Paul DeHart’s The Social Contract in Ruins: Natural Law and Government by Consent presents a clear and complete defense of a theist-friendly social contract theory, one that presupposes the goodness of God and the necessity of reason and will in grounding political obligation. Because the heart of the book is constructive, a better title would have been “Social Contract Theory Reconstructed” or something similar.
The book is divided into three parts. Part I, “The Social Contract in the Ruins?” (chapters 1–3) aims to show how “conventional social contract theory” (CSCT) is not cogent. CSCT comes in various forms, some more explicitly contractual than others; they include the familiar versions of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, John Rawls, and David Gauthier. If one holds any of these early modern and contemporary versions, then, DeHart argues, one’s theory is in ruins. Part II, “The Inescapability of the Good: On the Nature of Moral Obligation” (chapters 4–6), argues that a necessary condition for morality is the existence of objective goodness, a transcendent, nonrelational entity that grounds normativity; the entity is God. He calls this “classic social contract theory.” Part III, “Covenantal Realism: The Essential Dependence of Covenant and Consent on the Classical Natural Law” (chapters 7–9), presents classic social contract theory.
In part I, DeHart endorses several familiar criticisms of CSCT, especially those of Jean Hampton and Leslie Green. Hampton argues that Hobbes’s claims (i) that the dominant motive for action is self-preservation, (ii) that this desire requires people to transfer all their rights to a sovereign, and (iii) that this action must preserve the right to oppose a sovereign’s decisions are jointly inconsistent. Green shows that CSCT does not create political authority and so is a failure (24–28). Criticisms of other theorists, notably Rawls and Gauthier, appear in chapters 2 and 3.
DeHart’s central criticism of CSCT is that it is self-refuting because it is not backed by something essentially normative but instead attempts to generate normativity from human acts of will (31). Without intrinsic goodness, human conventions are worthless because they consist of nothing but individual acts of will; the “source of obligation [must be] independent of will” (31; see also 45, 80, 98–99, 140, 145, 239, and 323); and “it is logically impossible to distinguish among exercises of will on the basis of will alone” (39; see also 98–99, 105, 117–18, 143, and 290). Intrinsic goodness is the gold standard of authority and obligation according to DeHart (223). A defender of CSCT might respond that, if DeHart’s view were correct, then fiat currency, unsupported by commodity value, could not be legitimate. Yet contemporary money is valuable because citizens treat it as such because other citizens do.
DeHart would presumably disagree. For him, no set of individual acts of will are “binding or obligatory”; and adding more individual acts of the same kind would not create obligation (32; see also 272–74). But proponents of CSCTs have a reply, namely, that one act of will can be distinguished from another in virtue of the will’s content, the person or persons who are the agents, and the time and place of willing. Consider the necessity of the conjunction of agent, will, and content of laws of nature, according to one interpretation of Hobbes’s view. The laws are obligatory because God’s command or will is attached to propositions derivable from reason. “I [God] command that everyone keep their covenants” is a law of nature, and “I [Lee] command that everyone smoke at least one cigarette a day” could not be. It is ironic that DeHart has a similar view: “Moral obligation is a compound property comprised of intrinsic goodness and prescriptive will exercised by someone possessed of the authority or right to prescribe” (325).
DeHart says that voluntarism founders on the subjectivity of willing, as do some theories that seem to adopt an objective standard that is not grounded in anything external to human beings. DeHart’s commitment to a transcendent “divine Goodness” will leave many theorists cold (7). Why can’t there be an immanent objective good such as human flourishing, especially since DeHart leaves the concept of goodness unanalyzed? Moreover, goodness seems to have little content: good parents, good managers, good athletes, good race, plow, and jumping horses are all good but in different ways.
Most philosophers would credit Hobbes for showing how obligation arises from human actions. Again, DeHart disagrees: “we cannot be bound to observe the terms of the social contract” unless they are already binding, because God is “good and wise” (38). However, if goodness and wisdom generated authority, then Mother Teresa and Socrates would have governed large swaths of earth (cf. 61–62).
To his credit, DeHart offers incisive critiques of numerous CSCTs, for example his critique of ancient conventionalism (55–60). His explication and criticism of Gauthier’s social contract theory is illuminating and devastating (82–99). However, I think he is unfair to Hobbes. DeHart implies that Hobbes was a horrible person because infanticide would not be morally objectionable in the state of nature (94); a more charitable interpretation is that Hobbes’s state of nature is a thought experiment, that he stipulates that there are no laws in the state of nature, and that he is giving another good reason to get out of that state.
In part III, chapter 7, DeHart argues that Aristotelian political theory and classical natural law theory are consistent with consent-based legitimacy. The often-expressed view that they are mutually exclusive rests on a false dichotomy, though each view contains some truth. From classical natural law, he takes the idea that covenants are innately obligatory; from Aristotle, he takes the view that a political society is an “associational whole,” not a “natural organic” one (231–32 and 287).
In chapter 8, DeHart revisits his position that natural law is consistent with covenant or social contract theory. He repeats that consent must be “grounded in moral or metaphysical realism” (267) and then argues rightly that hypothetical consent does not create an obligation (270–71, 294–315). Some theorists will maintain that tacit or implicit consent is not as problematic as DeHart thinks.
In chapter 9, DeHart deals with the persistent problem that too little “meaningful individual consent” exists to generate political obligation (289). He accepts some standard criticisms of consent, especially those of Simmons, before asserting that the foundation of natural liberty is “human equality, not natural liberty” (317). No person naturally governs any other because no one is superior to any other. Following the attractive views of Calvinist Johannes Althusius, DeHart holds that consent to government rests on the pre-political consent found in marriages and trade guilds (319). (Despite the importance of God, goodness, will, and reason in DeHart’s theory, none of these terms have entries in the index.)
DeHart’s book, replete with ideas, will raise objections in the minds of many readers; but theist political theorists, especially Christian and unmentioned Islamic ones, will find DeHart’s theory congenial. Less sympathetic readers will still find a clear, structured argument, which facilitates identifying particular points of disagreement.
