ABSTRACT
That Hegel was in some sense a critic of social contract theory is beyond dispute. Indeed he was widely regarded, especially by an earlier generation of political theorists, as the philosopher who had most effectively undermined the doctrine’s credibility. Gough, for example, in his classic study of the different guises assumed by the social contract from antiquity to modern times, admits that Hegel’s ‘portrait of human life is closer to history and reality than the abstractions of the contractarian school’ and that he had ‘enunciated a political philosophy totally at variance with everything’ the social contract tradition had stood for.1 Lessnoff has reiterated the point, arguing that, in Hegel’s view, contract ‘fails to do justice to the grandeur and majesty of the state, and the obligations it is thereby entitled to impose on the individual’.2 The claim is that the community, and the state which expresses the identity of that community, logically and actually precedes the individual constituents of the community. It may be possible to regard individuals in some aspects of their lives as narrowly self-interested calculators of advantage; and in these spheres it might be proper to invoke the image of contract as a means of rendering their mutual relations intelligible. But contractual relations at the micro-level presuppose wider bonds which are not themselves contractual. To treat the state itself as the product of an actual or even hypothetical contract would thus invert the logical relationship which obtains between contractual and other obligations. Far from helping to clarify our understanding of political obligation, contractual language would actually muddy the issue, confusing our duty to fulfil voluntarily incurred commitments with the grounds for the fulfilment of our duties. Taken in conjunction with Hegel’s more general insistence that cultures, practices, institutions, and so on should be seen as products of a progressively emerging historical process, these theoretical arguments would seem to make the idea of contract redundant. It could serve neither as a historical explanation of the establishment of states nor as a hypothetical explanation of the basis of obligation to the state.
