THE SOCIAL COMPACT IN HELLENIC AND WESTERN TRADITIONS:

Consent is also reflective of the social compact which binds the society together. This theory of a social compact can be found as early as Plato's Republic in which "men agree together not to do injuries, in order that they may escape injury at the hands of their fellows."⁽⁵²⁾

With the ascendancy of the Epicurean school in 306, Plato's idea was detailed with more than a touch of cynicism.

"All men are essentially selfish and seek only their own good. But in this way the good of everyone is jeopardized by the equally selfish actions of other men. Accordingly men enter into a tacit agreement with each other neither to inflict nor suffer harm. The doing of injustice is not bad in itself, but suffering its consequences without protection is worse than the advantage to be gained. Since the state of affairs resulting from a general practice of injustice is intolerable, men adopt as a working compromise the plan of respecting the rights of others for the sake of obtaining an equal forbearance from them. In this way the state and the law come into existence as a contract to facilitate intercourse between them. If no such contract exists, there is no such thing as justice. Law and government exist for the sake of mutual security and they are effective solely because the penalties of the law make injustice unprofitable. The wise man will act justly because the fruits of injustice are not worth the risk of detection and punishment. Morality is identical with expedience."⁽⁵³⁾

By the end of the Voelkerwunderungen more than just the Hellenic universal state - in the form of the Roman Empire - had been destroyed.⁽⁵⁴⁾ The settling tribes looked with fascination on what had gone with the wind, but they had also been convinced of the truth of Jewish and Christian scriptures. Their efforts to reconcile these two forces caused a new epistemological assumption. Socrates had tested every proposition with reason, but Christian nations could no longer accept this epistemological assumption. Jesus, as a Jew, had tested propositions by scripture, but this epistemological assumption could not be accepted in tact either. The new nations were challenged to reconcile the two methods.⁽⁵⁵⁾ It fell on them to apply the law and the prophets to reason and life experience. Mount Olympus stood, but not as an equal to Mount Sinai. In the Middle Ages propositions were tested first against scripture, and then against the truth which the individual found inside himself. This was the Augustinian compromise.⁽⁵⁶⁾

In the 11th century Manegold of Lautenbach described the social compact as it applied to Feudal kings:

"The essence of kingship is the office and not the person; hence the individual's right to the office cannot be indefeasible. ... disposition could be justified when a king has destroyed those goods which the office was instituted to preserve. ...

"No man can make himself emperor or king; a people sets a man over it to the end that he may rule justly, giving every man his own, aiding good men and coercing bad, in short, that he may give justice to all men. If then he violates the agreement according to which he was chosen, disturbing and confounding the very things which he was meant to put in order, reason dictates that he absolves the people from their obedience, especially when he has himself first broken the faith which bound him and the people together.

"A people's allegiance to its ruler is therefore a pledge to support him in his lawful undertakings and ipso facto void in the case of a tyrant."⁽⁵⁷⁾

By the 12th century when Bracton described the role of the feudal king as a part of the social compact, it sounded directly from Ephesians 5.

"As vicar of God, the king ought to do justice and accept the ruling of law in his own cases, even as the least in his kingdom; if he will not, he becomes a minister of the Devil, but his subjects have no recourse except to leave him to the judgment of God."⁽⁵⁸⁾

In the early 13th century the works of Aristotle were discovered, in Latin, under the steps of the Cathedral of Speyer. The impact of the discovery, made in the tradition of Deuteronomy and Leviticus,⁽⁵⁹⁾ cannot be under estimated. Up to that time the supremacy and integrity of Catholic doctrine had turned on Augustine's philosophy that the search for truth depended on scripture and the inner world of ideas more than on sensory experience. Aristotle's vigor, clarity and authority restored confidence in empirical knowledge. In 1268 Thomas Aquinas became immersed in the controversy which the new epistemology generated. His reconciliation of Augustine and Aristotle became the new basis for the church. Aquinas insisted that the truths of faith and experience are both compatible and complementary. Incarnation can be known only through faith, the composition of material things only through experience, and the existence of God is verified by both. This epistemological change was the beginning of the Renaissance and the Reformation. Questions were now allowed which would cause the revelations, verified by scripture, to be tested by reason. This was the beginning of the four-fold test of reason, revelation, scripture and experience which makes up the current foundation of the church.

The proliferation of Aristotelian thinking did not stop the scriptural authority of the social compact theory. In 1433 Bracton's ideas were applied by Nicholas of Cusa as a defense of the General Counsel of the Catholic church:

"since by nature all men are free, any authority by which subjects are prevented from doing evil and their freedom is restrained to doing good through fear of penalties, comes soly from harmony and from the consent of the subjects, whether the authority reside in written law or in the living law which is in the ruler. For if by nature men are equally strong and equally free, the true and settled power of one over the others, the ruler having equal natural power, could be set up only by the choice and consent of the others, just as a law also is set up by consent."⁽⁶⁰⁾

By 1579, when the Huguenots published Vindiciae contra tyrannos, the Reformation was well under way. The 30 Years War, which would separate church from state, was within sight. The influence of scripture was still evident, however, and Vindiciae's argument reflects both 2 Timothy 2:14ff and Calvin.

The Vindiciae perceived a two fold compact. First, the people, as a community, are chosen of God, and the community as a church owes God true and acceptable worship. Second, the community as a state delegates certain powers to the king. The king is bound to rule well and justly, and the people must obey as long as he does. As a party to both contracts, the king's powers come from both God and from the people, but all kings were really elective even though a custom had grown up in favor of hereditary succession. God's covenant did not run to an anointed individual or family⁽⁶¹⁾ but rather to the community as a church and its elected as king.⁽⁶²⁾ The community, according to Vindiciae was properly viewed as a corporate body in which the director's office had no purpose except as a part of the corporation.⁽⁶³⁾

When Johannes Althusius published Politica methodice digesta in 1603, his theory of society depended on implied religious authority because he saw natural law as a reflection of the second tablet of the decalogue.⁽⁶⁴⁾ He developed a social contract which owed nothing to explicit religious authority. Because his social system had nothing to do with the second tablet of the decalogue, it was a purely naturalistic theory. Althusius saw the relation of the people to each other as a phenomenon of natural dynamics.⁽⁶⁵⁾ Sovereignty resides in the people as a corporate body as a characteristic of that kind of association. It can never be alienated or pass to a ruling class.⁽⁶⁶⁾ Because he was a Dutchman, with a fierce belief in local control, Althusius constructed a tier of associations from family, to corporation, to community, to province, to state. Each creates, and limits the authority of the next for the administration of its common affairs. In this way, the relation of the ruler to the populace as purely contractual and expressly limited.⁽⁶⁷⁾ Because sovereignty rested permanently with the populace, and the ruler derived his power from provinces which were three tiers removed from those people, the Althusian theory would always function as a confederacy with a central government. Examples of the Althusian contract would include the Holy Roman Empire, Switzerland, Poland, Holland, Scotland, Canada, and the Iroquois. A federal government which was responsible directly to - or directly elected by - the population would not occur. The strong central governments of Rome, Byzantium, England, Prussia, the United States, Sioux, Aztec, or Inca would not fit the Althusian system. Althusius would never have believed the passage of the 17th Amendment to the Constitution, which changed the Senate from a body appointed by the state legislatures to one elected directly by the people of the state.

Hugo Grotius' De jure belli ac pacis⁽⁶⁸⁾ expanded natural law beyond the decalogue. "The security of property, good faith, fair dealing, and a general agreement between the consequences of men's conduct and their deserts" were included in the standards which he found in the nations.⁽⁶⁹⁾ Good faith and fair dealing included the sanctity of contracts and covenants.⁽⁷⁰⁾ "Human nature is the mother of the law of nature."⁽⁷¹⁾ Grotius, who was also raised as a Dutchman, believed that people voluntarily associate with one another, and that the sovereigns are those powers which are not subject to the legal control of another.⁽⁷²⁾ Grotius began to distinguish between the state, which is the sovereign, and the government which administers the mechanisms of authority.⁽⁷³⁾ The social compact was still made by the free association of people, but the contract for the implements of social control was now made with a government which could be changed. The differences in national policies could now be explained in terms of "considerations of utility, which may well vary from people to people, and which also may dictate practices looking to the advantages of all nations in their international dealings."⁽⁷⁴⁾

While the concepts contained in the Vindiciae, Althusius, and Grotius were developing on the continent, another line of thought was developing in England where Calvinism was not as influential.

In 1594, Hooker asserted that native sociability forms societies, that these societies are impossible without a government, and that governments are impossible without human - or positive - laws.⁽⁷⁵⁾ Reason binds all men absolutely both inside and outside of societies. From reason, "The rules by which men elect to live together are agreed upon either expressly or tacitly, and the order thus established is law for the commonwealth."⁽⁷⁶⁾ Men establish these laws either personally or by elected representatives, but in either case laws are universally binding and permanent. In Hooker, under the Tudors, reason was the natural law by which men and their governments were guided.

Hobbes differed from Hooker in his initial premise.⁽⁷⁷⁾ Men did not come together because of their sociability, but rather because of their need for protection from their inherently evil nature. Governments enforce covenants among citizens by the fear of punishment. A government without a sword is words.⁽⁷⁸⁾ Loyalty to the sovereign may be a moral obligation, but compliance with laws and contracts was only valid because of the fear of punishment. Hobbes' proof that association was not a natural function, was that an assembly of people is simply a crowd until the locus of power comes to rest on some one. Then the crowd becomes a union, or "corporation", which has powers to make and enforce decisions.⁽⁷⁹⁾

Locke was not as cynical as Hobbes. The Civil War had been settled in 1688 by the restoration of the crown, and in 1702 the insoluble problem of Scotland had been solved with a treaty. The state of nature to Locke was peace, mutual aid, and natural rights, and civil society was derived from the consent of its members.⁽⁸⁰⁾ "Civil power is `the ability to make laws with penalties, for the regulating and preserving of property, and of employing the force of the community, in the execution of such laws, all this only for the public good.'"⁽⁸¹⁾ The "original compact" is the concession to incorporate into one society by the delegation of certain natural rights. One of these delegations is that the acts of the community are based on consent of the majority, and are not necessarily unanimous.⁽⁸²⁾

Hume⁽⁸³⁾ refuted the idea of a social compact because there were too many tyrannical states which did not rely on the consent of the governed. Governments were overthrown because of weakness and inefficiency rather than because of tyranny.⁽⁸⁴⁾ There may have been a compact at some time in the distant past, but loyalty to existing states was based on habit and the need for stability. It is not a contract based on obligation. Government is the replacement of force with legitimate authority.⁽⁸⁵⁾ Burke⁽⁸⁶⁾ also agreed that states and governments were purely conventional.⁽⁸⁷⁾

Spinosa⁽⁸⁸⁾ argued that in the state of nature men's desires make them enemies to each other, but "what men chiefly desire is a life as far as possible secure and free from fear."⁽⁸⁹⁾ To achieve their aspiration, men must agree to live under the laws of a society.⁽⁹⁰⁾ Men transfer all of their right to the society as a whole, which then administers property and justice.⁽⁹¹⁾ Spinosa had a more accurate psychology than Hobbes, and believed "that men have an natural sympathy and pity, and as natural need of one another, as well as hatred and envy; and though he thinks that enmity is usually stronger than friendliness he does not, like Hobbes, seek to explain away all generous emotions as disguised forms of selfishness."⁽⁹²⁾

Rousseau⁽⁹³⁾ believed that;

"there is a `fundamental compact underlying all government', and we may `regard the establishment of the political body as a real contract between the people and the chiefs chosen by them: a contract by which both parties bind themselves to observe the laws therein expressed, which form the ties of their union'. Thus, while the people `concentrated all their wills in one', `the magistrate, on his side, binds himself to use the power he is entrusted with only in conformity with the intention of his constituents, to maintain them all in the peaceable possession of what belongs to them, and to prefer on every occasion the public interest to his own'."⁽⁹⁴⁾

Men come together for their self-interest, but this instinct of self-preservation is changed to justice only within the confines of the society. This flys in the face of natural law. Historically governments consume power until the rights originally assigned to it by free men are lost in tyranny. The human misery which comes from this tyranny can only be cured through insurrection. To prevent these abuses Rousseau became fascinated with a political solution like a constitution.

Even after the ascendancy of loyal opposition, which was expected to resist the accumulation of power which Rousseau feared, de Tocqueville still found a tendency toward despotisms in democracies because of ostracism.⁽⁹⁵⁾ Vaclav Havel asserts that there is a different problem because of the civil service system which is immune from the effects of opposition.

"The West and the East, though different in so many ways, are going through a single, common crisis. Reflecting on that crisis should be the starting point for every attempt to think through a better alternative. Where does the cause of the crisis lie? Vaclav Belohradsky puts it very nicely when he writes about this late period as one of conflict between an impersonal, anonymous, irresponsible, and uncontrollable juggernaut of power (the power of `megamachinery'), and the elemental and original interests of man as a concrete individual."⁽⁹⁶⁾

This is not an exhaustive treatment of the idea of a social compact in the Hellenic and Western traditions. J.W. Gough continues his treatment of the development of the social compact through Kant and Hegel, and through the development of American thought which was founded on Lockeian principles before Hume, Burke and other detractors came to prominence. Leslie Lipson discusses the idea at some length in The Great Issues of Politics⁽⁹⁷⁾.

The purpose for this trek through the social compact idea is to show the distinction between one of Lowi's underlying ideas in the Christian and the Jewish environment.

The social compact assumes that people come together into a society. Some of the authors I have cited believe that men come together because they are basically evil and need a form of mutual defense. Others believe that men are basically good and come together because of their natural sociability.

In either event, once this social compact is formed, the population contracts with some of its members to administer the power and machinery which is necessary to keep the society working. Sometimes this power is obtained because of superior might, and other times it is obtained through charisma. In either event, the initial conquest takes place, the population submits to the people in power, and through regular compliance their power becomes authority.

The government must exercise the discipline to take from the population only as much power and right as is necessary to administer the society.⁽⁹⁸⁾ This is accountability. The amount of power, and the moral conduct, in the government is measured by natural law.⁽⁹⁹⁾ This `natural law' is the values which were held by the people who formed the compact,⁽¹⁰⁰⁾ and the values which are continued through socialization as the generalized other.⁽¹⁰¹⁾ If the government becomes abusive of these values, the population has the right of revolution. Martin Luther is an example of an articulator who protested what he saw as abuse and irresponsibility, and the revolution which he incited became known as the Reformation. Samuel Adams, Oliver Cromwell, and Nikoli Lenin are other examples of articulators against perceived abuses who incited forcible revolutions. Lowi points to the Mayflower Compact and the Declaration of Independence as two examples of forcible revolutions against the perceived abuses of the existing government. The Confederate States of America was a revolution which failed.⁽¹⁰²⁾

The referents used to isolate the social values reflect the epistemological structure of the society. The assumptive premise which is consistent through Western Civilization is that our moral values are based in scripture. During the Middle Ages people believed that the implementation, and illumination, of these scriptural values came from meditation and revelation. Correct understanding was verified by the authority of the church. That was their paradigm. The Renaissance was what modern Futurists would call a "Paradigm Shift".⁽¹⁰³⁾ Living in the same assumption, that values had a basis in scripture, the new paradigm required the thinker to look outside the self to what could be objectified and observed through reason. The shift was from the right brain to the left-brain;⁽¹⁰⁴⁾ from feelings to reason. As the shift became institutionalized⁽¹⁰⁵⁾ into the social system, Calvinism ascended as the correct understanding of scripture and social values, and then paled in the face of pure science. The scripture became one of four bases of social values. Just as the absolute deference to the authority of the Medieval church led to the abuses that Luther complained of, so the I-thou relationship which is required in science has led to the abuses which Vaclav Havel complains about. Citizens no longer view themselves as citizens whose values are reflected in their government, but rather as members of a society who demand accommodation of their needs from a government bureau.⁽¹⁰⁶⁾ The relationship has become that of a customer to an independent contractor.

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