You Tube Theology

From the UN Secretary General to the World Economic Forum, demands have multiplied in 2020 for a renewal of our social contract. But what does that mean? The social contract metaphor expresses a fundamental social connection or bond, subtending explicit legislation or regulatory norms. This paper uses insights from key recent thinkers, including Michel Serres, to develop a framework for understanding what we mean when we call for a new social contract. It argues that the contract metaphor as it is customarily deployed both reflects and reinforces an artificial and dangerous notion of autonomy that alienates the supposed subject of the contract from lived experience and predisposes contractarianism to fostering discrimination and exclusion. These pathologies run deeper than the metaphor itself, and deeper than the pulleys and levers of legislation and regulation that we often have in mind when we muse about renewing the social contract. The paper concludes by showing how the renewal of the social contract cannot be limited to legislative or regulatory changes alone. If we are seriously to address the pathological autonomy that underpins the social contract we must draw on the resources of philosophy in addition to those of politics and the social sciences.