Law & Society Blog

14 Responses to “Did I ever mention how I don’t like social contract theory?”  

1. 1 Matt Wood Dec 3rd, 2006 at 6:49 pm

   Ben-
   I think your Tikopian/Wild West analogy is illuminating, but may unintentionally provide some basis for the ’social contract’ theory. Let me start with a few axioms/presuppositions:

   1. All behavior is governed by internal, cognitive assessments of both the status quo and the consequences expected to flow from particular actions.

   2. The law enters into individual reasoning processes in a variety of ways:

   a. Reification.
   I’ve argued elsewhere on this blog for this point, so I won’t belabor it here. Suffice it to say that “the law” is often perceived as a regulating force outside the individual, and phenomenologically distinct from the individual social actors and institutions that promulgate and enforce it.
   - Ex: “Environmental laws are blocking me from building a new shoe factory on the Mississippi River.”

   b. Embodied consequentialism.
   A little self-reflection will show that people often use their imaginations evaluatively to predict the consequences of their actions. A predominately visual mental-movie spontaneously forms in the mind, which simulates the expected results. The individual reasons from this representation.
   Ex: “I’d like to shoplift this new Eminem CD, but what if there’s a guard nearby, or cameras on the ceiling, and what about the jail showers … and I can just see the look on my mom’s face now!!”
   (Editorial note: I’m not proposing that this kind of monologue would actually go on in the mind of the potential shoplifter, but rather that the accompanying imagery probably would.)

   c. Moral sensibilities, or propriety.
   Human behavior seems to also be governed by a sense of moral propriety, typically visceral, and rooted in either revulsion or perceived virtue, in response to either perceived or imagined scenarios (in the latter case, piggybacking on the imaginative (primarily visual) faculties discussed earlier).
   - Ex: “This child will be slaughtered.”
   Reaction 1: “Inhuman! Cruel! Evil!” (modern mainstream response)
   Reaction 2: “Gross, but the Water God’s will must be done.” (Aztec priest)
   - Ex: “The doctor inserted the IV into the patient’s arm.”
   Reaction 1: “I sure hope she’s cured.” (modern mainstream response)
   Reaction 2: “Blasphemy! Profanity!” (christian scientist)
   - Ex: “The white farmer dropped a few spare squash off at the black family’s house nearby.”
   Reaction 1: “A nice gesture, maybe the families are friends.” (modern mainstream response)
   Reaction 2: “What is he, some kind of n***er lover?!” (common American Deep South response, mid-19th century)

   Ok, these examples can multiply ad infinitum…

   The point is that law can enter into human cognition in a variety of ways, some rooted in violence, others not. As a reification, “the law” may be perceived as an immovable impediment, a watchful eye, etc., thus frustrating the individual’s will. And I think this state of affairs can be described as rule by violence. Similarly, when (imagistic) reasoning about legal consequences deters an individual away from an otherwise desired action, this seems susceptible to a description as violence.

   But the final category of “sensibilities” might support a contractual understanding of law. On this understanding, many people comply with the law for the same reason they dress appropriately for different social events. They value the law’s commands, perceive them as legitimate, and obey almost reflexively. In this manner, I may get a jury summons and (without even considering the negative consequences of not going) mark down the date on my calendar. But, critically, note that I wouldn’t recognize the same claim to my time if the notice was printed on the stationary of the Brazilian government. The Brazilian police would have to show up at my apartment in America with guns visible for me to comply. In like manner, although the Tikopians wouldn’t have internalized a habit of legitimacy-recognition with regard to foreign nations, many Wild West settlors would have internalized - through developmental conditioning supported by communicative action - a sense of ‘rightness’ to their compliance with the laws of the United States, perhaps even a sense of ‘duty’. In this case, system-needs and individual desires become co-incident. Strangely enough, few citizens question the propriety of being governed in the first place. [For example, the propriety of the power of their congress or parliament to pass laws binding on them.]

   But of course, each individual internalizes conceptions of legitimacy in different ways, and the threat of force is needed behind all laws because each law will be recognized as legitimate by only a portion of the population. In other words, the different cognitive responses I’ve outlined above will be distributed differently across the population, and will vary even within single individuals from law to law. And some of these responses will always be dependent on the expectation of negative consequences for compliance. But from the mere existence of negative consequences, it does not necessarily follow that obedience is always driven by consideration of such.

   So, while in neither the Tikopian or Wild West case has some conscious, carefully negotiated agreement been arrived at, the Tikopians have not been conditioned into a posture of automatic legitimacy-recognition like the Wild Westerners, and so the “rule of law” collapses into the “rule of force”. But the same does not hold in the case of coherent political identities, as internalized by constitutive populations, such as “the United States”, the “Roman Empire”, etc. These are phenomenological constructs that exist solely in the mind of the citizenry, but have almost magical effects in their ability to induce a sense of propriety and hence compliance. And because cooperation is in some sense consensual, I think this state of affairs can be meaningfully redeemed as “contractual”.

2. 2 Ben Samuel Nelson Dec 4th, 2006 at 6:24 pm

   Matt, very interesting stuff. Your framework helps quite a bit. If I understand what you’re saying, you’re not defending contractual theory as a theory, but rather, as a partial explanation. I should say first off that that is far more intelligible stance to me than the Hobbesian (or even Lockean) alternatives. It also very much resembles the stance of Russell in ‘Power’, which I take to be my guiding light in these matters.

   However, we might bring up Hobbes against himself, and question your position even as formulated. For Hobbes, a contract is not a contract, but rather it is mere words, unless there is an arbiter to settle the dispute. But what you’ve just expressed in the final part is essentially a cognitive phenomenon, involving the willful submission of one party to the other. There is no arbiter. Thus, it cannot be a contract; it is, at best, mere submission. (I don’t actually believe this is a very powerful argument, but I thought I’d bring it up anyway.)

   Another disanalogy: consent isn’t the same as a contract. It’s not entirely clear to me why they are so usually run together as concepts, and/or why we’d be justified in jumping from consent to contract. Contracts are always based around consent to certain rules and restrictions, while consent itself may be to either a particular action or akin to a contract. The distinction appears to be in the reasons for submission: whether it derives from a bonefide sense that the other person has legitimacy, or whether it comes from acquiescence and a disinterest in dissenting. But this distinction is a very necessary one if one of our core interests is upon the legitimacy of any given polity (relative to some individual(s)), since the former is more ethical than the latter; and so it can’t be very far from our minds when we talk about how to describe the way that polities actually were formed.

3. 3 theDonnybrook Dec 4th, 2006 at 11:35 pm

   I agree with both of these criticisms of social contract theory, however, Mr. Wood’s assertion that the problem posed with the hypothetical Tikopians comes down to an issue of sovereignty seems to strike at the heart of the theory’s pragmatic deficiency. In the purest sense of Locke’s social contract theory, tacit consent will always be a problem. However, the conceptualization of tacit consent poses an issue within a sovereign nation as well.

   For instance, the American government operates on principles of social contract, through terms enunciated with some degree of debatable clarity and ambiguity in the Constitution of the United States and its subsequent amendments. The contract, in essence, exists between the government and the people. In a Lockean and Hobbsean sense, the Constitution is an agreement subjecting the American constituency to the control of federated government provided the government ascribes to the limitations imposed by the terms of the agreement.

   Issues of tacit consent arise when you consider at what point an individual consents to the terms of the contract. If a child is not capable of entering into such a contract because they lack sufficient competency to enter into a legally binding agreement, does this mean a child, naturally born in the United States of America tacitly consents to subjugation to its law? Alternatively, at what point is one competent to consent, tacitly or otherwise, to the terms of a social contract? These questions accentuate a fundamental problem with social contract theory as a basis for government. In the instant that an individual possesses the faculties to decide for herself whether to enter the social contract, the theory operates at its maximum value in principle. However, a person born and raised under the laws of the United States may never consider being subject to the laws of this nation beyond their birth and residency.

   Choosing to stay is the clearest form of tacit consent, but even such a decision requires the competency a child lacks. As a result, consent, tacit or otherwise, can only be said to exist later in the life of a naturalized citizen. Regardless of this state of affairs, the abstraction of whether a child at any age before majority can tacitly consent to the laws of their country of natural origin remains a fundamental problem for the operation of social contract theory on a generational level.

4. 4 Matt Wood Dec 5th, 2006 at 12:06 am

   Ben-
   You’re right to resist a simple equation of “consent” with “contract”. Consent may be a necessary constitutive feature of a contract, but it can be involved in other non-contractual things as well. As you mention, some forms of submission can be described as consensual. [Ex.: A king enters the room, and one of his subjects reluctantly bows.]

   So does the notion of a “social contract” crumble to the touch? I’m not so sure. But before I defend the idea, let me give it some content and complexion.

   I. The Metaphor of the State

   I take as my foundation the framework of conceptual metaphor theory, primarily as advanced by Lakoff. In his book ‘Moral Politics’, Lakoff sketches a theory of political reasoning whereby the state and its relations to its citizenry are metaphorically conceptualized according to a mental schema of the family. So, for example, a common mapping consists of:

   Parent -> Government
   Citizen -> Child
   Nation -> Family

   Before you fire the charge of “fuzzy neo-Freudian”, consider first the ubiquity of metaphorical reasoning in everyday language: “He invested a lot of spare time in brainstorming.” - at least 3 metahpors. Secondly, consider the cognitive efficiencies that result from this trick of associative neurology, whereby an abstract, faceless, and intangible entity (”the Government”) is conceptualized - at least partly - in the well-etched terms of “Parent”. In fact, this sort of mental substitution of the concrete for the abstract is endemic in human thought:
   “I’m glad my childhood is behind me.” (passage of time = forward motion)
   “I didn’t grasp what he was trying to say.” (understanding = holding)
   “My criminal record is the only thing standing between me and a decent job.” (goal-seeking = motion along a path)

   Under Lakoff’s thesis (at least the grossly simplified version I’m about to present here), conservatives are guided by what he calls ’strict parent morality’. One of its tenets is that children should be punished for misbehavior and rewarded for obeying in order to promote a wholesome character. By metaphorical extension, Government should punish lawbreakers and reward entrepreneurs. Excessive legal protections for criminals violate the moral order by failing to punish wrongdoing, as do welfare programs by taking from the worthy and rewarding the unproductive. Such policies corrode society’s moral fabric. On the other hand, liberals are guided by what Lakoff calls ‘nurturant parent morality’, whereby empathy is the guiding ethic, not reward and punishment. Corporal punishment is perceived as not only a failure of empathy, but a form of violence. By metaphorical extension, the Government should take account of such factors as upbringing, social environment, and psychological illness when meting out punishment, just as a nurturant parent would, and welfare is conceived of as a form of empathy, with its recipients conceived of as victims of various social forces beyond their control. [As an aside, note how the two schemas generate diametrically opposed political positions, with each side believing the other to be “immoral”. Conservaties are greedy and violent, and liberals are relativistic and indulgent.] The key point is that our conceptions of the proper role of Government are in part governed by cognitive ’shorthands’ which map an understanding of parental ethics onto political ideas. Indeed, how could it be otherwise? We reason from our representations.

   This type of reification and anthropomorphism is by no means limited to political reasoning. It extends to religion, in which a god is frequently conceptualized as a father, shepherd, or king, and nature, vis a vis “Mother Earth”, or the vaguer notion of the Earth as a nurturant force, deserving of a reciprocal duty of nurturance, much like a parent. And stepping beyond Lakoff’s work, it seems to me that Government is not conceptualized only according to a Parent schema. Instead, like “love” - which is conceptualized with a variety of metaphors depending on the operative context (”Love is a journey.” “Love washed over me.” “Our love is dead.”) - our conceptions of the Government too are context-dependent shapeshifters. More often than not though, this conception takes the form of person-hood. Take these headlines that I just grabbed from a Google news search as evidence:

   “Hospital closures will save lives, Government says”
   “Government unveils plans for new schools”
   “Welfare system leaving children to die”
   “10 Steps to Make Government Serve the People”

   Or, as John F. Kennedy once said: “Ask not what your government can do for you, but what you can do for your government.”

   Each of these examples provides a clue to human cognition, particularly the shape of the representations being expressed and evoked.

   So what’s the ultimate point of this (admittedly too-long) essay? I think that government - at least goverment conceived of as legitimate - may be conceptualized in certain contexts as a trading partner. Sure, we’re born into the agreement with only minimal control over the terms of the bargain, but there is some undeniable sense of quid pro quo surrounding the interlocking roles of Government and Self: I pay my taxes, obey the laws when reasonable, and vote, and the Government protects me from criminals and hostile nations, paves my streets, and maintains my parks. There is the odor of a contract hanging about this arrangement. And being conditioned from birth to love my nation and government, and above all respect its power over me (which is impressed in my brain with the stamp of legitimacy and goodness, as mentioned before), I find this trade to be proper, even desirable, making me a willing, consensual participant (even though I really have no choice, and violence is an ever-present backstop). And this ongoing exchange might be reasonably termed a “social contract”.

5. 5 Ben Samuel Nelson Dec 5th, 2006 at 7:35 pm

   Matt,

   On the upshot: I can’t see how one could admit that conditioned reification is violence in some sense, and then admit that conditioned reification is in some other sense a kind of contractual relationship. What are the two senses that would allow us to escape contradiction?

   Even if we could escape contradiction, it would seem to bear grim results for the question of “Is government legitimate?”, unless one’s ultimate conclusion is that “the foundations of law are a muddle of legitimate and non-legitimate factors”. And it’s hard to see how Thrasymachus hasn’t won the day, in that case; for it seems as though the foundation of a government upon evil is destined to erode anything good about it.

   Hard, but not impossible. IIRC, Hanno once mentioned in discussion a theory of government which understands any and every bit of the government’s responsibility towards its citizens to be predicated upon its dominion over them, as a kind of way of saying, “sorry for the loss of autonomy, etc. To make up for it, we’ll reward you with citizenship, rights, etc.” (Assuming I haven’t just misremembered.) The trouble, of course, is that Tony Soprano would say much of the same. And anyway, this relationship is not contractual, but rather, a case of exploitation with perks.

   On the general subject, I’ll give three compliments before I start with my worries. First, I think Lakoff is right to press us onto these very interesting topics. Second, I think the general paradigm he is working in, of cognitive linguistics, is a wonderful and exciting approach to semantics, and one which I would be very happy to be a fellow traveller with. For surely it must be the case that we begin with patterns, representations, heuristics, etc., and proceed from there. Third, and finally, I also think that the metaphor of family is surely one way that present-day rhetoric operates in the minds of many, even to the point where it has some modest predictive power. I should also mention that my acquaintance with that particular thesis is quite tentative at best. (I only own “Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things” and not “Moral Politics”).

   Nevertheless, the thesis causes me to worry on at least three levels.

   First, Aristotle rebutted it 2000 years ago in his discussions of “household management”. Whether or not his arguments are convincing is a deep question, and it shouldn’t be presumed that he was right. But the fact that Lakoff’s argument was rebutted a few millenia before he was born ought to at least give us pause and wonder whether or not it is justified in anything more than the most tentative descriptive terms.

   Second, it neglects the facts about the rhetorical face of the modern American theocrats, which can be better characterized as unstable and manic-depressive. In the debate over war and over the effectiveness of Bush as a president, one is confronted with all kinds of vaccilating attitudes played by the most uncharacteristic roles — the “angry Diva”, embodied by Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter; the whining male, like Ron Silver, and sometimes, Sean Hannity; and the pompous teenager, like Rush Limbaugh or Bush himself. Where do they fit in with a “hard disciplinarian parent” morality? I don’t think they do. Joe McCarthy did, maybe; as does Bill O’Reilly; but the world has moved on from their type. The modern theocratic movement doesn’t “fit” with the disciplinarian parent metaphor.

   You can contrast this with the ’shrill’ anti-war liberal Keith Olbermann type (who are generally not to be found in popular media except when the protests get too big to ignore), the ALGORE/JOHNKERRY snoozebot, and the pro-war establishment meritocrats like Wes Clark (and John Kerry). None of them embody any necessary relation to the nurturing parent stereotype. In other words, if we’re really talking about “liberal v. conservative”, then it doesn’t apply to the icons of the present American political movements as such, which are totally and completely different beasts altogether. (The “conservative vs. theocrat” dichotomy might be more appropriate.)

   I think this at least should be accounted for, and its relationship to the ethos of “paternalism” should be explained. For my part, I think Lakoff’s schema should be dismissed altogether. A far better description would be to say that the post-9/11 liberals (and arguably, the post-Mondale liberals) are by and large parentalistic and conservative, while the theocrats invoke the ethos of the angry teen.

   Third, it envisions this dichotomy between “liberals” and “conservatives” (or “nurture” and “discipline”) that is fundamentally incomplete (as well as wrongheaded, though for other reasons). To approach something like a complete formulation of strains that are relevant to current American politics, you must account for modern liberals, theocrats, and centrists (and to a lesser extent, libertarians, socialists, and anarchists). Centrism is the operating exception in this case. True centrism is the perversion of the Aristotelian Mean, and lacks any real sense of principle. It is characterized by a shallowness of thought, and chooses the midway between whatever two options have made some kind of impact upon its attention — in other words, kind of like the allegories of South Park.

   It is a powerful ethos, because it is simple. But I cannot describe this idea in Parenting terms. It is largely alien to that metaphor. But if I tried to force a metaphor, it would be between a sad child who is trying to reconcile fighting family members without much caring about the underlying causes of the dispute.

6. 6 Matt Wood Dec 6th, 2006 at 12:56 am

   Ben-

   1. I think the contradiction in my account of reification, as it concerns Law and Government, lies more in my presentation that in the substantive points I was trying to make. Harkening back to my initial comment, the example I gave of law-as-reified-impediment is only one example of the sundry reified forms law can take in the human mind. Some others:
   “The law is our only defense against anarchy.” (law as a protective force)
   “The law is an instrument of justice.” (law as a tool)

   I didn’t mean to imply that every reification of the Law is a manifestation of violence. Rather, I meant to illustrate that at least one of Law’s reifications (in my first example, law-as-barrier-to-action) frustrates the individual will and hence may be meaningfully thought of as a coercive force, i.e. “violent”.

   2. My Government-as-reification thesis drew heavily from Lakoff’s book, and like I said, I grossly simplified his analysis. His argument is both more subtle and more comprehensive. In the first chapter he claims that his metaphorical analysis can account for the variations in conservative and liberal political philosophies that you cite as evidence against a simple binary parenting-model account. But his discussion of this claim is reserved for the final third or so of the book, and having only reached the 2/3 mark, I don’t yet have an informed opinion as to the project’s success. I think his work occassionaly suffers from an excessive literalism, and I have empirical reservations too. But my reason for including the material was simply to put some flesh on the claim that people often reason about the Government in reified and anthropomorphic terms, as a vehicle for constructing a new image of the “social contract” concept.

   3. I don’t think the failure of prominent political figures to themselves fit Lakoff’s parental molds is fatal to his model. The central inquiry focuses on rhetoric: whose descriptions and normative claims do listeners find persuasive? Lakoff’s insight is that (to a degree) our mental representations of the proper relationship between Government and Citizen is in some sense modeled on interpersonal interaction - and sometimes parental norms more particularly. [An exciting possibility is that modern neuroscience may be able to lend scientific weight to this claim, by demonstrating that overlapping neuron clusters are used when reasoning about both the government-citizen and parent-child relationships.] Because persuasion is an irreducibly cognitive phenomenon, these mental representations will govern which claims we credit. (If I told you I saw a horse with five legs, would you believe me?) And this representation is separate from conceptions of individual politicians (at least non-”heads”-of-state, such as kings or presidents), so the politicians themselves need not embody the relevant parental norm. They need only rhetorically invoke a shared “consensual domain” in order to productively coordinate behavior. For example, we talk of “Congress’s actions” without mentally representing individual politicians. So while political figures may be ontologically constitutive of the entity “Congress”, they need not be semantically constitutive of it.

   4. The initial framework I laid out for analyzing the cognitive phenomenon of “law” certainly seems to have gloomy implications for legitimacy. But I think these implications are mitigated by a couple of considerations. First, while the categories of ‘embodied consequentialism’ and ‘reification’ support the notion that law is sometimes perceived as an unwanted constraint on personal preferences, I don’t believe it necessarily follows that the reified Government-concept (or ‘godhead’, if you will) is tarnished in the mind of the constrained citizen. For one, she may recognize the ‘wrongness’ of her preference, as in the shoplifting example. Or she may perceive the constraint as unjustified but a sort of behavioral aberration, analogous to a “bad mood” or “phase”. We don’t instantly abandon our loyalty to a friend simply because he occassionaly imposes avoidable burdens on us. (Granted, the two cases are far from perfectly analogous.) So I’m not sure the matter is so simple as ‘occassional violence’ -> ‘illegitimacy’.

   Furthermore, note the unavoidability of using anthropomorphic language in describing the relation between state and citizen:

   “IIRC, Hanno once mentioned in discussion a theory of government which understands any and every bit of the government’s responsibility towards its citizens to be predicated upon its dominion over them, as a kind of way of saying, “sorry for the loss of autonomy, etc. To make up for it, we’ll reward you with citizenship, rights, etc.” ”

   Why not reconceptualize this anthropomorphic Government as making an offer instead: “If you pay your taxes and agree to abide by consensus norms, we’ll compensate you with clean air, regulated markets, and safe homes.”

   As I believe Oliver Wendell Holmes put it, “Taxes are the price we pay for civilization.”

   Granted, the problem with this reconceptualization is that it misses something essential about the relationship that the first version does not: namely, the fact that the citizen can’t really decline the offer (ie, the violence problem). But maybe the distinction - as in my “Congress” example above - lies in this: While violence is certainly an ontological feature of government, it isn’t necessarily a cognitively salient feature at all times.

   As an analogy, is it a “contract” if I consent willingly to sell my car to a stranger for $10,000, not knowing that he plans to use violence to force the exchange if I raise the price? And even if I do know of his plans, would the exchange cease to be a “contract” if I liked the terms regardless? One objection to this analogy is that our satisfaction with the terms aren’t “really” freely or independently arrived at. Perhaps then we are happy slaves, besotted with our caged fate, lovers of our masters, as culture so conditions. . . but then again, if we limit the ambit of “choice” to those determinations we make free of all conditioned preferences, we may end up reducing ourselves conceptually to little more than wind-up toys of fate. On these grounds, I would suggest that, as a phenomenological matter, the relationship between Government and Citizen rests on a fuzzy but emotionally potent notion of “consent” and “exchange”, and that this understanding constitutes the elusive “social contract”.

7. 7 Matt Wood Dec 7th, 2006 at 1:07 pm

   I think theDonnybrook raises a good point, which on reflection has helped me flesh out the “fuzzy but emotionally potent” notion of social contract I mentioned above.

   I take his comment to make roughly the following points: If uncoerced “consent” is required to complete a legally binding *commercial* contract, shouldn’t the same principle apply when dealing with the fundamental social compact? Certainly the latter is no less important than the former. The problem with describing the citizen’s submission to the social structure as a “contract” then is two-fold: 1. There is no formal acceptance ritual, even as simple as saying the words “I accept” or nodding in response to a question, as we’d expect in order to finalize a commercial contract. 2. Whatever informal acceptance there is (via the bonds of affection that form during childhood and the tacit consent they give rise to), the accepting party lacks the “capacity” that society requires in the commercial context.

   There seems to be no satisfactory answer to the first problem, except to invoke the kind of “tacit consent” mentioned by theDonnybrook (ie, remaining in the country), which could be characterized as “behavior consistent with the existence of an agreement”, which is sometimes given legal effect in commercial law. As for the second problem, I suppose society could modify the requirements of contractual “capacity” in the context of the fundamental social compact by lowering the standard. In fact this appears to be the prevailing norm. Children are actively encouraged into a posture of devotion towards their nation (e.g., daily pledge of allegiance), a cultural tradition that rests on the notion that the child’s immature experience of love-for-the-nation counts for something. Society may therefore validate this form of crude acceptance as sufficient. [The obvious difficulty is that the grounds for this acceptance are problematic, as the product of something like the “undue influence” made illicit in wills law.]

   But I think the analysis I’ve sketched above is too literal. We might instead start our analysis from the statement: “Of COURSE, there’s really no social contract.” Instead, what we’re dealing with is a metaphor, rooted in a vague sense of reciprocal rights and duties - and their corresponding expectations. A Benthamite theory of property emphasizes the primacy of “expectations of control” as the hallmark of “property”. And if we loosely define “trade” as the exchange of property interests, then it becomes apparent that “trade” is nothing more than an interlocking set of revolving expectations. This is especially stark in the service industry, where a right to future performance constitutes the entire property interest / expectation.

   And this kind of “trade” translates into the political arena: Under a feudal power structure, the king grants the lord dominion over a tract of land, and the lord promises to supply knights and pay periodic tribute to the king. In modern democratic societies, where the sovereign obviously isn’t a single person, the same sense of “trade” exists between Government and Citizen with the aid of cognitive shorthands like reifications. So long as these expectations are stable across the population (perhaps due to the simplicity of the Constitution and widespread education), a more-or-less discrete set of expectations, bi-directional between Gov. and Citizen, conceived of as legitimate in the conditioned minds of the populace, constitute the permissible boundaries of “the deal”, the “trade”, the “social contract”. A breach occurs when either party transgresses these limits, resulting in justifiable anger, civil strife, or perhaps even a coup or civil war. Within the contractual bounds though, the harmony of society is maintained by the conditioned expectation of interlocking rights and duties, which constitutes a crude form of “trade”, and which is perceived as legitimate for little more than the internalized social fact of its existence (coupled with hearty doses of glory and origin myths and devotion rituals).

   This understanding of “rightness”, which most citizens actively deem proper (and hence “consent” to as opposed to reluctanty submit to), surely is the primary infrastructure that holds the whole whirligig of state together. Were these bonds of loyalty - underwritten by a notion of fair trade - not to exist, the amount of state-violence that’d be required to hold the whole contraption together (1) would surely exceed the amount of violence currently employed, and (2) probably wouldn’t be materially feasible on the sheer scale demanded by the size of the modern state. And I’m guessing that the genesis of the “social contract” theory of government emerged during (or shortly after) the medieval rise of mercantilism, when the notion of a “contract” would be an especially salient and legitimating metaphor. The importance of the metaphor is that, despite being non-literal, it results in a mapping of expectations from one knowledge domain to another, thereby serving as a useful guide to behavior. Another example of how the human mind utilizes the concrete to conceptualize and understand the abstract.

8. 8 Ben Samuel Nelson Dec 7th, 2006 at 1:35 pm

   Matt (of Dec 6),

   1&4. Aha. In that sense, I see what you mean.

   Still, now that the contradiction has been averted, does it allow us to steer our way through the “legitimacy” question?

   I do not object seriously (right now anyway) to anthropomorphization. It may be useful. Moreover, your “friend” metaphor might be especially useful.

   Is the meaning of “friend” a description of a relationship, and/or is it a description of the duties between individuals? If it is merely a description of a relationship, then we’ve gotten nowhere with the contract metaphor; but if it’s a description also of duties, then we could consider a friendship automatically “broken” when a certain nasty thing has happened (i.e., if my best friend cheats with my girlfriend). It seems to me that the breaking of the “contractual” elements of a friendship does not sever the relationship, as with a contract; rather, the friendship is downshifted “into limbo”, where the “contract” is forced to be renewed, reviewed, and/or severed. This same attitude might be carried to the public’s relationship with their governing elites.

   Unfortunately, the “contract” itself is still rather unfair, for a number of Hobbesian reasons, which I’ll discuss in a moment.

   2&3. No doubt there is some modest power to Lakoff’s descriptive claim and its predictive ability. I won’t argue against that. But its significance is very narrow — it will capture only group attitudes on some issues, and will be a dominant ethos only during certain time periods. Moreover, I would bet that today, you will find fewer traces of this ethos among American liberals than in previous years, as post-911 (and post-Mondale) they have had to “toughen” their attitude and become more conservative overall. (Although *even that* might be a mischaracterization. I’m sure that a case can be made, following Chomsky, that the liberal mainstream reaction to Iraq is identical to the mainstream that reacted to Vietnam, i.e., a collection of pro-war “black hawk doves” who argue over technical efficiency and not the morality of war).

   Still, whatever its virtues or vices, I think that the metaphorical analysis is especially cogent to the examination of leaders. Don’t the traits of an icon act reflect the standards by which an audience will be convinced of something? I mean, all other things equal, if nominal “conservatives” in a truly democratic system were hypothetically interested in frank, tough, hard-minded, accountable, and meritocratic decisions, then they’d pick a leader that displayed those traits. Of course, America is nothing close to a perfect democracy, so we can expect some sullying factors; a leader may display a few of those qualities, and be just electable enough for that reason, but ultimately be chosen by wirepullers for other more nefarious reasons. But when people rise to the status of icons for some movement, and then at the height of their popularity those icons start displaying the exact opposite of the purported virtues of the movement — failure to act on rhetoric, waffling attitudes toward policy, unresponsiveness (and apathy towards) evidence, leaping to conclusions, cruelty, failure to accept responsibility for wrongdoing — then you are obliged to infer that the movement really just doesn’t value the original virtues. For though a political wirepuller has some power, ultimately it is only the power to guide and manipulate the pre-existing sentiments of a population.

   So if we take your argument for a “social contract” to be guided by symbolic concerns, i.e. by popular metaphors, then I think that we’re very much forced to conclude something about an audience by looking at the people they’ve chosen to represent them.

   This isn’t fatal to Lakoff’s thesis. He might concede that post-911, the rhetoric has changed so dramatically that the Mommy-Daddy divide has become less significant. But I think it may be fatal to the “social contract” inference. For I think that the examination according to metaphor would be a bit of a characature; not just because, to a large extent, mainstream elites are chosen undemocratically, and because lies and myths can be easily manufactured by the dominant party and fed to an inattentive public, but also because a mainsteam analysis seemingly encourages us to ignore the slipsteam of nuanced differences of opinion. We only get the People magazine version of political reasoning, and only from the mouths of pundits who are usually no more qualified to say boo than the local wacko at the gas station.

   Taking all this into consideration, it seems to me that it would be better to say that there’s an “illusory contract”, which has the following properties:
   a) the terms of the agreement are vague (i.e., metaphors, virtues);
   b) the arbiter of the contract is identical to the dominant figure in the agreement (i.e., in today’s case, the party leaders and propaganda machine); they are the ones who determine whether or not the contract has been lived up to or not;
   c) there is no way to tell to what extent the agreement of the subordinate figure (i.e., the mainstream movement) corresponds with the aggregated opinions of individuals in the movement.

   And that description is just dealing at the level of fraud, and not even including the Thrasymachus question of violence. It seems to me that it would be fine to say that the 10000$ car case is a contract — but it is a hollow one.

9. 9 Matt Wood Dec 8th, 2006 at 8:36 pm

   Ben-
   I don’t doubt your realist critique of the power dynamics behind the ‘contract’. I oversimplified when I looked to “the simplicity of the Constitution and widespread education” as the only source of content for a citizen’s epistemic stance on the matter. The people who sense the contract’s existence are often limited to the caricatures fed them by politicians and the mainstream media (with its lackey hordes of pundits, “experts”, and pseudo-scholars, and their mountains of glib assertions), which can be persuasive precisely because the ‘terms’ of the contract are so vague and impressionistic, and hence manipulable.

   On a lighter note, here are a few specimens of “social contract” plucked from the wild during my peripatetic daily web-surf:

   Radical Islamist Profiles (3): Ayman Muhammad Rabi’ Al-Zawahiri:
   “For he who legislates anything for human beings,” writes Al-Zawahiri, “would establish himself as their god.” Since democracy is founded on the principle of [popular] political sovereignty, which becomes the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong, whoever accepts democracy is an infidel. He deplores the Muslim Brotherhood for mobilizing the masses of youth “to the ballot box” instead of mobilizing them to the ranks of Jihad. He criticizes the Brotherhood for extending bridges of understanding to the authorities that rule them. These bridges become part of a package or a quid pro quo: the rulers allow the Brotherhood a degree of freedom to spread their beliefs and the Brotherhood acknowledges the legitimacy of the regime.

   Embedded Journalism: Second Life:
   But there was more to my motive than confidentiality. Every time I had an opportunity to depict Residents’ real life photo, I hesitated, even when they’d given their permission. In retrospect, I believe this was motivated by an unconscious resistance to fully rip away the theatrical backdrop of what we were calling a world. Breaking this implicit social contract would reduce Second Life to nothing but a 3D Web, taking away the sense of immersion, and the chance to embody whatever persona you had in mind, no matter how much it differed from the reality beyond the cathode.

   Houstin Chronicle:
   SALT LAKE CITY — The chief law enforcer in two Utah-Arizona border towns is accused of misconduct after writing a letter pledging love and allegiance to the leader of a polygamous sect, who was on the FBI’s most wanted list at the time.
   “I love you and … know that you have the right to rule in all aspects of my life,” Fred Barlow wrote in the October 2005 letter to Warren Jeffs. “Without priesthood I am nothing.”

10. 10 Ben Samuel Nelson Dec 9th, 2006 at 10:44 am

    Matt (Dec 7),

    There is no doubt that these are very interesting and creative arguments, but I have two worries.

    I. the treatment of quasi-economic matters — such as the trade of rights facilitated by the state with duties to the state — as genuinely economic seems to follow from the formulation of property subjectively as “the expectation of control”. In trading property, we would seem to be “trading” expectations re: our dominion over things. If I decide to trade my cow for a bag of beans, it might be said that I’m trading expectations in some sense; I nullify my expectation of control over the cow, in order to amplify my expectation of control over the beans. An ‘expectation…’ doctrine has certain descriptive advantages; i.e., it would obviously help us to understand how to explain the notion of intellectual ‘property’.

    But how do we interpret the doctrine of “expectation of control”? What is essentially being bargained away during a negotiation — the expectations themselves, or also the expectations along with the referents of those expectations?

    Nozick famously argued against utilitarianism by emphasizing the role of objective goods in goal-seeking. His analysis ultimately misfired, but still there was something sensible to it.

    It can’t be right to say that mere subjective expectation is all there is to trade, or even that this is all there fundamentally is to trade. It seems to me that, without a direct objective component from which we might be alienated, we’re not dealing with economic negotiations as much as we’re dealing with either political agreements or latent consequences (i.e., externalities, which are beyond the scope of a trade anyway). For instance, if I trade my cow for a bag of beans and receive a bag of oats, but am personally too silly to understand the difference between oats and beans, then my expectations have been satisfied, yet the trade has still gone awry. So there must be more to a trade than mere expectations: we also need objects with which to trade. I would say that the trading of mere expectations is more political than economical; we might call it “quasi-economical”.

    If we demand that property has an objective component, then there are theoretical consequences. First, it follows that “intellectual property” as such is a misnomer. Second, it follows that it cannot be said that behaviors that follow as a mere consequence to our expectations are subject to trade. We do not merely “trade” our labor or our services for anything else. Rather, we lease our bodies in a certain time and place, subject to certain expectations involving service. Third, and most importantly in this context, it seems to undermine the “trade” metaphor to describe the legitimacy of the state. “Lowering the standard” becomes a non-option.

    II. It isn’t the case that a fundamental breach of the illusory contract between citizen and state is automatically capable of being terminated by the aggreived party. Instead, much like in the friendship example, the illusory contract is “downshifted” into limbo, and the dominant party may simply force the continued observation of the contract, because they also act as the arbiter. That means it can’t really be a contract.

    None of this is to say that you’re not onto something in fuzzy metaphorical terms. Surely people have fruitfully used the metaphor to bring themselves up from the muck of natural law. I just mean to suggest that what you’re describing has relatively weak descriptive and normative theories of governance.

    Also, I don’t object to the idea that a revolutionary society would be more costly in human terms than a stable state. No doubt, upheaval can be ghastly. But I think we can go about describing this in a better way than “a contract” (unless some further argument could be made to connect those ideas in a way that I can’t currently picture).

    There is one way to escape the box of Stockholm Syndrome, and that is to examine the beliefs of people who have, through strength of mind and purpose, divorced themselves from their social context to some extent. These charismatic authorities are candidate revolutionaries, and present themselves as competent judges of their present state of affairs. Nothing can be said about them except that their (perceived) virtues, when needed, will tend to inspire followers. If there is any kind of contract which approaches a real tacit contract, it is between them and the governing elites, because the power between them approaches something closer to equality. Normatively, if these charismatic authorities are of any significance to questions of the true legitimacy of the state, it is only when they are true Kohlbergian Stage 6 personalities.

11. 11 Matt Wood Dec 9th, 2006 at 4:38 pm

    Ben-
    Very interesting points, but I think we might be engaged in slightly different inquiries: I’m looking inside the phenomenological circle, trying to give some sort of descriptive account of the cognitive constructs from which people reason about the real world. Your points seem aimed more at the literal truth of these constructs, surely a fascinating project in itself, but not quite identical to mine (although undoubtedly complementary). With that little prologue, let me jump into a reply:

    I. Expectations referents –(nec)-> contract.
    You’re right that a “contract”(at least in economic terms) seems to require the existence of some sort of objective referent as a spindle for the expectations to encircle. So, we might say, in the case of a chemotherapy patient contracting with a sperm bank, that even though the bank sends monthly bills and the customer pays them, and even though the customer feels the subjective gratification of an ongoing “expectation of control”, AND even though the customer may never actually utilize the sample stored there, if the bank were to surreptitiously throw the sample in the garbage we would intuitively cry “breach of contract”, or even “fraud”. But I think we can dissolve the apparent solidity (and hence perhaps necessity) of the objective referent further, such as in the case of an exchange like a one-year term life insurance contract, which will often result in the purchase of nothing more than interim peace of mind.

    So I think, with those examples in mind, that the expectation of Government performance (or non-performance) of certain functions can constitute adequate “consideration” (to use contract law terminology) even in economic terms, to legitimate the reciprocal duties of the citizen, in the mind of the citizen. At a minimum, these functions could correspond to a donative-schema like the following: “the Government provides services X and Y for society”, which may or may not be felt to give rise to a reciprocal duty.

    Take this excerpt from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s celebrated “I Have a Dream” speech:

    “In a sense we have come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men - yes, black men as well as white men - would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
    It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds” in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check - a check that will give us on demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.”

    Bracketing the obvious eloquence and near self-conscious use of metaphor in this excerpt, note the remarkable fact that this speech is even comprehensible! At a minimum, this fact suggests that people are *capable* of conceptualizing the Government as a service-provider, debtor, etc. - and hence perceiving the existence of a “contract” between it and them. And abundant everyday langauge mirrors MLK’s metaphors, albeit much more subtley and less colorfully, to the point where they constitute “common sense”. Assuming further that our use of language reveals something about the underlying operation of our cognitive faculties, this use of langauge points to the actual means by which social reality is constructed and understood, inside the circle of phenomenology.

    Furthermore, consider these facts:
    1. Most individuals aren’t aware of the multifarious and subtle causal threads that interconnect Government action and their everyday world, and none are aware of all of them. Even more to the point, in the moment of reasoning, when mental constructs are invoked, people don’t (and couldn’t possibly!) simultaneously animate their conceptions of all these causal filaments at once. So casual statements like “The Government should provide universal healthcare” don’t really ‘conceal’ a great of information, actually known, but rather compress the intricacy of the real world into manageable cognitive shorthands, from which pragmatic reasoning is possible.

    2. Government must be reified in the minds of at least some people. The same argument from cognitive capacity-limits suggest that people, even those knowing a great deal about their Government, often make statements and observations about it without invoking the whole panoply of their knowledge. But more to the point, most people have no idea how their Government actually works in the first place! Consider the results of this poll, conducted in July 2005 by the American Bar Association (excerpt taken from the Executive Summary):

    Just over half (55%) of Americans can correctly identify the three branches of government.−More than one in five (22%) believe the three branches of government are the Republican,Democrat, and Independent branches.−A full 16% of respondents believe the three branches of government to be local, state, and federal.

    Ergo, when at least these people reason about their Government, they can’t possibly be relying on high-truth-value representations. Instead, they must be utilizing shorthands of some sort - constructs such as reifications, perhaps often imbued with anthroporphic qualities. And these poll results understate the magnitude of the phenomenon: As I’ve said before, even when we reason about “Congress”, we aren’t conjuring representations of each representative, plus simulating their likely interactions. We utilize pragmatic “truths”, which are really nothing more than mental constructs.

    So the imagination of some kind of schematized exchange-relationship, in the mind of the citizen, between Government and Self, is highly plausible, as a phenomenological matter. And like you said, the terms are manipulable. Consider one of you and I’s past exchanges, in which we contemplated “power”. The notion I introduced of “extra-constitutional acquiescence” is founded on the manipulation of these constructs (metaphorically, the malleability of the terms of the “social contract”). When the President claims the power to interpret the Constitution, many citizens will find this claim plausible and even persuasive in light of the vacuousness of their constructs and the relationship of trust they feel towards the President (as honorable “trading partner”), rooted in background legitimacy-recognition conditioning, from which they perceive value in the “bargain” as a whole. Of course, legal scholars represent a “priesthood” of sorts (or discourse “immune system”) which, by specializing in the relevant knowledge domain, develop more refined constructs whose “truth” (ie, coherence) is capable of restricting the rhetorical freedom and consequent power of governmental actors, such as the President, by appealing to shared orientations of trust towards the writings of certain authoritative figures and overarching structural intuitions. But it’s *all* a game of contrivance, just more or less conservative, because even the scholars are representing, constructing, without access to ontology, to things-as-they-were or even things-as-they-are (even reading the newspaper is an act of construction). The people are Dalis, keeping time with liquidinous clocks, and the scholars are the Eschers, generating mathematically-patterned and precise half-sense… but all are surrealists in the end.

12. 12 Ben Samuel Nelson Dec 12th, 2006 at 11:10 am

    Of course, as you mentioned, there are at least two approaches to social investigation which are familiar and intuitive. One approach is to begin from the perspective of the individual about social reality, and the other is to determine some aspect of social reality and then evaluate the opinions of the individual. You must be engaged in the former, while I’m in the latter. And your approach actually seems to have more surface validity than mine, since it’s not clear that there is any such thing as “social reality” to begin with, and it’s not clear that my analysis can generalize across persons or contexts. Also, I don’t deny that the contract metaphor is intelligible; surely it is, and surely it has some usefulness. I also don’t deny that all there is to “social reality”, if there is anything, are shared meanings inspired by patterned behaviors.

    Having said that, I think that all the interesting questions — such as, “is this government legitimate?” and “what is the nature of social cohesion?” — cannot even pretend to be broached by using only the former technique. We have these contractual metaphors, and they may play a causal role in the maintenance of a government, insofar as they provoke acquiescence in a populace, and the populace is a power. But these metaphors can’t do any normative work, and can only do modest descriptive work.

    (Granted, the “no normativity” complaint isn’t especially severe, since we shouldn’t approach the investigation with our fingers crossed tightly under the hope that we’ll solve the crisis of legitimation; since that’s quite a tall order.)

    But we are still obliged to ask ourselves whether the contract metaphor is more or less descriptively useful than the alternatives. If we don’t, then we’re setting ourselves up to worsen the legitimacy crisis, rather than merely examine it. For if it is not a contract, but merely a contractual metaphor, which is the basis of social cohesion, then we might justifiably infer that confusion and deception is the basis of the polity. This surely bolsters the unfortunate Thrasymachian case.

    (And it is the case that we really are observing real things when we talk about social reality — at least in part. The ontology of social reality is not merely an examination of shared meanings; it is also an examination of real behaviors, cognitions, and so on. So we are not destined to be stuck in the mazes of Escher. Rather, to borrow a metaphor from literature, we are engaged in a kind of Marquezian magic realism, where “magical” and meaningful truths are only there to give color to the “real” social world. If things really were like your surrealist’s picture, then nothing could possibly be more or less descriptively useful than anything else; but this is clearly absurd, since some metaphors are clearly more successful at aping some pattern, and some clearly less.)

    I think, though, that the most useful tool to describe social cohesion is the appeal to both psychological and social dependency. Thrasymachus would win under your illusory contract, and he would also win under the language of dependency. But at least if we spoke in the language of needs, then we’d be in a position to recognize that the scope of our duties does not extend beyond their social utility. Under the weight of a contract metaphor, a government may say to its citizens: “You promised to do x! Now pay your taxes!”. But under the weight of the dependency metaphor, a citizen may say to its government: “I won’t, because the commonwealth doesn’t need you to do x, and I only need to respect the commonwealth”.

    You bring up a good point with the question of insurance. (And it may cause us to wonder, with some justification, whether or not insurance is a scam in the first place.) I think, though, that it isn’t fair to say that a case where I am fit and healthy (and thus don’t need a payout) shows that there was no contract. We have to presume that there is a payout under the right conditions, because that’s the crux of the analysis, and the only way it can be defeated. To use another example, if two men enter into a street car race, with the understanding that the loser must wear a clown costume, and then they tie for the race, then there cannot possibly be either a breach nor a non-breach of contract. The relevant conditions — i.e., someone loses the race, or (in the former example) a life-threatening accident does happen — have not availed to test the strength of the agreement; the contract is inert.

13. 13 Matt Wood Dec 12th, 2006 at 3:28 pm

    Ben-

    A “metaphorical social contract” theory of legitimacy may suffer from taking people’s statements at face value, but I don’t think “dependency theory” is any more free of constructivist objections. For example, the government promises to clean your municipal water supply but tells you that a new filtration system needs to be installed, and asks that you pay taxes to finance the project. You, being a pragmatic citizen and obeying the sovereign only upon a finding of dependency (or violence), sense your dependency on this supply of water and decide to pony up the money. The only problem is, the mayor fabricated the need for the filtration system and is getting a kickback from the manufacturer; the water was fine without it. You, never knowing the difference, are satisfied, and might even believe that the water has tasted better ever since.

    So “dependence” is a construct, no more than an exchange metaphor. Granted, there are times when the perception of dependence appears to correspond to actual dependence. (Or, putting aside constructivist reservations, “really corresponds to actual dependence”.) And in these cases, cooperation is certainly justified on pragmatic grounds. My point though is that, as a purely empirical matter, people are *not* operating from rigorously researched conceptions of their “actual” dependencies. They are, instead, responding to perceptions of “duty”, “obligation”, “rightness”, or “contract”, or even schematized notions of “dependencies” (”I’m dependent on the government to keep me safe from terrorists”), and these conditioned responses in turn produce a feeling of legitimacy, of rightness, to their being governed. In my own experience, Americans even feel a sense of “love” for their nation. [Think of Americans’ willingness to believe such myths as “Americans have the most freedom of any nation on Earth”, or “America has never fought a war for selfish gain”, etc., etc. I hear that garbage all the time.] Perhaps more than a few American slaves (though by no means all) believed their master had a “right” to rule over them, that slavery was “just their place” in life, perhaps even “loved” their masters, and so on. Or look at the elaborate social structures that religious beliefs give rise to, and all the attendant power relations! You and I are standing outside such constructs, looking back in, and asking ourselves how to rediscover legitimacy. I think the answer is that we can’t. We can only act in our pragmatic interests (according to perceived dependencies and threats of violence) against the humming backdrop of the machinery of state, whose joints are glued together with constructs.

    As a theoretical matter, I think a constructivist notion of the state satisfies two critical criteria: (1) descriptive adequacy, and (2) being evolutionarily adaptive. As for (1), I think it can account for the existence (and persistence) of the modern state. The consensus constructs are fairly stable, and the “terms of the contract” (or, rather, the constructed notion of the proper role of government) are not infinitely manipulable. Politicians may certainly have some degree of freedom to commit malfeasance, to double-deal, to manipulate public opinion, but they are constrained to justify their actions according to popular constructs of government (call this the “constraint of communicative action”) which may impose real limits on their freedom of action, and further constrained not to generate effects or blowback from their actions as heads of state that so obviously conflict with popular constructs that the people revolt (vote out of office).

    As for adaptiveness, these kinds of constructs seem to solve cooperation problems, insofar as cooperation is dependent upon an expectation of reciprocity. If you and I are strangers and I ask for a favor, you might be willing to comply if you believe I’ll return the favor in the future. But how can you trust me? Kinship bonds - which are no more than constructs - solve these problems by both creating a sense of guilt for betraying “one of your own” and also generating a larger backdrop of actors willing to enforce the implied agreement by shame or force. So, if you are pragmatic, you may do me the favor, knowing I am constrained by these forces. But you may also do the favor because you feel a bond of loyalty or mild affection in turn towards me, based on my being “one of your own”. And a similar kind of presumption of goodwill tends to apply (all else being equal) to fellow citizens. [I’ve noticed this effect is more pronounced among Americans traveling abroad. And clearly, Americans were more distraught over the 9/11 attacks than the Madrid train bombings, so some sort of disparate regard is at work.] These vague, emotionally potent loyalties may help enable initial cooperation and prevent prisoner’s dilemma-type defections, enhancing the common good, for example, by unleashing forces such as economies of scale and labor specialization. The problems with being pragmatic about every choice (am I dependent or not?) are several: (1) time constraints, (2) information costs, and (3) cognitive capacity-limits (perhaps even of the “Dunbar number” type). All of these practical limits translate into epistemic limits, in turn leading to over- and under-inclusiveness problems (ie, sometimes you’ll perceive dependence when you’re not, and sometimes you won’t when you are). In fact, given these limits, the more “rational” choice may be generalized cooperation according to reifications. And if all “truth” is pragmatic, and there are opportunity costs to increased knowledge in one domain over another, you may stand to lose more than you gain by educating yourself. [”May”, because if the government is sinking into tyranny, better that the alarm be sounded earlier than later.]

14. 14 Ben Samuel Nelson Dec 14th, 2006 at 10:27 pm

    But there’s dependency in that scenario all the same. It’s just that we’ve shifted our description from the dependency upon prudential restraint plus accurate information, to a mere dependency upon accurate information. After all, when I’m being swindled by that shifty mayor, I’m still dependent upon him for the truth, due to a variety of technical reasons. Here we’re confronted with a distinction between dependency which is merely psychological, and that which is “more real”, involving objects that are the subject of well-grounded beliefs. I wouldn’t hesitate to make room for the former, and so, I’d also allow for and invite investigations into meaning and mere appearances.

    I should clarify that I’m not saying that a social actor has to be aware of their dependencies in order for them to be a candidate explanation for the basis of law. I think we have to go beyond the actor, to some extent, if we are to describe the full origins of law. So it’s no surprise that we don’t find any given actor weighing a balance of dependencies in all matters at all times.

    Moreover, I’m worried about the limited scope of your investigation. I mean, the symbolic universe is important in social science, but it’s not exhaustive. And the only reason why we might restrict ourselves to an analysis of metaphor, meaning, and language when trying to answer the question of “What is the origin and basis for law?”, is if we thought that those were our only tools for social investigation. But they’re not. There are grain shipments, and backroom deals, and spies in alleyways, and ignorant voters, and ambitious slaveowners trying to escape annoying British rule. These, and all the other “real” things, motives, events, behaviors, and interactions contribute significantly to an adequate social description, and are not obviously metaphorical in any sense we’re talking about. So it seems to me that if the test of “descriptive adequacy” is taken to mean “an exhaustive explanation”, then the metaphorical contract has failed the test.

    Maybe if we restricted our inquiry to smaller grounds, it would succeed: i.e., if we were to ask, “What is the cognitive basis for the default support for law (during relatively stable economic times)?”, then the explanation according to metaphor would seem to work to a greater extent. And surely, what you’ve said lays out some limits for the kinds of interactions that people will have with their government and vice versa. But I wouldn’t call it either descriptively adequate, or contractual.

    (I’m never exactly sure how far “constructionism” is meant to go. Since we’re talking about ways of *describing* reality, then that automatically suggests something artificial, even if we’re just debating over what aspects of the situation to emphasize. But surely mere debates over emphasis do not capture what is meant by those who call themselves “constructionists”.)

Leave a Reply