Future Hindsight - The Social Contract - History of a Big Idea: Melissa Lane

The Social Contract - History of a Big Idea: Melissa Lane

10/21/21 • 42 min

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Future Hindsight

The Social Contract

The state of nature is a human condition that exists in any space that lacks a civil authority. With the social contract, we're prepared to make a deal with each other in order to live together as best we can and exit the state of nature. Philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau expressed versions of the social contract that influence governments around the world today.

Co-Creating Reality

We are all co-creators of our community politics and social outcomes. The ancient Greeks embraced civic thought as a pervasive and abiding concern for the matters belonging to the community in common. Classical ideas can provide a lens for choosing to embrace or to abandon the obligation to sustain and participate in a mutually beneficial reality.

Mutual Aid

Where is the social contract working today? In response to the pandemic, mutual aid sprung up to meet people’s needs in many communities. Members participate as much as they're able to and ask for what they need. In doing so, the group can work together to sustain and provide for its members.

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Melissa Lane is the Class of 1943 Professor of Politics and the Director of the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. Her research and teaching are focused in the area of the history of political thought, with a special expertise in ancient Greek thought, and in normative political philosophy, including especially environmental ethics and politics. She is an associated faculty member in the Princeton Department of Classics and Department of Philosophy.

Her books include The Birth of Politics: Eight Greek and Roman Political Ideas and Why They Matter (PUP, 2015); Plato’s Progeny (Duckworth, 2001); and Method and Politics in Plato’s Statesman (CUP, 1998).

At Princeton, she was the first director of the Program in Values and Public Life, and is co-chair of the Steering Committee for Service and Civic Engagement and of the Climate Futures Initiative. She received a Phi Beta Kappa teaching prize in 2015. Before joining the Princeton faculty in 2009, she taught in the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge and was a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. She is a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Royal Historical Society, and the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce (RSA).

The Social Contract

Co-Creating Reality

Mutual Aid

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Previous Episode

Season 16: The Social Contract

Our all-new season is all about something that we most often hear about in terms of its brokenness: the social contract. We will be asking big questions about how we live together, what we owe each other, what we can ask of governments, and how we can repair what’s broken, renegotiate what never worked, or what’s not working anymore.

Next Episode

A New Social Contract: Minouche Shafik

Architecture of Opportunity

We lose talent in our society when we overlook those from poor backgrounds or minority families. For example, Lost Einsteins are children who harness above-average skills, but don’t have a chance to invent and create later in their lives because they lack access to opportunity. John Rawls' Veil of Ignorance provides the template for a just society where the luck of your birth need not be a factor in your life’s outcomes.

The Importance of Childcare

Our social contract has widely depended on women to provide free labor to care for children and the household. Because of the imbalance in structures like maternity leave, the gender pay gap can largely be attributed to children. By investing in affordable and accessible quality childcare, our society will benefit from the productivity and talents of all the women who are now subject to this child penalty.

The New Social Contract with Business

Global corporate taxes have been lowering for decades as countries fight to attract major corporations. Using taxes to invest in our society is part of the social contract, and a minimum global corporate tax will ensure that large companies can no longer shirk this responsibility. In addition, the current economic model lacks any measurement of how we degrade our environment. If these costs were measured, a carbon tax can be designed to reflect them and incentivize sound choices about our environment.

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Baroness Minouche Shafik is the Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is a leading economist whose career has straddled public policy and academia. A graduate of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, she received her MSc at the London School of Economics and her DPhil at the University of Oxford. By the age of 36, she had become the youngest ever Vice President of the World Bank. She’s taught at Georgetown University and the Wharton Business School. She later served as the Permanent Secretary of the Department for International Development from 2008 to 2011, Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund from 2011-2014, and as Deputy Governor of the Bank of England from 2014-2017.

Baroness Shafik has served on and chaired numerous boards and currently serves as a Trustee of the British Museum, the Supervisory Board of Siemens, the Council of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and the Economy Honours Committee. She was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list in 2015. In July 2020, she was made a crossbench peer in the House of Lords. Her new book is What We Owe Each Other: A New Social Contract.