To social contracts and beyond

Christiana did a great job of summarising our recent conversation, so I've just pasted her bullet points below:
 

·       MICHAEL w APPLE: ‘Interrupting the Right: On Doing Critical Educational Work in Conservative Times’

o   How can we, as academics, build, communicate the hegemonic bloc formed by neoliberals, neoconservatives, authoritarian populist religious activists, and a managerialist class.

o   Disconnection between policy intentions and policy results

o   Parents as significant education policy actors

o   Targets and Markets do not work

o   Markets lack of morality

o   Operation of the Market (David Harvey)

o   Cooperative movement

o   What is compelling about right education

o   Social interactions and connections enable us to be together

o   Alan Touraine Can We Live Together? Equality and Difference

·                     Matters of risk (Hood, C., Rothstein, H. and Baldwin, R. (2001). The Government of Risk: Understanding Risk Regulation Regimes. Oxford: Oxford University press.).

o   How risk is understood around different things? How risk comes to be regulated and managed?

·       Social contracts

·       Porto Allegre Example; Make it an attractive political strategy in England

o   Who gets to speak, who gets to be involved

At one point in our recent conversation I foolishly brought up the question of social contracts and Helen suggested I blog on this subject.  So briefly, and at the risk of doing injustice to the subject, a brief and hasty intro.

Social contract theories in Western philosophy have a long history:

Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau advocated very different forms of social contract theories, but essentially a social contract is an agreement amongst ourselves about the type of social organisation we wish to abide by.  For example, we typically submit to laws, give up some freedoms, in return for a sense of security and protection. 

Rousseau - “Man is born free but everywhere he is in chains” – wants a contract that ensures ‘egalité’; in a contract individuals give up certain minimal liberties in exchange for certain protections; for example, we agree to pay tax and abide by just laws in exchange for the protection of our liberty.  .

John Rawls (1921 – 2002) A Theory of Justice (1972) sparked off a lifetimes work for himself and others.  He has modified his theory several times.  He takes up some of Kant’s ideas on reason and places them into institutional arrangements and procedures for ensuring justice as fairness.  Rawls wishes to update contract theories for modern societies and in America and the UK at least we have a political class many of whom studied politics, philosophy and economics, probably at a 'top' university and will almost certainly have immersed themselves in Rawls's work

He extends Kant's thinking of an imaginary contract; for Kant an imaginary act of collective consent “is the test of the rightfulness of every public law”; does the law frame the ‘united will’ and oblige citizens as if they had consented?

Contracts carry moral weight in so far as they realise two ideas: autonomy and reciprocity; John Rawls (1971, revised 1999) A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism (1993) (The latter responded to critics by introducing the idea of the overlapping consensus - public reason – we might never agree but we can come to public consensus; builds on Mill’s notion of democracy as government by public discussion)

principles of justice in the social contract come from the “original position” - what would we agree to in an initial situation of equality from behind a “veil of ignorance” (i.e. knowing nothing about each other).  He argued we would agree these arrangements:

1) Equal right to basic liberties compatible with liberties of others                

2) inequalities permissible only if they work to the least well off members of society and equality of opportunity open to all in holding office

Difference principle: people to use their different natural talents for the common good; basic structure of society to be arranged:   “entitlements to legitimate expectations” - an entitlement only arises when the “rules of the game are in place”.

Contrary to the Aristotelian tradition Rawls argues that the notion of ‘just deserts’ for people is morally arbitrary.  What is just and unjust is the way that institutions deal with the facts of uneven distribution of difference.  Liberal democracies should therefore be neutral as to the ends or goods of institutions in relation to society providing they uphold these principles.  Needs a state to arrange the contract but should only be as minimal as necessary.

Rawls has a multitude of admirers and critics.  Paul Graham (2007) has done for Rawls what Jenkins does for Bourdieu -provide a neat summary.  One of the principles that emerge from Rawls is the concept of public reasoning which has been taken up by Jurgen Habermas and Amartya Sen in different ways.  The difficulty is how to maintain a liberal notion of private rights within a public dialogue that is sensitive to cultural differences.  Rawls is concerned with political arrangements, Habermas (1995) I think has a more global interest in how we defend rational notions of the common good through dialogue, he reworks Kant not through the subject but through discourse.  Sen's work is about capacities to participate in public reasoning.  I have not read much of Nancy Fraser's work but she critiques the notion of public reasoning for not accounting for gendered and power inequalities in the public sphere.  Fraser (2010) does however believe in forms of public reasoning and her theories of justice revolve around both redistribution, recognition and representation.  Themes particularly relevant for concepts of voice and justice.

 

Michael Sandel (the “encumbered self” 1984), Alasdair MacIntyre (the storied self -1994) are critics of Rawls that I'm more familiar with. 

How do we decide between competing visions of the ‘good life’, can a theory of justice (e.g. Kant and Rawls) be neutral as to these questions?  MacIntyre (2001) argues that liberalism is an intellectual tradition that contains normative values about how we ought to live and does not therefore propose ‘neutral’ theories of justice; we have to argue those out in social contexts.

Sandel (1984) has critiqued Rawls for having insufficiently taken into account issues of power but fundamentally advancing a thin conception of morality, a weak version of attachment to each other.  We cannot leave behind our narratives to arrive at the original position.  People need access to substantive values capable of motivating them that are not purely based on rational reasons but on a history of attachments and disagreements.  While we have to reflect upon and question our values we cannot escape them, they are part of our character, our ‘moral depth’.  Philosophers such as Richard Rorty have accused MacIntyre and Sandel of being communitarians – a relativist position that Rorty (1994) claims is a “wistful” attachment to some poorly theorized concept of community.    Communities have the possibility of being tyrannical and destructive of liberties.  Rawls argues that to specify in too much detail the principles of a good life would require a much more authoritarian political regime than most people would find tolerable in advanced democracies.  Rorty argues that liberal democracies do not need substantive philosophies of the 'good life' and his accusation of "terminal wistfulness" would certainly extend to Michael Fielding's work as well. 

 

 Incidentally, both Sandel and MacIntyre have rejected the communitarian label, MacIntyre (2001) argues that communitarianism is just another form of liberalism.  

 

So where does that leave us?  I argue, contra Rorty,  a need to 're-enchant' the public sphere with ethical reasoning, however wistful that might be, and that this is, contrary to postmodernism and some tenets of liberalism, a possibility - I feel another blog coming on.  But briefly, MacIntyre (1994, 2001) makes a compelling argument that it is in the context of social practices and how virtues are partly definitive of and extended by these practices and how they define their telos, that we need to seek reasoned civic engagement.  At the level of the state and a global public culture it may be that our reasons derived from differing moral traditions are now incommensurable and irreconcilable.  However, contemporary 

institutions such as schools are powerful sites not only for the content of a richer civic engagement through curriculum reform, but also for the modelling and encouragement of civic virtues.  Perhaps we need to start with what constitutes excellence as opposed to effectiveness in the learning cultures of our schools and this I would maintain requires some notion, qua Aristotle,  of human telos and flourishing.  Thanks for reading this far!

 

References;

Fraser, N. (2010) Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World (New York, Columia University Press). 

Graham, P. (2007) Rawls (Oxford, Oneworld Publications)

 

Habermas, J. (1995) The Theory of Communicative Action: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, Volume 1 (Boston, Beacon Press).

 

MacIntyre, A. (1994) After Virtue: a study in moral theory (London, Duckworth).

MacIntyre, A. (2001) Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (London, Duckworth).

 

Rawls, J. (1973) A Theory of Justice (London, Oxford University Press). 

 

Rorty, R. (1994) Objectivity, Relativism and Truth (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press). 

Sandel, M. (1984) The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self, Political Theory, 12(1), 81-96.

 

Sandel, M. (2010) Justice: What's the Right Thing To Do? (London, Penguin).

Sen, A. (2010) The idea of Justice (London, Penguin).