THE APOLITICAL SOCIAL CONTRACT: CONTEMPORARY DEMOCRATIC POLITICS BEYOND DEPOLITICIZED SOCIAL CONTRACT

Beyond the Social Contract: Toward Global Justice

Agency, Cyberspace, and Social Contract

The social contract has been about rights and responsibilities in human societies. Facebook and its role in manufacturing and sustaining a global social contract, a new “we” is clearly one of the research areas that needs more attention. A new “we” is coming of age in the new age of connectivity and communication with a new outlook toward responsibility and rights at individual and collective l...

Social Yes; Contract No

Social contract theory is incoherent and it does not work as desired. Among the most obvious disanalogies is that contracts are enforced by a third party, commonly the state. There is no such external enforcer for a constitution. Contractarian theorists typically ignore all such issues and use the metaphor of contract very loosely to ground a claim that citizens are morally obligated to defer t...

Conflict and the Social Contract

We consider social contracts for resolving conflicts between two agents who are uncertain about each other’s fighting potential. Applications include international conflict, litigation, and elections. Even though only a peaceful agreement avoids a loss of resources, if this loss is small enough, then any contract must assign a positive probability of conflict. We show how the likelihood of conf...

Demography and the social contract.

As the most demographically complex nation in the world, the United States faces ever more formidable challenges to fulfill its commitment to the democratic values of equity and inclusion as the foreign-born share of the population increases. Immigration, the major source of the contemporary diversification of the population, provides several lessons about how to prepare for that future within ...