Social contract, promising, and political order (Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau)

This dissertation gives critical consideration to the role and significance of mutual promising in the modern social contract theories of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as represented by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, with supplementary attention given to Grotius, Pufendorf, and Kant. In this dissertation I show that promising (and the corresponding virtues of fidelity and trust) are foundational concepts for this philosophical tradition and for modern constitutional regimes. Through a new comparative-analytic study of the use of promising as the privileged mode by which various theorists conceive the formation of civil society and political identities, I argue that social contract theory in the modern period is never simply a thin or proceduralist account of how self-interested actors might agree to juridical rules of governance, but rather a powerful moral discourse that seeks to cultivate “good men and good citizens” in ways that will support a particular vision of a well-ordered commonwealth. One purpose of this dissertation is to explicate the presence of a substantive or “thick” moral dimension to modern social and political thought that it is otherwise denied. The language of promising and fidelity within modern social contract theory discloses what I call an ethics of commitment that normatively exceeds the more customary theoretical-political concerns with legitimation and obligation. In these terms I show how the social contract endeavors to cultivate the very subjects who otherwise appear as the willful, voluntary agents of liberal democratic consent. With these neo-Aristotelian continuities revealed, I outline the steps necessary for a more adequate critique of social contract theory. Such a critique must be capable of weighing the values and risks of conceiving the political through the language of promising. I formulate the outlines for a new critique of social contract theory by supplementing the more familiar concerns of Hume and Hegel with the contributions of Nietzsche and Arendt.