The Social Contract In Hard Times

The Foundation for Law, Justice and Society

Bridging the gap between academia and policymakers

The Social Contract Revisited

The Social Contract in Hard Times
REPORT AND ANALYSIS OF THE SIXTH WORKSHOP OF THE SOCIAL CONTRACT REVISITED, OXFORD 7-9 OCTOBER 2009

Amir Paz-Fuchs

The Foundation for Law, Justice and Society
in affiliation with

The Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, University ofOxford

www.fljs.org

The Foundation for Law, Justice and Society

© The Foundation for Law, Justice and Society 2010

THE SOCIAL CONTRACT IN HARD TIMES . 1

Contents

Introduction

2

Black Swans and Elephants on the Move

3

SESSION ONE: Theory

6

SESSION TWO: Institutional Aspects

9

SESSION THREE: From Welfare to Warfare? On the Boundaries of the Social Contract

11

SESSION FOUR: The DisparateEffects of Hard Times on the Social Contract

15

Conclusion

18

Participants

20

2 . THE SOCIAL CONTRACT IN HARD TIMES

Introduction
This report provides both a record and a critical assessment of the sixth workshop of the Foundation for Law, Justice and Society’s programme, The Social Contract Revisited. The workshop was held in Oxford on 7–9 October 2009 and asked, perhaps for the firsttime, what effects hard times have on the political, economic, and institutional facets of the social contract. A decade or two of unparalleled affluence in most industrial, capitalist countries has been accompanied by the dwindling of the social contract, also known as ’welfare state retrenchment‘. Arguably, the two are related. Against the background of increasing stability and prosperity, andimprovements in personal security, social order, general health, and so on, the wealthy are motivated to opt-out of collective arrangements and to establish institutions that cater to their own needs, while neglecting to fund the needs of the less fortunate. Nevertheless, it is a commonly held view that crises bring people together. The indiscriminate nature of some crises (such as terrorism and war)may lead to a reassessment of the social contract and of the institutions that underlie it. And yet, some ’general‘ disasters are more discriminate than others and have Yet, the extensive literature on the modern welfare state notably lacks a thorough and methodical discussion of the way sudden events, referred to by some participants as ’black swans‘, impact social policy and the social contractin general. This workshop sought to make some progress towards bridging this gap. The twenty-first century provides new (and some old) challenges for the social contract, and the recent and ongoing hard times may provide the opportunity to confront them in an efficient way. For these reasons, it is clear why many commentators have suggested that reformers should not let a crisis go to waste. AsTheda Skocpol has shown, for example, the American Civil War provided the platform for a categorical scheme of payments to soldiers injured in action and to widows of soldiers killed in action, that could not have been implemented previously. different effects. Witness, for example, the response to Hurricane Katrina, which victimized predominantly poor minorities. The current economic crisis, it hasbeen argued, affects the wealthy and the (upper) middle class much more than it affects the working class.

BLACK SWANS AND ELEPHANTS ON THE MOVE . 3

Black Swans and Elephants on the Move
’covered over a third of all the elderly men living in Keynote lecture by Professor Francis G. Castles, Professor of Political Science, Edinburgh University (Emeritus) and Australian National University Chair:Professor Denis Galligan, Professor of SocioLegal Studies, University of Oxford the North’2 and eventually took about 40 per cent of American government spending by the end of the century. And yet, Castles notes that this event was not sufficient to lead to an institutional change. The scheme was, to an extent, ad hoc, catering as it did only for Civil War veterans and their dependants, and...