On Tuesday January 18, The World Economic Forum is hosting a panel discussion on Renewing a Global Social Contract. The concept of a social contract has its origins in the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, who used it to justify the authority of the state. But while it can seem like a useful conceptual tool, it also contains many pitfalls. When it's the global elite inviting the world into a new global social contract, we need to be careful. Who is setting the terms of the contract? And whose interests is the contract protecting exactly? Unless the process by which the terms of the social contract are formulated is democratized, we should be highly suspect of the very idea of a global social contract, writes Jason Neidleman.

Talk of a new global social contract is in the air. Elite institutions from management consultancies, to leading universities and even the United Nations are all alluding to the concept. According to the McKinsey Global Institute, a new global social contract should focus on “two fronts” [1]: The first is sustaining and expanding economic growth and productivity; the second is mitigating the suffering faced by those adversely affected by these trends. Minouche Shafik, director of the London School of Economics, envisions a new global social contract that attends more carefully to women and to the global South [2]. António Guterres, Secretary General of the UN, favors a “New Social Contract and a New Global Deal that create equal opportunities for all and respect the rights and freedoms of all.”[3]

Today the World Economic Forum, perhaps the global elite institution, hosts a panel entitled “Renewing a Global Social Contract,” in which the speakers will attempt to identify “new policies and business actions…needed to create social mobility, good jobs, and an equitable society for all.”[4] Framing a political agenda around the concept of a contract has an obvious appeal. If politicians and business leaders can argue that their proposed policies have the consent of everyone involved, in virtue of some a social contract, then those policies will enjoy a level of legitimacy they wouldn’t otherwise have. But simply invoking the language of a “new global social contract” does not in itself establish much of anything. The devil is in the detail: Under what conditions could a claim to general consent be warranted? And who sets the terms of the contract?

The philosophical origins of the social contract idea and its problems

This question has been at the centre of the liberal political philosophy for four centuries. Early modern political thinkers like Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke were attracted to the idea of a social contract because it was a way of reconciling the authority of the state with the basic freedom and equality of its members. No doubt aspirations to a similar synthesis motivates the somewhat less philosophical present-day proponents of a social contract.

But, as we begin to think a bit more carefully, difficulties quickly emerge. Historically, sovereign authority has rarely emerged as a produce of formal consent. Very few of us have ever, or will ever, consent to the terms of the laws, norms, and institutions that govern our activity. To address this problem, early social contract theorists posited a pre-political state of nature, in which individuals were free and equal, none wielding any authority over another, and from which those individuals could plausibly consent, through a social contract, to the creation of a state and a sovereign.