Associations in Social Contract Theory: Toward a Pluralist Contractarianism

Abstract

Liberals can be distinguished from one another in a number of ways, including by what they regard as the greatest threats to liberty. According to Jacob T. Levy, “rationalist” liberals think that nonpolitical institutions are the chief threats to freedom and that democratic governance can free people from these private tyrannies. By contrast, “pluralist” liberals think that governments are the chief threats to liberty, and civil associations are a bulwark against encroaching state power. Levy has recently argued that the rationalist and pluralist strands of the liberal tradition cannot be combined into a single political theory. In this essay, I disagree. My strategy is to develop a version of contractarian political theory that treats associations as sources of legitimacy. This pluralist contractarianism solves two problems. It shows that the social contract theory can survive the pluralist critique. And since the social contract theory is often understood as rationalist liberalism par excellence, it shows that we can combine rationalist and pluralist insights into a single theory, contra Levy.