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Rethinking the Social Contract Tradition

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Rethinking the Social Contract Tradition View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by YorkSpace FROM FOUNDATION TO DISSOLUTION: RETHINKING THE SOCIAL CONTRACT TRADITION MICHAEL FOLLERT A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY GRADUATE PROGRAM IN SOCIOLOGY YORK UNIVERSITY TORONTO, ONTARIO MARCH 2015 © MICHAEL FOLLERT, 2015 ii Abstract The early modern intellectual tradition of the social contract introduces a problematic of the will to the socio-political realm. With power’s institutionalization no longer shrouded by an earlier religious imaginary, the social contract thinkers attempt to explain how civil society and the state legitimately and originally come into being. However, in doing so they produce a series of excesses. This work traces those excesses from the modern natural law lineage of Hobbes and Locke through the Enlightenment with Rousseau and Kant. It is in the crisis of society confronting the mystery of its self-institution that the excesses of the social and the political come into view. Rather than society being rendered present through the mediations of a divine will, the social contract stages society’s foundation as an act of collective human will. Society is ‘discovered’ in this intellectual tradition as self-instituting, but its discovery is only partial. In submitting the social and the political to a kind of deliberate construction, the social contract in Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau operates through an ‘artificialist imaginary’. As well, being part of the staging of society’s self-institution, the social contract contributes to the disarticulation of the social from the political. The social begins to come into view as a realm of intelligibility unto itself, historically, at this point. Yet its intelligibility remains subsumed by the ostensible transparency of the will, or in Kant, as an ultimate impasse to pure practical reason. The social must be found by reading between-the-lines of the works of these thinkers. This is because the social stands as an excess that the logic of the social contract cannot contain. There are multiple figures of the social that begin to reveal themselves here: the social as obligation, as sociability, and even as an uncontrollable ‘monstrosity’. Rather than a ballast for the political, the social primarily resists, residually or intractably, the immediate expressions of the political will. These excesses come most fully into view when the contract confronts its dissolution – an act that, by dint of its ‘foundability’, the contract must legitimate at a certain limit point. iii Acknowledgements I would be remiss were I not to acknowledge the people who have supported me throughout this PhD. I doubt most families would be as supportive as mine has been in pursuing such an ambitious project, fraught with uncertain outcomes and intangible markers of progress. My mom and dad, and my brother, Adrian, have been steadfast in their love and support, and I am endlessly grateful for them. I have also relied heavily on the camaraderie and emotional support of my closest friends, including Laura Schaefer, Walter Swardfager, Laurie McGregor, Marcus Law, Health Flint, and Hon Lu. Among my graduate student cohort, I’ve been fortunate to have such stimulating and engaging colleagues. I couldn’t possibly list them all, but I am especially grateful to Jesse Carlson who has been on a similar intellectual journey over the years, and is one of the sharpest minds I’ve had the privilege of knowing. I am grateful to Christine Korte, who has been charting this PhD course alongside me, for her unyielding friendship and support, and to Dan Guadagnolo, a thrilling mind to behold, and someone who has been a companion through many long study sessions. I have had the privilege of studying in an excellent program of sociology at York University under the tutelage of many fine academics. I am especially appreciative of Kathy Bischoping and Lorna Erwin who oversaw the program’s direction for the lion’s share of my years at York, and did so with such care for the success and well-being of the graduate students. I must also recognize those professors who have at various stages in my graduate career been generous with their time and intellectual contributions by sitting on my supervisory committees: Kevin Dowler, Ratiba Hadj-Moussa, Kim Michasiw, John O’Neill, and Philip Walsh. Finally, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Audrey Tokiwa and Brian Singer. Audrey is surely the rock of our graduate program, an always uplifting spirit, and sometimes mesmerizing in her institutional knowledge as assistant to the program director. It is difficult to imagine ever navigating the ins and outs of graduate school without Audrey there to steer the course. Intellectually, Brian has been incredibly generous in guiding me through my graduate career. He has been patient and inviting, helping me chart an intellectual course of my own. He has been supportive and inspiring in my work through a project that crosses disciplinary boundaries and at times has felt unwieldy. I am also grateful that he did not settle for merely passable results but pushed me toward ever greater clarity in my thinking and writing without sacrificing subtlety. iv Table of Contents Abstract………….………………………………………………………………………………...ii Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………... iii Table of Contents……….……………………………………………………………………….. iv List of Figures…….…………………………………………………………………………….…v Abbreviations for Works Cited Frequently….…………………………………………………. vi Introduction…………………………………….………………………………………………….1 Chapter 1: The Social Contract and Its Symbolic Order………………………………………...24 Chapter 2: The Artificialist Imaginary…………………………………………………………. 61 Chapter 3: Dissolving the Contract…………………………….……………………………...... 93 Chapter 4: The Social Contract and Its Inversions ...…………………………………………..138 Chapter 5: Kant and the Return of the State of Nature…………………………………………173 Conclusion: Redeeming the Social…………………………………………………………….. 196 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………… 206 v List of Figures Figure 1: Cover image to The Bloody Game at Cards (1642)………………………………...…2 vi Abbreviations for Works Cited Frequently C J. Bodin, Six Books of the Commonwealth DJB H. Grotius, De jure belli L T. Hobbes, Leviathan MM I. Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals RR I. Kant, Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason SC J.-J. Rousseau, The Social Contract SD J.-J. Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (Second Discourse) SL C.-L. de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws TPP I. Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace TT, II J. Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Second Treatise 1 Introduction Playing cards have been a feature of everyday social life in Europe extending back to the fourteenth century. The images most commonly found on face cards today originated in Rouen in 1567. Although they fell out of favour in France in the late eighteenth century, they became the English standard around the same time. In the Rouennais pattern, the King of Hearts, originally associated with Charlemagne, the first king of France, brandishes an axe from behind his head. The design first appeared in England on the cover of a political tract called The Bloody Game at Cards (1642) at the outset of the Civil Wars. It offered a Royalist portrait of Charles I’s plight using the figures and symbols of the card deck allegorically: “The bloody game at cards, as it was played betwixt the King of Hearts. And the rest of his suite, against the residue of the packe of cards. Wherein is discovered where faire play; was plaid and where was fowle.” Charlemagne transmutes into Charles I here as the axe-wielding King of Hearts. In time, by ‘gradual degrees’ (Benham 1931:31) the axe the king brandishes from behind his head would become a sword. In its present-day form, this sword extends just behind the king’s head…or perhaps directly into it, for the two-dimensionality leaves something to the player’s imagination. But there is sufficient ambiguity in the image that the King of Hearts would by the twentieth century come to be referred to idiomatically as the Suicide King.1 I offer, however, that there is something potent suggested by this image, even at its first appearance. The king represented here is the king of absolutism, who has assumed a political will unto himself – a will that was becoming increasingly disconnected from the divine, other-worldly realm. That the very weapon dangling behind Charles I’s head would in 1649 be his undoing cannot but help strike one with a degree of foreshadowing. His beheading, in retrospect, was no simple ‘suicide’ as such, but in 1 I trace the earliest usage of this term in a publication back to a 1951 issue of Collier’s Magazine. 2 Figure 1: Cover image to The Bloody Game at Cards (1642) 3 convening what would come to be known as the Long Parliament in 1640 he perilously exposed his neck.2 The invisible tether between the king’s two bodies was becoming increasingly apparent and exposed. The suicidal king is an unusual image, and an almost unthinkable one, but we do find one other prominent early modern cultural representation of the king’s suicide (albeit merely symbolic) in Shakespeare’s Richard II, written a half-century before the execution of Charles I. In the penultimate act, Shakespeare’s eponymous king is detained by Bolingbroke and forced to cede the crown by presiding over his own decoronation ceremony. In a sublime gesture, and under the poetic license of his dramatist, Richard II orates the transfer of his majesty over to his rival: Now mark me, how I will undo myself; I give this heavy weight from off my head And this unwieldy sceptre from my hand, The pride of kingly sway from out my heart; With mine own tears I wash away my balm, With mine own hands I give away my crown, With mine own tongue deny my sacred state, With mine own breath release all duty’s rites… (Act IV, Scene I) In this scene, Richard II’s power is dramatically juxtaposed to his impotence.
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