ABSTRACT
The last chapter closed with the sociologist’s dream of ideal happiness, which seems all too often not to be. If the analysis of contract by convention is apt, there are conspicuous issues to investigate in the hope of finding structured explanations as to why such contracts often do not regulate behavior in ongoing Prisoner’s Dilemmas. Against contract theories of the formation of the state, Comte argued that “to attribute to [the principle of cooperation] the formation of the social state, as it was the fashion of the last century to do, is a capital error; but when the association has once begun, there is nothing like this principle of cooperation for giving consistency and character to the combination.” 1
