Renegotiating the Social Contract: Hobbes to Rawls

Dissertation, University of Hawai'i (2003)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Rawls set out different versions of the social contract theory. In this dissertation, these different versions are treated as iterative accounts within an on-going meta-conversation. To facilitate this conversation, a generic social contract is developed that sets out a uniform way to look at the different versions of the social contract. The generic social contract highlights specific features of the contract process for comparison by creating a set of questions that are posed to each theorist. This conversation reveals a series of progressive choices regarding the values and standards incorporated into the moral and political institutions designed to bring about social order. Taken as a whole, the different versions are subsumed under a social contract paradigm that reinterprets the social contract as a diagnostic tool that goes back and forth between assessing problematic moral and political situations and the societal institutions that manage them. The social contract paradigm offers a technique of continuous inquiry that permits renegotiation of the social contract in light of progressive refinement of the demands placed upon moral and political institutions

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 79,898

External links

  • This entry has no external links. Add one.
Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Recognized rights as devices of public reason.Gerald Gaus - 2009 - Philosophical Perspectives 23 (1):111-136.
A paradox of sovereignty in Rousseau's social contract.Matthew Simpson - 2006 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 3 (1):45-56.
Psychological Contracts.Jeffery A. Thompson & David W. Hart - 2005 - Proceedings of the International Association for Business and Society 16:38-43.
Comment on Munoz-dardé's'liberty's chains'.Niko Kolodny - 2009 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 83 (1):197-212.
Hobbes and the social contract tradition.Jean Hampton - 1986 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
The Social Contract ; and, Discourses.Jean-Jacques Rousseau - 1973 - Rutland, Vt.: C.E. Tuttle Co.. Edited by G. D. H. Cole, J. H. Brumfitt & John C. Hall.
Social contract theory.Celeste Friend - 2004 - Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Analytics

Added to PP
2010-07-26

Downloads
94 (#140,643)

6 months
1 (#479,585)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Deb Kissinger
University of Hawaii

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

The Law of Peoples.John Rawls - 1993 - Critical Inquiry 20 (1):36-68.
The Law of Peoples.John Rawls - 2001 - Philosophical Quarterly 51 (203):246-253.

Add more references