Hobbes is treated by intellectual historians as a pessimist because people are so anxious to enter into a social contract that will protect their lives and livelihood that they will rush to anyone who offers such guarantees, including potential leaders who are demagogues or charlatans, so long as they offer peace and security. Never mind that Hobbes gives a back door way to democracy because he is saying that the authority for leadership is the result of the consent of the governed in that the popular majority decides whether they can live with the going or the proposed political arrangement. John Locke, on the other hand, is to be regarded as an optimist in that there is never an end to how people can form a new social contract, a new one created as soon as an old one ends, people always political in that they can frame an ever more useful constitution-- or, at least, the British are always able to. Moreover, there is, in addition to the overall social contract, there are any number of individual contracts that people can make which are mutually advantageous, such as contracts for employment, or to rent land, each crafted that is voluntary and reasonable, even if some people can arrive at a disadvantage as when a person agrees to work for low wages because poor people need the work more than the rich people need to hire one or another of them. Bad contracts are still effective except when people’s lives are endangered, and so slavery is prohibited by Locke as an individual contract because becoming a slave means putting one’s life in danger. And, according to Locke, people have innate rights, regardless of the nature of the constitution or the laws, whereby people are recognized as morally free to act because such things, like free speech or privacy, are recognized as part of a person’s nature rather than just the sufferance allowed by the government. It would therefore seem, in Locke’s view, that morality orders most of social life in that people can appeal to government, freely agreed to contracts, and personal rights, as allowing people to defend, of right, their dignities. But the Lockean question remains: where are the areas of social life where morality doesn’t prevail? What parts of social life have no moral sway, either because of a general social contract, or a particular contract, or as a matter of right? Where is the abyss into which people can descend where there is no morality?
Before considering those extreme conditions of social life where morality does not obtain, consider how different is the Locke view of society as that can be compared to the developing alternative, which is the growing Conservative point of view that found fruit in Burke in the Eighteenth Century and Durkheim in the Nineteenth and can be found as well in the French Ancien Regime in the Seventeenth Century. The Conservative view contemplates larger societies as communities of communities, people tied to one another in local places and their social and economic interactions and with the larger communities, such as nations, constituting the intersections between the various internal communities so that kingship is an amalgam of intersecting areas presided over by a monarchy beholden to those constituent entities as those represented by their various aristocrats. What might be called the organic nature of the larger society comes from the manifold ways in which people are locally conjoined to one another and the variety of ways in which aristocrats are subsumed to the monarchical gaze. Louis XIV has to keep track of what his major subjects are up to just as local aristocrats have to attend to their various inderlings, quite aside from the fact that there are stark divisions between aristocrats and peasants and there are city people independent of those other domains.
That Conservative view continues to the present day in that local government, such as that of states and localities, are to make the important decisions because each of them have their own peculiarities which require tailoring to the needs of the constituencies, whether about guns or salacious material, or about how to deal with ethnic minority groups. Different localities are different and to be dealt with on a particularistic basis rather than, as the conservatives say, one fit serving all, just as Louis XVI had to cater to the particular needs of each nobleman and area.
That is very different from the Lockean view whereby every subject is independent in that these people each have direct features of rights, every one of them having the same rights and independent of whatever differences there are between the various areas of the realm. Moreover, every society breaks down into being a purposeful organization in that voluntary organizations are created to suit the needs of their memberships even up to and including the purpose of monarchy as safeguarding and furthering the rights of the people in the overall realm. Whereas Conservatism sees a nation as a community of community, Liberals like Locke see a nation as an organization of organization, falling apart or reconstituting themselves so as to accomplish their ends, whether political or economic or cultural, while Conservatives hallow, always have and continue doing so, to maintain the way of life of what they consider the status quo ante, the customs of their neighborhoods and their nations. This is so different a perspective, the Conservatives not to change otherwise than to restore, while the Liberals to improve through their endeavors and proposals, that it is difficult to see how they can even communicate with one another, the Liberals always out for an agenda while the Conservatives are against doing new things, only old ones.
The test case for Lockeians and other Liberals is how to deal with those matters beyond the boundaries of rights and those two types of contracts: those of private contract and those of the general social contract. How are they to be ordered? The answer is that they are not ordered but simply left each of their members to be guided by prudence rather than moral principle. The two key examples of those beyond morality are revolution and war. Thomas Jefferson, a clear Lockeian, never declared in “The Declaration of Independence” that there was a right of a people to revolt or that the sovereign had violated a contract. Rather, Jefferson invoked the idea that there were a number of grievances that constituted an explanation rather than a justification for rebellion. Jefferson would persuade people that, in the terms of a later generation, that of Kant, that people should argue it was prudent to rebel rather than that it was moal . This judgment is not constrained by any sort of morality. Rather, that the revolutionists are serious minded in having decided to take the risks of rebellion, and the sufferings that would inevitably pursue to the nation at large as well as to the revolutionists themselves if they were to be defeated, they instead pledge their sacred honor as the bona fides of their efforts as considered ones. Their characters alone attest to the weight of their claims as amounting insufferable, sufficient to, deciding upon rebellion. The same is true of other revolutions. The Confederates did claim that there was nothing in the Constitution that forbade them from rebellion, though the Constitution had not included within it any provisions for putting asunder the national compact while Brexit did follow the procedures whereby a member state could separate itself from the European Union, proof enough that the United States never did contemplate a state ridding itself of the United States. Rather, the Confederates relied on the fact that they could get away with it as the basis for having decided to do so, letting the war decide the matter without, even after losing, not giving up the idea that slavery had remained a good system and somehow to be reestablished even without slavery itself, because the separation of the races seemed necessary and therefore inevitable. All that losing the war did was end the war and the ex-rebs assured those in the Union that they would not rebel again, all other issues aside. Prudence relies on consequences while morality relies on prior principles, rebellions without morality, only what seem sufficient affronts to the way present arrangements work and so in some sense “require” breaking a social contract by force.
Another major activity of social life that is not guided by morality is war. In that case, activities are also guided by prudence rather than by right. The laws of warfare are presumed to be based on morality but in fact by necessity in that people do whatever they can to achieve their military objectives and are forsworn to do something, such as kill prisoners or kill civilians, only because they are irrational activities, expressions of anger and revenge rather than military necessity. Indeed, activities which would seem to include awful atrocities, such as the indiscriminate bombing of Geman cities during World War Two, were seen at the time as having the military goal of demoralizing the citizenry so as to encourage them to surrender or are collateral damageattendant upon for the destructiom of industrial structures and therefore excusable.. Henry V slaughtered the French prisoners at Agincourt because there might be a counterattack which might free them and so make them again as dangerous combattants. Whether to punish those who lost wars to be punished for having waged them is a tricky question. Versailles regarded Germany as paying reparations for having inflicted war on the world, but whether that is justified depends on evaluating the balance of interests that made both sides feel it incumbent upon them to pursue war. Germany did not think that Britain had a right to have overwhelming sea power before World War I and Japan was serving an essential interest by trying to gain the oil and scrap iron the United States prohibited itself from selling to Japan. Each side sees its own side s needing to satisfy its vital interests, whether not to let Britain be defeated in World War I or prevent Nazi Germany from enduring for long over Europe. Morality goes out the window when interests are at stake, never mind the Kellogg Briand Treaty to outlaw war, so declared in 1928 so as to prevent wars but without understanding war’s nature as beyond morality and so without law. The United States has been very quick to criticize Russia’s war on Ukraine as barbaric and illegal because the atrocities were so many even if Ukraine had traditionally been part of the Russian and the Soviet spheres of influence and to which Russia wanted to have it restored, the proof otherwise in the fact that the Ukrainians have demonstrated they do not want Russian leadership by engaging in a war against Russia.
Are there any other areas of social life which eschew morality even if they may claim to backhandedly comply? Think of the wisdom of the adage that all’s well in love and war. What that speaks is that people will avail themselves of whatever they can to accomplish their ends in war and love even if they pretend to follow the courtesies of both because they are so driven by either that they are tempted and will not fail to lapse at morality. War leads to atrocities because they cannot overcome their lust for revenge however military forces may work hard to contain them. Similarly, love is so overwhelming an emotion that people will put aside whatever scruples they have so as to coerce or cajole or charm their potential conquests, even if they are ashamed of themselves for having done so. For that reason, what people do in the realm of love is to be hidden because it does not show people at their best, and people are to be forgiven for the putative transgressions of love as being merely human, whether men taking advantage of their power or women of their allure. Only prigs and opportunities like Ken Starr would persecute Bill Clinton for his transgressions.
But the woman’s movement is out to end this practice, to right things wrong by recognizing that there are rights and constraints and legal compacts dealing with how men and women are to interact with one another and that could include, for example, making forbidden in courtships between superiors and inferiors within an organizaation even if the relationship is considered consentual because it has not, by definition, been consentual, just as sex with underage persons is considered statuatory rape even if supposedly consentual. Love has become subject to morality, however constraining it seems until it becomes usual as well as socially proscribed. Law and morality march forward. There still remains, for the moment, treating love as a matter of prudence rather than morality. You remain at risk and therefore ought to be wary in becoming emotionally involved with a man or a woman. There are dangers there and this encounter may be remembered as the most dramatic and heroic set of events in your life whether or not it results in marriage. We give that up when we make laws and contracts and so may come to regard the idea of freely and independently arranged liaisons between lovers as a romantic age that lasted for two hundred years that has come to an end, for ill or good. Such is the burden as well as the liberation which is created through social contract. The #Me Too movement limited itself to dealing with individual atrocities and used custom rather than law to enforce it, as happened by ostracizing celebrities and politicians, but it did not propose a way to amend state laws to, leet us say, make it easier to convict accusedsexual harrassers, and that may have been wise because laws that are used to extend rights and that are part of the general social contract, as government can amend it, might have been too draconian to contemplate. Shame does the work that principle can’t.