In person icon Genealogy of Social Contracts

Abstract

A genealogy of how social contracts have been previously theorised in the history of ideas reveals a series of core conceptual questions and puzzles that need to be generally addressed by social contract theories: The nexus between citizens and governors (bottom-up), on the one hand, and government to citizens (top-down) as well as among the citizens as demos is key to understanding social contracts and their current challenges. Any social contract that is stable will rely on 1) a legitimate foundation that usually has a legal dimension and works in a top-down direction (this can be a constitution) and 2) a bottom-up basis, namely citizens and their support and identification of the social contract in a broad sense; and 3) horizontal links between the citizens. This means that a social contract is not merely a constitution, i.e. a legal document that has been concluded in a top-down way, but also consists of bottom-up identification and support by the citizens.

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