Social contract

This paper examines some of the lesser known fragments and reading notes by the Dutch humanist and jurisconsult Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) and focuses on how he used the idea of divisible sovereignty to justify the deposition of Philip II of Spain and legitimize the armed revolt of the Netherlands which led to the birth of the Dutch Republic. The question is: What are the lessons we can draw from this example and how relevant might they be for understanding certain events today?

This study examines employers’ and workers’ sensemaking about cybervetting—employers’ use of online information for personnel selection. Analysis of 89 employer and applicant interviews suggest a shift in the social contract—the implicit expectations for how personnel selection and employment relationships should work. Results suggest an extension of new proactive transparency expectations from organizations to workers, the implicit acceptance of which points to the emergence of a digital social contract. The digital social contract prescribes normative expectations for workers’ digital visibility, thereby extending the times and contexts within which employment evaluations and career management occur. Using a communicative perspective to address research gaps on everyday ethics, practices, and technologies of personnel selection, contributions include introducing and explicating the digital social contract, documenting the extension of new transparency expectations to individuals, and explicating ethical and practical implications of new technologies and information visibility on contemporary personnel selection.

If the greatness of a philosophical work can be measured by the volume and vehemence of the public response, there is little question that Rousseau's Social Contract stands out as a masterpiece. Within a week of its publication in 1762 it was banished from France. Soon thereafter, Rousseau fled to Geneva, where he saw the book burned in public. At the same time, many of his contemporaries, such as Kant, considered Rousseau to be “the Newton of the moral world,” as he was the first philosopher to draw attention to the basic dignity of human nature. The Social Contract has never ceased to be read in the 250 years since it was written. Rousseau's “Social Contract”: An Introduction offers a thorough and systematic tour of this notoriously paradoxical and challenging text. David Lay Williams offers readers a chapter-by-chapter reading of the Social Contract, squarely confronting these interpretive obstacles, leaving no stones unturned. The conclusion connects Rousseau's text both to his important influences and those who took inspiration and sometimes exception to his arguments. The book also features a special extended appendix dedicated to outlining his famous conception of the general will, which has been the object of controversy since the Social Contract's publication.

Hobbes's account of the commonwealth is standardly understood to be primarily a theory of contract whereby the archetypal manner of forming a political community is via an act of mutual agreement between suspicious individuals of equal power. By examining Hobbes's theories of the pre-political family, and what he says about the role of real history in the development of political societies, I conclude that this standard interpretation is untenable. Rather, Hobbes's conception of commonwealth 'by institution' is a hypothetical model used to illustrate the mechanics of sovereignty, and to reconcile men to the conditions of subjection to absolute political power. In practice, all sovereignty is originally 'by acquisition' – that is, violent conquest. Realising this casts serious doubt on the possibility that Hobbes is a fundamentally democratic thinker, according to whom the popular sovereign is 'sleeping'. By contrast, Hobbes's theories of the family and the role of history are properly revealed as the genealogical ancestors of Scottish Enlightenment conjectural history.

"This paper interrogates the limitation of the idea of Social Contract, State Sovereignty and State Responsibility by taking disaster management as one aspect of State activity. It argues that there is a need to expand the expositions of social contract beyond the nation-states. By using the framework of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and Humanitarianism this paper proposes to advance an idea of Responsibility to Care (R2C) that there is a global responsibility to respond to disasters.
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Following four decades of unprecedented economic, social, and cultural change, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) labor market is highly segmented: The native population is almost exclusively employed in the government sector, while the private sector is effectively outsourced to foreigners. This has created an unsustainable situation with growing numbers of young citizens reaching working age and with a public sector that has reached the saturation point. Policymakers repeatedly try to legislate to encourage private-sector employers to hire citizens. These policies have had limited success. We explored the career attitudes of 2,267 United Arab Emirates citizens prior to their entry into the labor market. Using structural equation modeling, we found that the social contract and resulting expectations toward state employment have strong implications for willingness to work in the private sector.

""Politics is always about nomination. It is about naming a political subjectivity and organizing politically around that name.– Simon Critchley (2007, 103)

This paper situates Guy Standing’s recent work on ‘the precariat’ within a broader body of literature exploring processes of ‘precarisation’, at work and across the social field. It sets out the differential distribution of ‘precarity’ (including on the basis of gender, geography, status and sector) resulting from transformations in labour and the political economy, the rollback of social democracy and of ‘industrial citizenship’ (where these existed), as well as from processes of globalisation. The paper argues that, like many other works, Standing’s book, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, de-couples its discussion of precarious, neoliberal labour and life from the explicitly utopian agenda of radical reform it ultimately proposes. Drawing on Kathi Weeks’ engagement with Ernst Bloch’s work, the paper suggest Standing’s utopianism remains abstract, detached from an analysis of the social forces, movements and struggles that might bring it into being. It makes use of Antonio Negri’s distinctive, heterodox interpretation of V.I. Lenin to provide a framework for theorising how concrete utopian projects of radical political transformation – which is to say, ‘realist’ or materialist ones – are extrapolated out of spontaneous struggles; the predominant ‘will’, ethics and structures of which are always largely determined by the social, political and economic context from which they emerge. It is shown how, on the basis of this approach, Negri (in his collaboration with Michael Hardt) has constructed the notion of ‘multitude’ as a potential model for political organisation today – apposite to the precarious reality described by Standing and others. They draw on Baruch Spinoza’s political philosophy – often counterposing it to that of Thomas Hobbes – to affirm the capacity for common political action and decision despite heterogeneity, and to ground political organisation in social conflict rather than contract. Finally, drawing on Alain Badiou’s distinction between ‘immediate’ and ‘historical uprisings’, the paper explores the degree to which a number of contemporary movements and struggles might have tentatively achieved what he calls ‘qualitative extension’ – establishing connections and a ground for common action across social spaces and strata – potentially setting in motion enduring projects of political organisation and constitution that resemble the multitude model.""

I argue that social-contract theory cannot succeed because reasonable people may always disagree, and that social-contract theory is irrelevant to the problem of the legitimacy of a form of government or of a system of moral rules. I note the weakness of the appeal to implicit agreement, the conflation of legitimacy with stability, the undesirability of “public justification” and the apparent blindness to the evolutionary critical-rationalist approach of Hayek and Popper. I employ that approach to sketch answers to the theoretical, historical and practical questions about the legitimacy of government or of systems of moral rules.

The Theses LVI belong to a series of hitherto unpublished early manuscripts of the Dutch humanist and jurisconsult Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) that were acquired by the University of Leiden in 1864. It is not certain when the Theses were written, but preliminary research on the physical manuscript and the sources cited indicate two possible windows. The first is around 1602-1605, that is roughly at a time when Grotius was also working on his Commentary on the Law of Prize and Booty (De Iure Praedae Commentarius). The second dating places the genesis of the manuscrbipt around 1613-1615.
In the context of Grotius’ writings, the Theses LVI assume an important position for several reasons: They raise questions about state formation, the duty of citizens to the state and the right of political resistance in far greater detail than in any other work of the celebrated Dutch humanist. The Theses LVI also feature important reading notes that yield priceless insights into the sources that Grotius directly consulted and their influence on his ideas. The manuscript grants modern scholars a unique glimpse into the working mind of its author. Evidence points not only to the ferocious haste with which Grotius wrote his works, but also the occasional sloppiness of his reading and research habits."""