COVID-19 and the social contract

Man is born free, and everywhere today he in self-imposed chains, locked down under COVID-19 regulations. The term “lockdown” is of course a misnomer. With some notable but very infrequent exceptions, no-one is locking our doors and forcing each and every one of us to stay within our four walls. It is relatively trivial to flout the lockdown rules if we are inclined to do so, and no government has the power to enforce such a measure if its citizenry is determined to flout it. No, our doors are locked on the inside.[1]

This makes the lockdown a fascinating case study of our social contract, the implicit agreement between individuals and the state to give up some of what the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau called our “natural liberty” in exchange for the protection, security and civic freedom provided by the state’s “political liberty”. If you and I are to live together in society then I have to relinquish my freedom to treat you in whatever way I like, in exchange for the state’s protection against you treating me in whatever way you like. We all stay at home with the understanding that this will make everyone freer in the long run, and will mean that more of us survive to have a long run at all.

The social contract, then, is an exchange of liberties: I relinquish one type of freedom in exchange for another. We should not think in terms of a social contract but a social transaction: political liberty purchased at the price of natural liberty.

Are we freer as a result? Almost certainly not, by a brute measure of freedom. Under natural liberty I can do whatever I fancy: I can extort you, enslave you, rape you, kill you. What an expansive freedom! The downside, of course, is that I have no protection against these actions being performed on me, and no redress if they are. This is the situation that Rousseau describes as a “state of nature” and Thomas Hobbes calls a “war of all against all”, though as Michel Serres points out the idea of war is more organised and regulated than this anarchic free-for-all: it requires states, armies or militias and some sort of common goal, for example.

We should not think in terms of a social contract but a social transaction: political liberty purchased at the price of natural liberty. Share on X

The COVID curfew is just one among many examples of such a social transaction: a voluntary surrender of some of my liberties in order to acquire other freedoms which I deem more desirable. And the COVID lockdown has brought the whole question of voluntary non-exercise of freedoms for the sake of a common good to the forefront of public debate.

Many further examples of surrendering freedoms are adopted (and contested) today. Take the decision not to eat meat for the benefit of factory farmed animals, for example. Or the decision to buy a small car rather than a SUV, to take fewer long-haul flights, or to have fewer or no children for the sake of the environment. These voluntary refusals to exercise personal liberty characterise our cultural moment, and are increasingly enforced by informal social shaming. The sense that these voluntary renunciations are part of broader transaction is crucial to their performance, and when this sense of exchange is lost there arise accusations of a “broken” social contract.

This reframing of the social contract as a social transaction can also help to find a way through the deep resistance experienced in some countries, notably the USA, to lockdown orders or to injunctions to wear face masks and observe social distancing. If we understand these attitudes as preferences for natural over political liberty, and conformity with government regulations as a transaction or investment in one’s own long-term freedom, we can provide a conceptual frame and vocabulary for understanding how “freedom” is no simple idea in this situation, and cirtainly not arrayed exclusively on one side of the argument. Those who resist the injunctions and those who obey them both have a claim on freedom, but the types of freedom they champion are different: those who refuse the government’s advice are privileging natural over political freedom, and those who abide by the guidelines are engaging in the social transaction, putting their natural freedom on deposit in order to accrue a political freedom that will yield a greater dividend of liberty in the medium and long terms.

In the next post in this series I will consider what makes us think it worthwhile to relinquish our natural freedom on a permanent basis, and what classic social contrast theorists can teach us about this transaction.

 

[1] I write from Melbourne, currently under stage three lockdown. Other countries where the rules are in the process of being relaxed will, I hope, not return to such a state.

Photo by LOGAN WEAVER on Unsplash