How the Modern Social Contract Tradition Loads the Dice in Favour of the Centralised, Sovereign State
The following essay is an excerpt from my book in progress, The Polycentric Republic: A Theory of Civil Order for a Free and Diverse Society.
The ideology of order we have inherited from the social contract tradition of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant primes us to view the sovereign State as a unique benefactor of civil order.[1] The familiar story of individuals consenting to the creation of a State in order to escape the inconveniences of a stateless society tricks us into accepting a false choice between anarchy and a strong, unitary State.
Specifically, the modern social contract story told by influential political thinkers like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and John Rawls, has made our political imagination peculiarly receptive to highly centralised political arrangements, such as the sovereign State, and peculiarly unreceptive to complex, polycentric political arrangements, such as federations of cities with civil authority dispersed across a wide plurality of actors.