Brownson on Social Contract

Orestes Brownson has some sharp insights on the purposes and effects of social contract theory as developed by early modern theorists. He recognizes that Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau have detached social contract ideas from their original mooring in Christian thought and “abused the phrase borrowed from the theologians and made it cover a political doctrine which they would have been the last to accept.” Such theorists “imagined a state of nature antecedently to civil society in which men lived without government, law or manners, out of which they finally come by entering into a voluntary agreement [either] with some one of their number to be king and to govern them, or with one another to submit to the rule of the majority.”

Social and political life is thus artificial and those who have entered the contract may “uncreate them whenever they judge it advisable.” This “deprives the state of her sacredness . . . and hold on conscience,” and has the effect of underwriting “the right of insurrection [revolution]” and undermining any support for authority: “the [modern democratic] age sympathizes, not with authority in its efforts to sustain itself and protect society, but with those who conspire against it –the insurgents, rebels, revolutionists seeking its destruction. The established government that seeks to enforce respect for its legitimate authority and compel obedience to the law, is held to be despotic, tyrannical, oppressive . . . ” The only result can be tyranny: What we now call totalitarianism is “the logical or necessary result of the attempt to erect the state on atheistical principles . . . for political atheism . . . can sustain itself only by force since it recognizes no right but might.” And militarization is also a necessary result, for on atheistic grounds civil rule cannot “sustain itself for a moment without an armed force sufficient to overawe or crush the party or parties in permanent conspiracies against it.”