IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/rmm/journl/v4y2013i77.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Social Contract Theory Should Be Abandoned

Author

Listed:
  • Danny Frederick

Abstract

I argue that social-contract theory cannot succeed because reasonable people may always disagree, and that social-contract theory is irrelevant to the problem of the legitimacy of a form of government or of a system of moral rules. I note the weakness of the appeal to implicit agreement, the conflation of legitimacy with stability, the undesirability of ‘public justification’ and the apparent blindness to the evolutionary critical-rationalist approach of Hayek and Popper. I employ that approach to sketch answers to the theoretical, historical and practical questions about the legitimacy of government or of systems of moral rules.

Suggested Citation

  • Danny Frederick, 2013. "Social Contract Theory Should Be Abandoned," Rationality, Markets and Morals, Frankfurt School Verlag, Frankfurt School of Finance & Management, vol. 4(77), November.
    • Handle: RePEc:rmm:journl:v:4:y:2013:i:77
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.rmm-journal.de/downloads/Comment_Frederick.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Gerald Gaus, 2013. "Why the Conventionalist Needs the Social Contract (and Vice Versa)," Rationality, Markets and Morals, Frankfurt School Verlag, Frankfurt School of Finance & Management, vol. 4(71), September.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.

      More about this item

      Keywords

      critical rationality; disagreement; evolution; legitimacy; social contract;
      All these keywords.

      JEL classification:

      • D6 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics
      • D7 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making
      • H2 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue
      • H4 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods

      Statistics

      Access and download statistics

      Corrections

      All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:rmm:journl:v:4:y:2013:i:77. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

      If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

      If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

      If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

      For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Friederike Pförtner (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/hfbfide.html .

      Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

      IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.