This post is part of a series of reflections on the social contract. For other posts in the series, please please click here.
It is common to evaluate accounts of the social contract as if they were abstract arguments containing a finite list of propositions about human nature, history and politics, each with its attendant justifications. Debates rage, for example, over whether the moment of the contract’s signing is historical or hypothetical, whether some rights exist in the state of nature (Locke) or not (Hobbes), and so forth. Accounts of the social contract are grouped together and transmuted into -isms (contractarianism, contractualism) to set alongside utilitarianism or Marxism as generic models of society.
It is much rarer to begin with the basic recognition that accounts of the social contract in Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and elsewhere are in fact stories. This is not to belittle them. Quite to the contrary in fact: it is to reveal in them a power that the theoretical, abstract, propositional approach occludes. The purpose of this post is to begin to show how this is the case.
Like all good stories, accounts of the social contract have a beginning (the state of nature), a middle (the event of contracting) and an end (the resulting society). They have characters, a setting (however abstract the account of the “state of nature” or “original position” may be), and they broadly conform to Freytag’s pyramidal dramatic structure, containing exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and resolution.
If we approach accounts of the social contract as stories, our expectations of how they work and what they can achieve will be significantly different from the expectations engendered by common understanding that they are theoretical arguments. We will begin not only looking for the strengths and weaknesses in their propositions but also asking a new set of questions, such as “what sort of world is this narrative inviting us to inhabit?”, “what is possible/impossible in this world, and what is visible/invisible?”, “from what point of view is it narrated?”, and “what position in this world am I being invited to occupy?”
If we approach accounts of the social contract as stories we will begin engaging with them with the tools of symbol, allegory, metaphor and myth, and we will be less preoccupied with whether a given account is historically accurate or not, or to what subspecies of -ism it conforms. We will begin to understand the possibilities of social contract narratives in a new way, for stories wield their great power and propagate their influence very differently to theories.
One thinker who can help us to set out on this path of doing justice to the narrative nature of social contract accounts is Etienne Balibar. In the rest of this post I propose to read carefully through four pages of the Introduction to Balibar’s Citizen Subject, drawing attention to valuable Balibarian insights and developing lines of thought tangential to his own reflections, all with the aim of drawing out the method and the potential of reading accounts of the social contract as narratives.
Roughly half way into his introductory essay, Balibar insists upon “a discussion of method, which I consider to be a matter of principle” (CS 9). The principle in question begins with the recognition that, in the collected essays of Citizen Subject, Balibar is engaged in “readings […] that bear upon texts” (CS 9, emphasis original), whether Descartes’ Meditations, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, or Rousseau’s Julie or The New Heloise. The nature of these texts, he insists, is to be “always rigorously individualized not only in the sense they are authored but also in that, above all, they are each time unique” (CS 9), unique in the sense that a thought or idea from one text is never repeated exactly in another. This singularity is not an impediment to engaging with the ideas in a text, but in fact the only hope of a rigorosu engagement at all, for:
only with a singular text—or even with the singularity of statements in a text that is itself singular— can a reader and commentator, who might be a translator, enter into a dialogic relation (which I have constantly attempted to do) that comprises an element of imagination […] but that also must stand up to textual counterproof. (CS 9-10).
To engage a generic idea abstracted from a text is a futile exercise in shadowboxing; both creativity (imagination) and refutation (counterproof) plunge their roots in the soil of specific textual formulations. This focus on singular texts makes Balibar loth to argue in terms of “‘systems’ or ‘tendencies’ that would be represented in each product” (CS 9).
The implications of this Balibarian démarche for a narrative approach to the social contract are already beginning to crystallise. There is no such thing as “the social contract” as a single, unified and unchanging concept, upon that almost everyone is agreed. But Balibar’s claim is stronger here: there is also no such thing as Rousseau’s social contract, or Hobbes’s social contract. What we can speak of truly, and engage with profitably, is the social contract of Rousseau’s Second Discourse or of Hobbes’s Leviathan. Not that these and other writers radically changed their ideas from one text to another but rather, as we shall shortly see, that the particular expression given to the social contract idea in a specific text shapes both its possibilities of creation and refutation. This already begins to draw out from social contract accounts a narrative-focussed analysis, insofar as narrative is a mode of writing in which the form of expression (the style, or idiom) usually shoulders its share of the communicative import of the text in an explicit way.
Situating his work “within the line of a ‘theoretical practice’ of the relations between discourse and historicity” (CS 9), Balibar parses this broad methodological principle into four four aspects:
1. “Only singular texts articulate determinate theses and pose determinate problems of interpretation.” This is not just the case in literary texts, he insists, but “especially in philosophy”, because “an author […] never writes the same text twice” (CS 9, emphasis original).
Balibar’s argument here is that the words of a philosophical text are not simply a transparent window through which one sees a pristine idea, but the warp and woof, the grain, the skeleton to which ideas conform. We have here a textual equivalent of the phenomenological insistence on the importance of the body in understanding human experience. For Merleau-Ponty I do not have a body but rather “I am my body”; for Balibar we might similarly say that “the idea is its linguistic articulation”. There is a materiality of language, just as there is a materiality of the body, and both are indispensable.
As an example, “to write ‘ego sum, ego existo’ is not to write ‘cogito, sum,’ even if an entire historiographical tradition proceeds as if this were the case and constructs its interpretation on such a basis” (CS 9). It follows that “one cannot work—as the representatives of the “analytic” tradition do—with simple reconstructions of arguments, substituting them for texts” (CS 9), any more than one can work with lists of personality traits, substituting them for face to face encounters with the people the lists describe.
2. The second principle is a point upon which I have already commented, and to which I return now with a different aim:
Consequently, only with a singular text—or even with the singularity of statements in a text that is itself singular—can a reader and commentator, who might be a translator, enter into a dialogic relation (which I have constantly attempted to do) that comprises an element of imagination […] but that also must stand up to textual counterproof. (CS 9-10).
This dense sentence might be summarised as a mode of “paying forward” one’s reading, commenting or translating, of enriching singular texts by drawing them into dialogue with each other in a way that tends towards the commentator herself becoming a “more or less ‘vanishing’” (CS 10) mediator.
This point not only gestures towards how we might compare different accounts of the social contract in ways that do not reduce to the unidirectional dynamic of refining (or critiquing) a previous argument, but it also raises the possibility of a dialogue between, on the one hand, a singular account of the social contract and, on the other, what Paul Ricoeur called “meaningful action considered as a text” or what we might dub the contemporary “social text” in a specific societal domain such as ecology or artificial intelligence. Brought together with Ricoeur’s concepts of the world of the text and the world of the reader, this Balibarian dialogic principle could be enlarged so as to serve as a tool for exploring not just the relationship between text and text, but between text and society. Balibar’s concluding assertion that “an echo must resonate in our own interrogations or those of ‘our time’” (CS 10) stresses, in this extended context of the ineliminable sedimented textuality of our social relations, conducted in implicit (and occasionally explicit) dialogue with a range of singular variations on the social contract theme.
3. “Texts, much more than ‘authors’ (and a fortiori ‘men’), have an intrinsic relation to conjunctures, whose contradictions they cast into relief and thus allow to be ‘problematized.’” (CS 10). So Balibar will refuse to evoke, for example, “Rousseau’s social contract”, preferring to engage with “the contract of The Second Discourse, or of The Social Contract”. Quoting the exposé de soutenance of his Habilitation, Balibar argues that “philosophy is never independent of specific conjunctures” (CS 10), where he understands conjunctures as what we might generalise to be ‘events’: crises, transitions, suspensions, bifurcations, all of which create a ‘before’ and ‘after’ and which bring “the impossibility of acting and thinking as before” (CS 10). Balibar’s ‘conjunctures’ here resonate with (if not to say “are in dialogue with”) Michel Serres’s recurring notion of philosophy as invention, and inventions as so many bifurcations or clinamen-like inclinations in the flow of ideas.
Moving beyond the letter of Balibar’s method once more, it would be interesting to approach the study of philosophical texts as a general ‘conjuncturology’ or ‘clinamatics’, discerning first where the text deviates from the conventions of its time, and then seeking to map where it cuts across or diverts our contemporary assumptions or patterns of thought. Such inclinations can occur both in texts that tend toward the theoretical and those that tend toward the narrative, though by now it should be clear that no hermetic division can be made between those two tendencies. Such a general clinamatics would open the way to seeing particular accounts of the social contract not only as potential descriptions of our social status quo, but as interventions to reaffirm, subvert or redirect it.
4. As his fourth point, Balibar draws two further implications from the singular nature of philosophical texts and conjunctures. The first is that “there is no ‘metalanguage’ in philosophy that would make it possible to reformulate texts in universal, descriptive, or systematic terms, ‘elevating’ them above their letter in order to extract their rational kernel or to reduce them [to] an ultimate materiality, more fundamental than their own” (CS 11). Once more, a comparison with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology is instructive here. There can be no ‘meta-body’ that would elevate a set of embodied existences in order to extract their common, irreducible essence or reduce them to an “omni-body” more ultimate than their own corporeality. We must deal in unique articulations, not in generalised meta-propositions. To respect this principle is, once more, is to treat philosophical writing like the text it is. It is an adage often repeated that, if Newton had not discovered gravity, someone else sooner or later would have done so, but if Shakespeare had not written Hamlet then we would still be without it today. Philosophy, in Balibar’s terms, is Shakespearean rather than Newtonian.
The second implication Balibar draws from the singularity of philosophical texts is the necessity of dealing with each in its original language, allowing the reader to pay attention to the “‘idiom’ whereby [philosophers] seek with an abundance of inventiveness (not necessarily jargon . . . ) to compensate for the lack of universality” (CS 11-12). I have argued elsewhere for the prime importance of idiom (though I called it “style”) in philosophical writing; it is an integral part of the philosophical necessity of moving beyond a paradigm of simply giving the reader information, in order to invite her into inhabit a new “global intuition”.[1] If philosophy wants to produce conjunctures, if it desires to bring about “the impossibility of acting and thinking as before” (CS 10), then it must attend to its idiom.
Balibar then proceeds to discuss “the relationship of texts to the signifying chains that they intersect (Nietzsche’s Zeichenkettel) and that determine in essential part their ‘material conditions of writing,’” (CS 12), or what we might call a given text’s key intertexts that is re-works, repeats, inverts, or returns.[2] Lest we think that heis committing the very sin of universal elevation above the letter of the text against which he has so recently warned us in this passage, he clarifies:
all of these questions radically escape the genre of the “history of ideas”; for, each element of method that I underscored above—the primacy of texts, the dialogic form of their interpretation, the knot between writing and conjuncture, and the procedure of infinite translation imposed by the idiom—constitutes a condition of impossibility for such a history. If I succeeded in extracting philosophical discussion of the subject from the history of ideas without thereby removing it from history, I would already consider myself quite satisfied. (CS 12-13).
From this rather long digression through four pages of Balibar, I think we can draw six important implications for the study of the social contract.
- We should not be blind to the fact that accounts of the social contract are narratives, and we should embrace them as such, with all the modalities and possibilities that this brings both for their explanatory and transformative power.
- We should not think that, having identified these accounts of the social contract as narratives, we should abandon any hope of addressing them as theoretical articulations. Balibar shows us how this is a false and misleading dichotomy, and how the literary and the theoretical are tendencies, not mutually exclusive categories.
- Having understood that accounts of the social contract lend themselves both to narrative and theoretical analysis, we should not think it adequate to detach the “ideas” they “contain” from their material, historical expression. Each singular text is to be studied on its own linguistic and stylistic terms.
- But this does not mean that, per impossibile, each text must be studied in strict isolation from all others. Indeed, the point of dialogic engagement is to bring the singular text into conversation with another singular text.
- There are resources in Balibar himself, as well as in other thinkers such as Paul Ricoeur, for envisaging how this dialogic study can be broadened to encompass not only the relation of text to text but also of text to social structure or social domain. This tantalizing expansion of Balibar’s dialogic approach remains to be worked through in detail.
- One way to engage with contract stories that takes account both of their narrative textuality and of their capacity to shape social attitudes and expectations is to bring them within a general clinamatics, seeking to understand how they bifurcate, incline, or subvert the assumptions and patterns of thought at work both in their original context and in ours.
The insights in these four pages from Balibar open the door to a fresh way of engaging with social contract narratives, helping to set a research agenda that situates accounts of the social contract not only as (real or hypothetical) descriptions of society and defences of particular views of justice, but as dynamic actors in real contemporary social situations, shaping attitudes and nudging policy decisions.
Photo by Karolina Grabowska from Pexels
[1] See the Introduction of my Michel Serres: Figures of Thought (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Press, 2020). A draft version is available here.
[2] Balibar provides examples of these different modalities:
I have no intention of reducing such complex problems to a single formula, whether it be Descartes’s “repetition” of a foundational utterance of Jewish and then Christian mono the ism, or Locke’s “transmission” of the theme of the double personality from Augustinian religious morals to criminal psychology of the positivist age, 40 or Rousseau’s “inversion” (within the framework of his enlarged familial utopia) of the relationship between activity and passivity that form the metaphysical horizon of ancient citizenship, or Freud’s “return” to a theory of the “parts of the soul” that only frees itself from cosmological myth in order to deploy the allegory of theater and the tribunal. . . . On the other hand, I wish to acknowledge in advance, as friends have occasionally pointed out to me (in par tic u lar, Jean-Luc Marion, Jacques Derrida, and Bertrand Ogilvie), that many questions are left obscure or formulated in an imprecise manner, whether they concern the difference between the intersection with religious utterance and the repetition of an ontological thesis, or the difference between a metaphysics of substance (founded upon the speculative hierarchies of form and matter or active and passive) and an anthropology of the “condition” that is inseparable from a political order. (CS 12)
