![]() The social contract begins from a thought-experiment, in which a group of people gather together to decide on their common future. ![]() But human societies are by their nature exclusive, establishing privileges and benefits that are offered only to the insider, and which cannot be freely bestowed on all-comers without sacrificing the trust on which social harmony depends. Such a contract is addressed to the abstract and universal Homo oeconomicus who comes into the world without attachments, without, as Rawls puts it, a ‘conception of the good’, and with nothing save his rational self-interest to guide him. Freedom and obedience are one and the same. When law is founded in a social contract, therefore, obedience to the law is simply the other side of free choice. Contracts are the paradigms of self-chosen obligations – obligations that are not imposed, commanded or coerced but freely undertaken. If we could construe our obligation to the state on the model of a contract, therefore, we would have justified it in terms that all rational beings must accept. When you and I exchange promises, the resulting contract is freely undertaken, and any breach does violence not merely to the other but also to the self, since it is a repudiation of a well-grounded rational choice. Although the social contract exists in many forms, its ruling principle was announced by Hobbes with the assertion that there can be ‘no obligation on any man which ariseth not from some act of his own’.1 My obligations are my own creation, binding because freely chosen. “Political philosophers of the Enlightenment, from Hobbes and Locke, reaching down to John Rawls and his followers today, have found the roots of political order and the motive of political obligation in a social contract – an agreement, overt or implied, to be bound by principles to which all reasonable citizens can assent. Some stoked where there were no boilers to stoke, and these imaginary boilers came to be, for me, a fitting symbol of the communist economy.” Some stoked boilers in hospitals others in apartment blocks one stoked at a railway station, another in a school. They all belonged, I discovered, to the same profession: that of stoker. And in all of them I saw the same marks of suffering, tempered by hope and the same eager desire for the sign that someone cared enough to help them. In that room was a battered remnant of Prague’s intelligentsia – old professors in their shabby waistcoats long-haired poets fresh-faced students who had been denied admission to university for their parents’ political ‘crimes’ priests and religious in plain clothes novelists and theologians a would-be rabbi and even a psychoanalyst. I realized that there really was going to be an air raid, and that the air raid was me. ![]() I found a room full of people, and the same expectant silence. But the argument continued and I was able to push my way up again, past the guards and into the apartment. Dr Tomin came out, and an altercation ensued, during which I was pushed down the stairs. Outside the apartment, however, I encountered two policemen, who seized me as I rang the bell and demanded my papers. Everywhere the same expectant silence hung in the air, as when an air raid has been announced, and the town hides from its imminent destruction. The staircase of the apartment building was also deserted. “I arrived at the house, after walking through those silent and deserted streets, in which the few who stood seemed occupied on some dark official business, and in which party slogans and symbols disfigured every building.
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