What is the point of a national anthem? Does it accurately portray the history of the nation it adorns? Seldom. Does it reflect current values and priorities? Hardly. Is it set to a rousing melody? Almost never. Is it achingly repetitive? In the case of the British national anthem, most certainly yes.
And yet anthems play an important, sometimes even a crucial role at moments of national remembrance, pomp, celebration and solemnity, as well as at world sporting events. Why are they so prominent? One answer is that, like an object lowered into a saturated solution on which crystals begin to form, their importance is not in what they say (their lyrics) or how they say it (their score), but in the fact that they are there at all.
But there is more to say about the nature of national anthems. Criticising a national anthem for its score or its lyrics really misses the point, because its value is not primarily in the intrinsic qualities of its description or resonance, but in what we might call its passive income: the work that it accomplishes through its very existence and rendition. The worth of an anthem is not in its virtues of description but in its performativity. It does not merely describe a sense of national identity that pre-exists it; it helps actively to bring about that identity. Its contribution to national life is not primarily in what its lyrics express, but what its repeated performance helps to create.
The same is true of the social contract metaphor. Most accounts of the social contract focus on what it does—or does not—describe: Is there really a contract of the sort that the metaphor suggests? Can a hypothetical contract be considered binding? What is the paradox of its origin? But to think only in these terms commits the same reductive fallacy as imagining that a national anthem’s only possible worth is in the accuracy or emotiveness of its lyrics. It may well be that the lyrics are, in fact, its least interesting and least useful aspect.
The importance of the social contract metaphor is not in its content but its performance, not in its what but its that, not in whether the intricate and complex details of the contract metaphor adequately capture the nature of social relations, but in the fact that, as a time-tested lexical unit, it haunts our public discourse, rearing its head at key moments of social tension or social breakdown such as COVID-19 or the Black Lives Matter protests. The content of any given account of the social contract may not adequately represent our social reality, but the repeated use of the term helps to construct that reality.
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These themes are prominent in Paul Ricoeur’s discussions of social realities. For Ricoeur, our social bond (lien social) is symbolically mediated (PR, 202). Quoting the historian Bernard Lepetit, Ricoeur argues that representations of the social bond “are no […] floating ideas, moving around in an autonomous space” (i.e. a space detached from the reality they describe), but rather “symbolic mediations that contribute to inaugurating the social bond”. [1] A representation of the social bond, in an anthem or in the metaphor of a contract, constructs what is purportedly describes.
In the essay ‘L’imagination dans le discours et dans l’action’ (‘The imagination in discourse and in action’) in Du Texte à l’action, Ricoeur also draws on the work of Max Weber who “characterises social action in terms of a signifying behaviour, mutually oriented and socially integrated”,[2] and Claude Lévi-Strauss who, in his introduction to the works of Marcel Mauss affirms that “symbolism is not an effect of society, but society is an effect of symbolism” (TA, 230).[3] Symbols and ideology actively constitute social reality because of “the necessity for a given group to have an image of itself, to ‘represent itself to itself’, in the theatrical sense of the word, the sense of making oneself in play and putting oneself on stage” (TA, 230).[4]
The social contract is not social commentary but social theatre. And this has far-reaching and profound implications for how we should understand and study it. Theatre is not meant here in the sense of ephemeral bourgeois entertainment. The ancient Athenians, it will be remembered, were sufficiently convinced of the importance of theatre to subsidise the attendance of the low paid, in order to ensure that everyone got to participate.
After watching a Sophoclean tragedy, the question to ask is hardly “Is King Oedipus real or hypothetical?”, and it is missing the point of the performance to comment “it could never have happened like that, you know”. The point of the theatrical spectacle is the purgation it induces, the catharsis of pity and fear that its performance supposedly brings forth in its spectators. In the same way, the metaphor of the social contract itself, as it is used in public discourse today, creates an incohate awareness of mutual obligations and benefits, making them visible in a way that causes those who use the metaphor to think and perhaps even to act differently. Similarly, it conditions the emotions of those who express a sense of injustice or unfairness at the way in which they, or others, are treated in society. After all, if there is no contract then no action, however callous or self-serving, can break it. In the words of the Apostle Paul, if there is no law, there is no transgression (Romans 4:15).
Unlike material objects, social realities do not admit of immediate, sensory verification in the world. We cannot pick up a social bond in the same way that we can pick up a chair or a mug, or see it on the horizon the same way we can spot a skyline or a flock of migrating birds. It is only “visible” to us as such via its representations and ideological mediations. Otherwise it is like the wind: we can see only its effects. The sense we have of its reality—our material interactions with it, and the way it can shape our attitudes and behaviour—hangs by the thread of its symbolic and ideological representations, existing in “the distance constantly hollowed out between real practice and interpretations through which the group becomes aware of its existence and its practice” (TA, 230).[5] This is why the metaphor of the social contract is so potent, not for what it describes from the outside but for what it makes from the inside: “there is perhaps no social group without this indirect relation to its own being through a self-representation” (TA, 230).[6]
Another facet of this complex relationship between the social bond and its representations is that Social reality has a symbolic constitution, and contains an interpretation of the social bond itself. In other words, the social bond is always already an interpretation of itself (See TA, 313-4); it is always already symbolic (TA, 321).
In the light of this mutual implication of the social bond and its representations, it is folly to consider the symbols and metaphors of the social contract to be representing something that precedes them, of which they are merely the reflections and echoes (TA, 321). Only a discourse of ideology can uncover the nature of the social bond.
What are the implications of this radically symbolic constitution of social reality for the study of the social contract? Surely that social contract theories should not primarily be understood as attempts to give an account of the social reality that precedes them, but as interventions that 1) create what they purportedly describe and 2) intend to shape the reality that succeeds them. They are not treatises, but tools, not representations for our contemplation but imaginary worlds for our habitation.
Photo by Tuur Tisseghem from Pexels
Abbreviations
PR Ricoeur, Parcours de la reconnaissance
TA Ricoeur, Du Texte à l’action
Notes
[1] “Les représentations ne sont donc pas des idées flottantes se mouvant dans un espace autonome, mais, comme on vient de l’exprimer, des médiations symboliques contribuant à l’instauration du lien social” (PR, 202). All translations are my own.
[2] “caractérise l’action sociale par un comportement signifiant, mutuellement orienté et socialement intégré”.
[3] “le symbolisme n’est pas un effet de la société, mais la société un effet du symbolisme”.
[4] “la nécessité pour un groupe quelconque de se donner une image de lui-même, de « se représenter », au sens théâtral du mot, de se mettre en jeu et en scène”.
[5] “la distance qui ne cesse de se creuser entre la pratique réelle et les interprétations à travers lesquelles le groupe prend conscience de son existence et de sa Pratique.”
[6] “Peut-être n’y a-t-il pas de groupe social sans ce rapport indirect à son être propre à travers une représentation de soi-même”.
