral politics, in doing so they illuminate problems in the revival of contractarianism in the twentieth century.
Th e impulse to be skeptical of abstract, universal formulations of the social contract, and instead to tie contract arguments to their contexts, reflects a common critique of Rawls’s initial formulation in A Theory of Justice. As he would later acknowledge, the theory in fact builds in his local horizon. Th e essays in Part I of the volume extend this insight to Grotian, Hobbesian, and Lockean contract theories, making the argument that they centrally address the ‘ancien regime’ question of the right to resist tyrants. Part II examines the logic of universal-izing, ‘philosophical’ contractarianism; these essays discuss the role of historical ‘facts’ in Hobbes’s political theory and the origin of mod-ern contract theory’s curious mix of voluntarist and nonvoluntarist reasoning.
The German Gītā: Hermeneutics and Discipline in the Early German Reception of Indian Thought
Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics (Technologies of Lived Abstraction)
Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy (4th Edition)
Storia della filosofia, Volume 1: Dai presocratici ad Aristotele
A History of Natural Philosophy: From the Ancient World to the Nineteenth Century
for example, in Leviathan: I know not how this so manifest a truth, should of late be so little observed; that in a Monarchy, he that had the Soveraignty from a descent of 600 years, was alone called Soveraign, had the title of Majesty from every one of his Subjects, and was unquestionably taken by them for their King.2 1 Harro Höpfl and Martyn P. Thompson, “The History of Contract as a Motif in Political Thought,” American Historical Review, 84 (1979): 941. 2 Hobbes, LV, 19, pp. 240–41.
Protection and Obedience” (LV, “A Review and Conclusion,” p. 728). Cf. Bodin’s description of the contract between ruler and ruled quoted in note 14 above. Thus it can be argued that Hobbes ended up reproducing—not avoiding—the contradiction in Bodinian when hobbes needed history 57 In De Jure Belli Ac Pacis (1625), Grotius offered a contract argument more promising to absolutist theory.18 The argument is framed to rebut the opinion that sovereignty always resides in the people and rulers are
way obtain the supplies needed to sustain life.27 Thus Grotius legitimated the possibility of absolutism, defined as unconditional sovereignty, as well as slavery. However, it was a weak, because merely permissive, defense of absolutism: he granted that other forms of government, including divided as well as conditional sovereignty, were also possible. His argument parallels the just-quoted defense of an absolutist contract: Against such a state of divided sovereignty—having, as it were, two
“Introduction” to Two Treatises of Government, by J. Locke (New York: New American Library, 1965), 91. 13 Jean Hampton, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 284. hobbes’s and locke’s contract theories 7 In the second section of the essay, I will argue, to the contrary, that seventeenth-century contract theory is more accurately periodized as an ancien-regime genre than as a modern one. Beneath the apparent continuity between contract theory
in Leviathan originating in annotations to the second edition of De Cive. Hobbes’s Way of Writing We know that the texts evolved in this sort of way due to Hobbes’s way of writing, which consisted, as Aubrey recorded about Leviathan, in jotting down notes as he walked and subsequently fitting them into an existing outline. Although Aubrey’s report specifically refers to Leviathan, the method is also evident in De Cive, most obviously in the insertion of annotations in the second edition. It
