An anthropology of the social contract: The political power of an idea

Abstract

The idea of the social contract resonates in many societies as a framework to conceptualise state–society relations, and as a normative ideal which strives to improve them. Policy-makers, development organisations, politicians, social scientists (including anthropologists), and our interlocutors all live with contractarian logics. While generations of political philosophers have debated the concept and its usefulness, the term has also travelled beyond academia into the wider world, shaping expectations, experiences, and imagined futures of state–society relations. An anthropology of the social contract explores ethnographically how this pervasive concept, laden with assumptions about human nature, political organisation, government, and notions such as freedom, consensus and legitimacy, impacts state–society relations in different settings. In this way, the social contract itself – its many emic instantiations, and its political effects – becomes the object of study.

‘We were not emotional enough’: Cultural liberalism and social contract imaginaries in the Colombian peace process

“…Western political theories underpin many forms of political organisation. As this special issue argues (Burnyeat and Sheild Johansson, 2022, this volume), loosely shared assumptions from social contract theory, varyingly interpreted and appropriated in different cultural contexts, imbue state infrastructures across time and space. The anthropological approach to the social contract outlined in our introduction proposes interrogating ethnographically the real-world effects of contractarian thinking, examining how people conceive of, appropriate and reinvent this widely circulating model of political life.…”

Scales of disaster: Intimate social contracts on the margins of the postcolonial state

“…It is unclear whether or not this represents genuine consensus amongst all community members. Nevertheless, the material benefits leveraged by the fishermen (elaborated further below) via their governance structure is strongly indicative of contractarian thinking in their ‘political community’ (see Burnyeat and Sheild Johansson, 2022, this volume): an intimate social contract based on relations of trust and co-dependency between individual households and the village council, and that between households.…”

“…Thus, we build on previous scholarship that highlights that ‘for the anthropology of the state disaster situations provide unique opportunities to dissect conventional images of the state as a huge, powerful and monolithic entity’ (Sökefeld, 2015). Our aim here is not to assess the perceived success or failure of the state in its interactions with citizens, but rather ‘our interest lies in how people imagine their relationship with each other and the state’ (Burnyeat and Sheild Johansson, 2022, this volume) and the ways in which this is lived and experienced on the margins of the postcolonial state.…”

“…Keating (2011) has highlighted the Eurocentric nature of classical social contract thinking, which emerged within a particular social and political moment in 17th- and 18th-century western Europe. This work explores the egalitarian potential of the ‘postcolonial social contract’ – paralleling the works of feminists such as Pateman on the sexual contract, or critical race theorists such as Mills on the racial contract (Burnyeat and Sheild Johansson, 2022, this volume). At the same time, emerging literature on disasters and postcolonial social contracts shows that the feelings of inequality experienced by citizens on the margins of the state demonstrate the resilience and malleability of these contracts (Siddiqi and Canuday, 2018).…”

“…In so doing our argument outlines an approach to understanding lived social contracts that engages critically with questions of scale and place – both conceptually and methodologically – and, in constructing these embodied and felt political relations, also brings in anthropological approaches (Laszczkowski and Reeves, 2015). Taking the argument made in the introduction (Burnyeat and Sheild Johansson, 2022, this volume) forward we recognise that unlike classical contractarianism, which was far more than a perceived state–citizen contract and rather a form of voluntary societal organisation, its appropriation by contemporary development discourses focuses exclusively on one perceived overarching state–citizen contract. In this article we deconstruct this idea, illustrating that a single and overarching conceptualisation of social contracts obscures the messy realities and politics of scale.…”