ABSTRACT
This chapter engages closely with social facts of legal consciousness as they relate to ethnicity and religion, and enlightens understanding of the debate while also critiquing its assumption that the social contract is a matter of plain historical fact. It also argues that the resort to historical facts is emblematic of a larger tendency to view truth in law and politics as a matter of plain facts, a view that distorts and blocks ethnocrats and liberals from appreciating the potential significance of the social contract as a common ground of justification between them. The social contract was first introduced as a term of art in Malaysian politics in the early 1980s. Since that time, officials, citizens, as well as academics regularly invoke the idea when they discuss Malaysian law and politics. Hobbism is a conception of legal authority that captures the major ideas in Thomas Hobbes's legal and political philosophy.
