[Abstracts] Conference at Nantes, France, January 20-21, 2016 - André Santos Campos

André Santos Campos

 

“The Social Contract Tradition(s): Agreements and Reconstructions”

 

In this presentation, I will try to defend two claims that somehow contradict the widespread view on the different modern theories of the social contract. (1) The first is that there is no single social contract tradition, but rather an array of social contract traditions. I will identify at least four different trends that use the conceptual framework of the social contract quite differently: i) the Catholic trend emerging during the sixteenth century in the Iberian school of natural law, with authors such as Bartolomeu de las Casas, Francisco de Vitoria, and Francisco Suarez; ii) the Protestant trend emerging in the seventeenth century, with authors such as Hobbes, Pufendorf and Locke, which became the predominant version of the social contract during the Enlightenment (including authors associated with Catholicism); iii) the contemporary theories of contractualism developed by authors such as John Rawls, T. M. Scanlon and David Gauthier; and iv) what I call the inner reconstruction of the social contract, which can be traced back to Spinoza’s semantic revolution. (2) The second claim I will try to defend is that the social contract has a variety of forms of agreement and consent beyond the old series of negotiation-celebration-effects derived from classical Private Roman Law. In order to prove this, I will focus on the way Spinoza’s contractarianism evolved from its earliest formulations in the Theological-Political Treatise to its more developed and complex formulations in the Political Treatise.