The Social Contract in The City of Lakes

Eighteenth century Enlightenment philosophers built the ideological framework for what became the American republic. Their ideas are found in the U.S. Constitution and include representation of the people, checks and balances of executive, judicial, and legislative authority, and the notion that all people — including elected officials and their appointees— are obligated to the rule of law, which exempts nobody, and which permits no arbitrary use of power. The Bill of Rights explicitly confirmed the rights to free speech, religion, the press, assembly and to petition government for “redress of grievances.” It asserted that warrants are needed to search private property and that the accused have rights to a fair and speedy trial and due process.

In 1762, Jacques Rousseau penned The Social Contract (1762). The ruling aristocrats did not like his ideas and so they banned his book. Rousseau asserted that the government’s authority was legitimate only when it respected the individual’s liberty. He argued that the state had no right to coerce or enslave people. He also insisted that citizens must sacrifice some of their freedoms so that their exercise of liberty was not a threat to the common good. This unwritten social contract could be broken in two ways. First, the people could disregard public safety, laws, and the right of others to be free and prosper. Second, the government could usurp the power of the people and undermine their well-being. Under these circumstances, Rousseau opined, the people would be right to rebel against their own government. This theory was central to the American and French Revolutions.

Rousseau’s critics, including American Federalists James Madison, George Washington, and Alexander Hamilton, believed democracy should not extend voting rights to those without property. They held that common citizens were too ignorant, selfish, and volatile to govern themselves wisely.  Others, such as John Adams and George Washington warned that political parties and partisanism were potential enemies of the people as they could conspire against the common good (Fulton, 2024). They knew that the social contract was vulnerable to the special interests of a governing elite on one hand and to the urges of the common people on the other.

In Minneapolis, the social contract has atrophied as human nature has too often taken the path of least assistance. Like its fellows across the country, folks in the land ‘o lakes have special regard for rugged individualism. Rugged individualism does not want to hear that the playing field of opportunity is not level, because it holds that, with perseverance, anyone can overcome adversity and ascend the ladder of success and material fortune. Our regard for the social contract is peppered with the following beliefs about the nature of well-being:

  • The belief that competition always leads to superior production of goods and services
  • The belief that prosperity requires ever-expanding markets
  • The belief that people with wealth and property inherently know best how to govern
  • The belief that people who have college degrees and bountiful incomes are more well-adjusted than people without college degrees and have meager incomes

As Rousseau conceptualized it, the social contract is not completely compatible with capitalism because it required individuals to temper their appetites so that they would not exercise their liberty unconditionally. While defending the right of people to pursue their own interests, Rousseau observed that human beings are readily corrupted by the pursuit of wealth and property. The quest for property and wealth often made people indifferent to the needs of others and willing to exploit others at the expense of their well-being. Like the conservative philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, Rousseau was unconvinced that human beings were social by nature. Instead, human beings craved autonomy and were driven by personal ambition and desire for wealth and power. He observed that inequalities among people originated in both nature and social conditions, and that one’s way of seeing and being in the world was shaped society (Rousseau, 1961).

Getting human beings to consent to a social contract that placed the common good front and center of its priorities always meant finding ways to maximize its appeal. In theory, reason guides people to consensus because the social contract permits everyone to pursue their interests as long as they do not obstruct others in their pursuit of their interests. The problem is that reason is a subjective concept, and human beings are not always rational. The extent to which individuals consent to the social contract is the extent to which human societies — with their brutish and clannish ways of life — become civil societies, which are more cooperative, well-mannered, and willing to sacrifice personal interests for the good of society as a whole.

Signs that the social contract is in peril in Minneapolis are the same signs that the social contract is in jeopardy all over the United States. They include:

  1. Prioritizing housing development that yields great private profit while reducing access to affordable housing
  2. Tolerance for a two-tiered educational system that provides outstanding instruction and formation to affluent communities and mediocre to poor instruction and formation to lower income communities
  3. Reconfiguring voting districts for the purpose of diminishing the voices of minorities and the poor
  4. Refusal of partisans to work with each other to resolve economic and social problems
  5. The use of executive authority to unilaterally authorize government agencies to violate the Constitutional rights
  6. The exercise of legislative favor toward laws that reduce the accountability of banks, industries, and institutions to protect the public’s safety, health, economic stability, and right to be well- informed
  7. Presumed entitlement on the part of individuals, corporations, and public enterprises
  8. The deployment of federal agents to harass, assault, arrest, detain, and kill people with immunity from prosecution, even when those agents have violated the U.S. Constitution
  9. Favoring the use terrorism as a means of enforcing the law instead of creating a means of holding people accountable for transgressions and establishing restorative justice through non-violent measures that address the needs and rights of both the innocent and the guilty (See Blog “The Banality of Terrorism” in Cultural Criticism
  10. Creating a legal system that is preferential to the interests of the wealthy, who often seek restrictions on civil rights, deregulation of banks and industries, and a tax structure that perpetuates distributive injustice

Minneapolis’ commitment to the social contract is inconsistent and fragile. It will remain that way as long as people who have opportunities for self-improvement and upward mobility reject them, as long as the affluent are reluctant to support public and private opportunities for self-improvement and personal economic stability (see Blog “Messianic Fatigue” in Religion & Spirituality. It will remain precarious as long as the economic and social playing field is not level, and as long as we believe that a social contract can withstand extreme and toxic individualism.

References

Fulton, Neil. Politicians the Founders Warned You About Politicians the Founders Warned You About. UC Law Constitutional Quarterly, 51(3): 353-96. (2024).

Rousseau, Jacques. Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. In The Social Contract and Discourses, 176-272. Trans. By G.D.H. Cole. New York: E.P. Dutton & Company, Inc. 1961.