SOCIAL CONTRACT POWERED BY TECHNOLOGY [CONTRACT SOCIAL POTENŢAT DE TEHNOLOGIE]

Jora Octavian-Dragomir
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Jora Octavian-Dragomir: Academia de Studii Economice din Bucureşti

Revista OEconomica, 2023, issue 04

Abstract:

“From the Gospels to the social contract, ideas have dominated the world” (J. Rueff). And, indisputably, the social contract is an “idea”. A defining one (although debatable too), which provides the symbolic backbone for the societal, political, and economic body. Modern statehood as well as national economies owe to it their fecundity. It is up to each of us with our idiosyncratic Weltanschauung whether we perceive or preach social contracting as elevating people from the state of nature, seen as savage and scarring, so as to entrust them to an absolute sovereign (T. Hobbes) or a government of elected representatives (J. Locke), or, somehow on the contrary, providing them shelter from a harmful society, which takes them away from the, here idyllically depicted, state of nature, just to enslave them (J.J. Rousseau). The state turns the competition of wild force into a “monopoly of legitimate violence” (M. Weber), that’s the rational and reserved narrative. But states tend to silently and swiftly confiscate this social contract from us. Yet, true democracy and law depend on its integrity. A tautology! But is the social contract restorable? By technology!

Date: 2023
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