The Social Contract Through the Lens of Hegemony: New Heuristics for Analysing Contemporary Struggles

Many contemporary struggles can be conceptualised through the category of the social contract. This paper explores how social contract can be thought through the lens of the theory of hegemony of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985): social contracts are established, retained and contested as hegemonic formations. It would enable a perspective to a social contract as a heuristic for assessing the processes of imagining collectives as it seemingly provides a glue to the society. Regularly it would be civic and ethnic forms of nationalism that would take this role. In this way it does not assume a foundational basis or an imagined cultural tie, but it envisions a contract that would assume a crafted but consenting relationship between the power-holders and the citizens. In contrast to the Rawlsian decision behind a veil of ignorance, theory of hegemony challenges the idea that this would be a one-off decision but affords attention to the active maintenance and the possibilities of contesting such a relationship. Moreover, the ideas on which the contracts are based are not something to be taken for granted but building a basis of our society in a particular way. Radical democratic perspective in Laclau and Mouffe’s theorizing would offer an additional dimension to the social contract vis à vis democracy. In post-foundational theories democracy is not merely procedural but processual, ever improving. A resilient social contract is not merely a given state but in a continuous process of re-negotiation, incomplete and requires constant evaluation of whether everyone is indeed included and equally so. Alternatively, social contract offers a perspective to see contestation and exclusion or inclusion (see Pateman and Mills). Through the lens of hegemony and radical democracy, social contract offers a metaphor or a heuristic for better understanding prevailing logics in societies and politics.