Since the publication of Michel Serres’s Le Contrat naturel (The Natural Contract) in 1990, the thesis that our social contract needs to be complemented and extended by a contract with the natural world has come in for sustained, and predictable, criticism. In this new mini-series of posts I want to clarify the natural contract idea, defend it from some of its detractors, and show how it can play a key role in coming to terms with the climate crisis.
What is the natural contract?
The basic idea of Serres’s natural contract is not hard to understand. We are familiar with the idea that an implicit social contract underpins our living-together. We are bound to each other in society by mutual obligations and commitments, and “social contract” is a term that we use to evoke these diverse duties and the common benefit that their observance supposedly yields.
Serres’s main problem with the social contract is that it forgets – even abhors – the world, leading to a horribly distorted and dangerous view of reality. In an oft-quoted passage, he illustrates this through a discussion of Francesco Goya’s Fight with Cudgels (1820-23), pictured above:
The painter, Goya, has plunged the duellists knee-deep in the mud. With every move they make, a slimy hole swallows them up, so that they are gradually burying themselves together. How quickly depends on how aggressive they are: the more heated the struggle, the more violent their movements become and the faster they sink in. The belligerents don’t notice the abyss they’re rushing into; from outside, however, we see it clearly.
Who will die? we ask. Who will win? they are wondering – and that’s the usual question. Let’s make a wager. You put your stakes on the right; we’ve bet on the left. The fight’s outcome is in doubt simply because there are two combatants, and once one of them wins there will be no more uncertainty. But we can identify a third position, outside their squabble: the marsh into which the struggle is sinking.[1]
This marsh, in fact, is the real enemy of the two pugilists, a common foe to which they will both inevitably succumb if they persist in ignoring its presence. Similarly, the social contract fatally forgets the world in which all societies live, move and have their being. This perpetuates an unhealthy, parasitic relationship between the human polis, which alone remains visible, and the forgotten but necessary world to which it clings like a leech.
For more posts on rewriting the social contract, please click here.
Why do we need a natural contract?
Such a wilful ignorance of the world outside the polis was benign enough, Serres argues, during the period when the human capacity to change the natural world was minimal, but in our industrial and post-industrial world we can no longer ignore the world with impunity:
At stake is the Earth in its totality, and humanity, collectively.
Global history enters nature; global nature enters history: this is something utterly new in philosophy. (NC, 4)
Now that we can destroy the earth, we must finally pay attention to it.
One way to begin belatedly paying attention to this host that our rampant parasitism now has the power to kill, is to make use of a tool already available and known to us: the social contract. This strategy has the benefit over more recondite or bespoke ecological paradigms of requiring no radically new idea, no unheard-of concept to champion a new ecological sensitivity. In fact, the move is quite brilliant: 1) let us use the potency of the very assumptions that are undermining any efforts to embed sustainability in our predispositions and instincts – namely the social contractual illusion that our primary duties and obligations are all contained within an exclusively human, social sphere – and 2) let us re-wire or re-purpose the social contract, one of the most powerful metaphors of that myopic tradition, to serve the consciousness-raising that is customarily thwarts. In other words, like an judo black belt the natural contract expertly turns one of modernity’s most deadly weapons against itself.
The social contract names a set of implicit agreements and commitments intended to ensure the mutual benefit and general good of all subjects of law in a given society. Is it such a stretch to think that we can arrive at a settlement of mutual benefit between the human and non-human subjects of law? We already have the proof of concept in modernity’s long social contract tradition.
The natural contract is the next step in modernity’s progress towards universal rights and universal suffrage
One of the most compelling arguments in The Natural Contract situates the development of a contact with nature as a reasonable and necessary progression of the modern trajectory of universal enfranchisement. In a 2008 interview, Serres insists that:
In The Natural Contract I asked the question about who, in the general history of law, was a subject of law. In antiquity those who required a guarantor were not subjects of law. Children, the elderly, slaves, zealots etc. There were precious few subjects of law: Roman citizens or Athenian citizens. Hence the generalisation or extension of the notion of the subject of law. The Declaration of 1789 rounds off this history: everyone is a subject of law.[2]
Only, of course, this “every one” is far from the end of the road for the gradual expansion towards the universal to which modernity aspires. In the samw way that we now look back in disbelief that it could once have been taken for granted that “universal” suffrage excluded women and slaves, Serres warns us of the judgment of future generations on our own parochial universality:
Tomorrow we will think about nature with the same shame that, today, we feel at having taken so long to understand that our companions should have become our partners to say the very least, since the beginning of the world.[3]
We can view Serres’s natural contract as an ecological wager. The wager is that we can rise to the challenge of the climate crisis not by perpetuating the division between nature and culture and forcing the social to retreat in the face of a natural world in chronic need of repair, but by doing precisely the opposite, namely welcoming the natural world into our social mechanisms and concepts, making it a subject of law and striking a blow for the universal in complementing the social contract with a natural contract. This also helps us to see why Serres repeatedly insists that The Natural Contract is not a book about ecology, but about law.
If I had to sum up what Serres’s Natural Contract has to offer us today, I think I would answer “a challenge to mean what we say when we talk about universal rights and universal suffrage”, and “a challenge to look outside the narrow frame of the social contract to what, to our peril, it excludes”.
[1] Michel Serres, The Natural Contract, trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995) 1; Hereafter: NC. “Or le peintre — Goya — enfonça les duellistes jusqu’aux genoux dans la boue. A chaque mouvement, un trou visqueux les avale, de sorte qu’ils s’enterrent ensemble graduellement. A quel rythme ? Cela dépend de leur agressivité : à lutte plus chaude, mouvements plus vifs et secs, qui accélèrent l’enlisement. L’abîme où ils se précipitent, les belligérants ne le devinent pas : au contraire, de l’extérieur, nous le voyons bien.
Qui va mourir, disons-nous ? Qui va gagner, pensent-ils et dit-on le plus souvent ? Parions. Pontez à droite, vous autres ; sur la gauche nous avons joué. Que le combat soit douteux, cela signifie la nature double de ce couple : il y a seulement deux combattants que la victoire, sans plus de doute, départagera. Mais en tierce position, extérieure à leur chamaille, nous repérons un troisième lieu, le marécage, où la lutte s’envase. » Michel Serres, Le Contrat naturel (Paris: Éditions François Bourin, 1990) 13-4.
[2] « Dans Le Contrat naturel, je posais la question de savoir qui était, dans l’histoire générale du droit, sujet de droit. Dans l’antiquité n’étaient pas sujets de droit ceux pour qui il fallait se porter aval. les enfants, les vieillards, les esclaves, les zélotes, etc. il y avait assez peu de sujets de droit : les citoyens romains ou les citoyens athéniens. D’où la généralisation ou l’extension de la notion de sujet de droit. La déclaration de 1789 parachève cette histoire. Tout le monde est sujet de droit. » Michel Serres, ‘Le droit peut sauver la nature’, Pouvoirs 127:4 (2008) 5–12, 5. My translation.
[3] « Nous raisonnerons demain, par rapport à la nature, avec la même vergogne que celle d’aujourd’hui, sur le fait d’avoir mis si longtemps à comprendre que nos compagnes auraient dû devenir nos partenaires au moins depuis la fondation du monde. » Michel Serres, Retour au contrat naturel (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 2000) 20. My translation.
