Social contracts in flux: crises as challenges and chances for transformation

Abstract

A social contract can be understood to describe an (both imagined and material) agreement between the members of a polity on the principles of this polity. We can consider it as having bottom-up, top-down and horizontal dimensions. Talking about a social contract is to talk about norms, ways of living together, and of grounding societal and cultural elements. As a theoretical-historical concept, the social contract is grounded in the classical theories (esp.Hobbes 1691, Locke 1689, Rousseau 1762 and Kant 1779), the more contemporary work by John Rawls (1971, 1993, 2001) and critical theories of Pateman (1988) and Mills (1997) especially, but has also more recently been further discussed in several contexts. The Continuous construction of social contracts through societal transformations (CO3) project (2024-2027) develops a theoretically and empirically grounded approach to understanding the evolving social contracts. The lecture introduces its approach and gives examples of its empirical work, especially focusing on the role of crises as challenges to social contracts.