Beyond Liberalism: The Moral Community of Rousseau's Social Contract

2001 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 579-600 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katrin Froese
Keyword(s):  
Public Good ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Moral Community ◽  
Bourgeois Society ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Right ◽  
Public Right

This article argues that Rousseau's Social Contract both upholds and transcends liberal concepts of political right. Rather than maintaining a distinction between public right and public good, Rousseau tries to collapse the division between the two in order to effect a transition from a bourgeois society to a moral community. In his view, individuals are best protected from each other by participating in the formation of a community of equals. Rousseau's conception of morality is not based on absolutes, but is a process whereby individuals consciously integrate themselves into the community. This presupposes a desire to belong on the part of individuals, and recognizes their propensity to distance themselves from the social order. Rather than trying to eradicate the tension between individuality and integration, Rousseau affirms that the effort to reconcile this tension is the foundation of morality.

Social Contract versus Invisible Hand

2019 ◽  
pp. 734-763
Author(s):  
Viktor J. Vanberg
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Invisible Hand ◽  
Spontaneous Order ◽  
The Social ◽  
Visible Hand ◽  
The Invisible

The purpose of this chapter is to take a closer look at the relation between the invisible hand paradigm that is at the heart of economists’ theoretical outlook at markets and its “visible hand” counterpart, the social contract paradigm as a theory of government. It is argued that in its generalized interpretation as an individualistic model of organized collective action the social contract paradigm consistently complements the invisible hand paradigm as an individualistic theory of spontaneous social order. What Hayek has referred to as “the two kinds of order,” spontaneous order and corporate order, can thus be accounted for within one coherent individualistic theoretical framework.

The Employment Contract as Materialization of Social Order. Contracts at Albert Ranft’s Stockholm theatres, 1895-1926

2017 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 81
Author(s):  
Lovisa Näslund
Keyword(s):  
Social Contract ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Employment Contracts ◽  
Dominant Position ◽  
Employment Contract ◽  
The Social ◽  
Theatre Studies ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Formal Contract

In the archive, the materialized traces of theatrical organization and performances remain. In this paper, we focus on the employment contract, as a type of source material commonly found but rarely studied in theatre studies. Empirically, the paper is based on a study of contracts from Albert Ranft’s Stockholm theatres, 1895-1926. Ranft built his commercially funded theatrical empire in Stockholm in a period when the competition from subsidized theatre was minimal, and for a time dominated the Stockholm theatres. The study demonstrates how the study of employment contracts allows us to form an understanding of power relations between managers on the one hand, and artists and directors on the other, and also the formal and social aspects of the employment contracts. In the case of Albert Ranft, the contracts bear evidence of his dominant position in Stockholm theatre, which in turn a orded him an unusually powerful position in relation to his employees. The relationship between the formal and social contract is explored, and it is suggested that the formal contract could be seen as a photographic negative of the social contract: if there is an extensive social contract, the formal contract will be more elaborate, and vice versa. The extensive formal contracts of the studied period might therefore be seen as evidence of a relatively thin social contract, implying that industry norms were, at the time, not institutionalized enough to be taken for granted.

In the Shadow of the General Will: Rawls, Kant and Rousseau on the Problem of Political Right

1987 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 389-409 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Neal
Keyword(s):  
Social Contract ◽  
General Will ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Right ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Unstable Position ◽  
Theoretical Project

The relationship between Kant and Rawls is apparently an obvious one; Rawls himself acknowledges the Kantian foundations of his approach to questions of justice and political right, and identifies the precise points at which his theory departs from that of Kant. This essay attempts to show that when one examines those points of departure carefully, they turn out to point not merely away from Kant, but directly and inexorably toward the account of political right given by Rousseau in The Social Contract. The essay argues that it is impossible to fully understand Rawls' theoretical project until one sees the (unstable) position it occupies between the Kantian and Rousseauian accounts of political right. Moreover, it argues that the theoretical project undertaken by Rawls, that of revising the Kantian conception of autonomy in an attempt to show how it could be coherently “expressed” politically, was actually undertaken and “completed” by Rousseau — though with ironic, and unsettling, results.

scholarly journals Preps and Punks: An Inquiry into Externally Imposed Factors that Contribute to the Social Categorization of Students

2005 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Georgann Cope Watson
Keyword(s):  
Social Contract ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Hidden Curriculum ◽  
Social Categorization ◽  
Social Categories ◽  
School Life ◽  
The Social

The division of students into social categories is a phenomenon that invites inquiry. Historically, students have tended to migrate towards one of two groups: the preps who embrace all aspects of school life and the punks who reject all aspects of school life. These two groups are reproductions of the social order. This paper inquires into three elements of the discourse of schooling that influence the categorization of students; normalization, the hidden curriculum and the social contract.

The Erotic Vaṭan [Homeland] as Beloved and Mother: To Love, To Possess, and To Protect

1997 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 442-467 ◽  
Author(s):  
Afsaneh Najmabadi
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Male Bonding ◽  
Nationalist Discourse ◽  
National Community ◽  
The Social ◽  
Identity Based ◽  
Nationalist Sentiment

Modern nations have often been explicitly imagined through familial metaphors. In particular, the construction of the national community as a brotherhood (a fraternity) has pointed both to the centrality of male bonding in the production of nationalist sentiment and to the exclusion of women from the social contract. Within that contract not only were women “subject to men's power; it also implied complementary bonds between men;… women had no place in the new political and social order except as markers of social relations between men.”Hunt's observation recalls Sedgwick's analysis of how male bonding is mediated through the figure of woman. In nationalist discourse representing the homeland as a female body has often been used to construct a national identity based on male bonding among a nation of brothers.

scholarly journals The Employment Contract as the Materialization of the Social Order. Contracts at Albert Ranft’s Stockholm theatres, 1895-1926

2018 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 81
Author(s):  
Lovisa Näslund
Keyword(s):  
Social Contract ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Employment Contracts ◽  
Dominant Position ◽  
Employment Contract ◽  
The Social ◽  
Theatre Studies ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Formal Contract

In the archive, the materialized traces of theatrical organization and performances remain. In this paper, we focus on the employment contract, as a type of source material commonly found but rarely studied in theatre studies. Empirically, the paper is based on a study of contracts from Albert Ranft’s Stockholm theatres, 1895-1926. Ranft built his commercially funded theatrical empire in Stockholm in a period when the competition from subsidized theatre was minimal, and for a time dominated the Stockholm theatres. The study demonstrates how the study of employment contracts allows us to form an understanding of power relations between managers on the one hand, and artists and directors on the other, and also the formal and social aspects of the employment contracts. In the case of Albert Ranft, the contracts bear evidence of his dominant position in Stockholm theatre, which in turn afforded him an unusually powerful position in relation to his employees. The relationship between the formal and social contract is explored, and it is suggested that the formal contract could be seen as a photographic negative of the social contract: if there is an extensive social contract, the formal contract will be more elaborate, and vice versa. The extensive formal contracts of the studied period might therefore be seen as evidence of a relatively thin social contract, implying that industry norms were, at the time, not institutionalized enough to be taken for granted.

scholarly journals Moral Community and Moral Order

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
James Caton
Keyword(s):  
Social Contract ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Moral Community ◽  
Moral Order ◽  
Minimum Standard ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Rule Systems

This work aligns James Buchanan’s theory of social contract with the structure of Michael Moehler’s multilevel social contract. Most importantly, this work develops Buchanan’s notions of moral community and moral order. It identifies moral community as the vehicle of escape from moral anarchy, where community is established upon a system of rules akin to James Buchanan’s first-stage social contract. Moral order establishes the baseline treatment of non-members by members of a moral community and also provides a minimum standard for resolving disputes that are not resolved by the more robust social contract shared among community members. This work links the multilevel contract to polycentric social order, noting that polycentric systems may promote development of the moral order by enabling experimentation with and emulation of rules and rule systems made available by overlapping and adjacent institutions.

Zigomar

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vito Adriaensens
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Target Audience ◽  
Bourgeois Society ◽  
Cinematic Adaptation ◽  
French Writer ◽  
The Social ◽  
Serial Novel ◽  
Nick Carter ◽  
The Way

Zigomar was the criminal mastermind of French writer Léon Sazie’s eponymous serial novel, or feuilleton, which appeared in the newspaper Le Matin between 1909 and 1910. It was in 1911, however, through a cinematic adaptation in six episodes by the Éclair Film Company and its leading director, Victorin-Hippolyte Jasset, that Zigomar and his Z-gang shot to worldwide fame. Serial detective fiction was certainly not new at the time, Éclair and Jasset led the way in 1908 with the famous Nick Carter series and multiple adaptations and imitations of Sherlock Holmes that had flooded the screens for years; however, the elevation of a criminal figure was still a very recent phenomenon—with Danish precursors such as Dr. Nikola (Viggo Larsen, 1909), Zigomar helped pave the way for classics such as Louis Feuillade’s Fantômas series (1913–14). Abel argues that Jasset’s Zigomar, played by Alexandre Arquillière, strengthened Sazie’s by transforming him into an immoral bourgeois gentleman, "a capitalist entrepreneur pushed to the point of excess" (Abel 1998: 358). As such, Zigomar was one of the first modernist antiheroes to grace the silver screen, an illustrious criminal who undermined bourgeois society by upsetting the social order and preying on its members— not, coincidentally, the cinema’s target audience.

scholarly journals Rousseau's Conception of Government in the work Discourse on Political Economy

2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-61
Author(s):  
Petar Jakopec
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
General Will ◽  
Major Work ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Government ◽  
Political Right

In this article the author problematizes Rousseau’s Discourse on Political Economy and his conception of government in the political community. Rousseau’s Discourse on Political Economy was chronologically written seven years before his major work The Social Contract or Principles of Political Right. Regardless of the fact that the Discourse on Political Economy was published earlier, it left a remarkable trace in Rousseau‘s philosophical opus. In this work, which was published as part of the fifth volume of Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, Rousseau indicated his direction in political philosophy. This philosophical and political direction began with the Discourse on Political Economy and culminated in the philosophical and political conception of republicanism, elaborated in detail in The Social Contract. In this article the author uses critical analysis and reconstruction to establish Rousseau‘s fundamental ideas about his political philosophy present in the Discourse on Political Economy, with a focus on observing and studying the role of a sovereign and the public economy in the function of the government by general will within the political community.

Ordered Anarchy and Contractarianism

Philosophy ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 85 (3) ◽  
pp. 399-403 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony de Jasay
Keyword(s):  
Social Contract ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Practical Importance ◽  
The Social ◽  
Critical Scrutiny

AbstractIn a recent essay Robert Sugden sets out his view that two foundational institutions of the social order, the convention and the social contract (at least in one variant of the latter) are compatible and that therefore it is not self-contradictory to be a Humean and a contractarian at the same time.1 The proposition, despite appearances, has greater practical importance than most other doctrinal ones tend to do for if widely conceded, it would render current political thought even more woolly than it is already. If so, a critical scrutiny might be of some use.

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