António Guterres, Jean-Luc Nancy, and the new social contract

On July 18 this year the U.N. Secretary General António Guterres added his voice to the ranks of those calling for a new social contract, entitling his 18th Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture ‘Tackling the Inequality Pandemic: A New Social Contract for a New Era’. But what does that mean? What do we want when we want a new social contract?

Guterres’ rhetoric is evocative, though far from clear. He repeatedly pairs the call for a new social contract with “a New Global Deal” (or “a Global New Deal”) indicating that, whatever the social contract is, it is distinct from the massive legislative, financial and regulatory measures that will be necessary in any global post-COVID reenactment of Roosevelt’s programme for rebuilding a post-depression U.S.A.

The hopes pinned on such a new social contract by the Secretary General are mouth-wateringly diverse. It will “create equal opportunities for all, and respect the rights and freedoms of all”, “enable young people to live in dignity […] ensure women have the same prospects and opportunities as men; and […] protect the sick, the vulnerable, and minorities of all kinds”, and finally “integrate employment, sustainable development and social protection, based on equal rights and opportunities for all”. Quite the wish list!

What mighty instrument can achieve such grand aspirations? Certainly not legislation, regulation and financial measures by themselves. We need to penetrate below these visible strings and levers to the often hidden assumptions, instincts, habits, anthropologies and even ontologies that inform and enable them. This is a journey for which philosophers, not economists or political scientists, must be our guide.

Jean-Luc Nancy

I propose to hang on to the coat tales of one philosopher as he dives beneath the New Deal to the social contract that underpins it. Jean-Luc Nancy has not written extensively on the social contract, but what he lacks in volume he more than makes up for in insight and acuity. In this post I will highlight three penetrating Nancean reflections that can help us to develop and deepen Guterres’ distinction between a new social contract and a Global New Deal with which it “must go hand in hand”.

The social contract and the social bond

Nancy’s first insight is that “contract” is a spectacularly unhelpful metaphor for framing the task that faces us in the post-COVID world. It is a term handed down to us from a certain tradition of political thinking, and very much a concept of its time (NIUM, 38). Not only does it presuppose the presence of individual human subjects who decide to come together in community (Politique et au-delà, 10-11), but it also frames sociality in a juridico-commercial frame that leaves the general equivalence of capital as the only generality that can ground social relations. What Rousseau is in fact describing is not a contract at all, Nancy argues, but the social bond (le lien social) that precedes and grounds all contracts.

The paradox of the social contract

The second Nancean insight relevant to Guterres’ Mandela Day Lecture regards the nature of the contract: it cannot be legislated into being. It is not the fruit of laws, it is their root and trunk; is is not the consequence of laws, it is their basis. What a new social contract requires is not new policies but new people with dispositions and instincts of benevolence and common interest in line with the sort of society the contract seeks to bring about. Such people must precede the social bond in order to renew it, but the social bond must precede them in order for them to be the benevolent people they are. This is what Nancy calls the social contract’s paradox of institution (elsewhere “aporia”, “singularity” or “circularity of foundation”). Put at its most rough and ready: “the contract presupposes people capable of contracting, and these people presuppose the contract that opens their humanity” [“le contrat suppose des hommes capables de contracter et les hommes supposent le contrat qui ouvre leur humanité”] (Politique et au-delà, 11).

Our challenge today, therefore, is to rethink the social contract “according to this profound motif of the bond which is absolutely contemporaneous with the terms that it relates” Share on XNancy finds this paradox in Rousseau’s Social Contract, where according to Rousseau the contract itself “out of a stupid and bounded animal made an intelligent being and man” [“d’un animal stupide et borné fit un être intelligent et un homme”] (‘The Social Contract’ and Other Writings, 53). The contract makes beasts into intelligent human beings; but aren’t intelligent human beings required to enter into the contract in the first place? Answer: yes. The contract presupposes the people who presuppose the contract.

Our challenge today, therefore, is to rethink the social contract “according to this profound motif of the bond which is absolutely contemporaneous with the terms that it relates” [“selon ce motif profond du lien absolument contemporain des termes qu’il relie”] (NIUM, 38-9), neither as merely descriptive nor as hopelessly aspirational but as performative. But we have repeatedly shown ourselves unable to think this contemporaneity. Sometimes we have imagined a community anterior to its members, but more often we have fancied individual subjects to precede their association. It is in this failure to think the contemporaneity of the contract and its parties that we fall short of understanding social relations at all (NIUM, 39).

A new social contract requires a new ontology

Thirdly, if the social bond is not a contract, what is it? It cannot be a trait held in common by members of a community (be it a common language, common ethnicity or common culture), because that would return us directly to the paradigm of the war of each group against every other group, a situation we might call the “state of culture” that succeeds but fundamentally parallels the Hobbesian “state of nature”. No, the social bond, that which is most proper to being, is the ‘with’ (avec): “dry and neutral: neither communion nor atomisation, only the sharing of a place, at the most a contract: a being-together without gathering” [“sec et neutre : ni communion ni atomisation, seulement le partage d’un lieu, tout au plus un contrat : un être-ensemble sans assemblage”]. The ‘with’ is a disjunctive conjunction (Le Sens du monde, 173) in which there is both consensus and dissensus, “spacing at the heart of proximity and intimacy” [“écartement au cœur de la proximité et de l’intimité”] (La Communauté affrontée, 43). This complexity is obscured by the metaphor of the social contract and its juridico-commercial framing. The challenge that faces us is to “think the social bond on another model, or perhaps without a model” [“Penser le nœud social sous un autre modèle, ou peut-être, sans modèle”] (Le Sens du monde, 173). “This politics requires”, Nancy argues, “an entire ontology of being as binding” [“Il faut à cette politique toute une ontologie de l’être en tant que nouage”], an ontology that is still waiting to see the light of day (Être singulier pluriel, 175). Rousseau’s performative contract is a way marker for this new ontology of the in-common that does not rest on any prior substance.

Guterres after Nancy

So how can Nancy’s reflections on the social contract help us to understand, develop and also critique Guterres’ soaring aspirations? In three ways.

First, the renewal of the social contract advocated by the Secretary General must be understood in terms of a schema of two distinct but inter-related levels. There is the legislative and policy level, which presupposes the social bond, rather than addressing it. This is the level of the “New Deal” and “universal basic income” that Guterres evokes. But relying on these measures alone to create a new social contract is like taking pain-killers to cure cancer: they palliate without addressing the underlying conditions that enable the inequalities that the Secretary General repeatedly bemoans. Those conditions are themselves not legislative; they are anthropological and ontological. One of the challenges of our time … is to reinstil in the consciousness of our people that sense of human solidarity, of being in the world for one another and because of and through others. - Nelson Mandela Share on X

Secondly, changing the social contract must be thought of neither as descriptive (registering what has already happened informally) nor as aspirational (setting “goals” for future achievement). It should be considered as a performative gesture, a fiat that establishes its own conditions of possibility. Any declaration of a new social contract must therefore come before its due time, while it is still outrageous and premature, because it is the contract itself that brings about the sort of people ready to abide by it. If we wait until the right time we will find ourselves like the hapless man from the country in Franz Kafka’s ‘Before the law’, growing old and dying before a door which, he finds when it is too late, was meant only for him.

Thirdly, it must be understood that renewing the social contract is not a legislative challenge. It is not even an educational challenge. It is an anthropological and an ontological challenge. And that is why it requires not only the input of lawmakers and educators but of philosophers and culture-makers who can help us rethink the people presupposed by the contract that the people presuppose. In the words of Nelson Mandela quoted in Guterres’ lecture: “One of the challenges of our time … is to reinstil in the consciousness of our people that sense of human solidarity, of being in the world for one another and because of and through others.”

References

Guterres, António. “tackling the inequality pandemic: a new social contract for a new era”. Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture 2020. New York, 18 July 2020. Available at https://www.nelsonmandela.org/news/entry/annual-lecture-2020-secretary-general-guterress-full-speech

Nancy, Jean-Luc. Être singulier pluriel. Paris : Galilée, 1996.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. La Communauté affrontée. Paris : Galilée, 2001.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. Le Sens du monde. Paris : Galilée, 1993.

Nancy, Jean-Luc, Philip Armstrong and Jason E. Smith. Politique et au-delà. Paris : Galilée, 2011.

Nancy, Jean-Luc and François Martin. NIUM. Valence: Ecole Régionale des Beaux Arts, 1998.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. ‘The Social Contract’ and Other Later Political Writings. Edited and translated by Victor Gourevitch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.