The Social Contract and Discourse on Inequality
by John Lawrence
Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote the Social Contract in 1762 in which he advocated for direct democracy. This is a democracy in which the people do not elect representatives, but vote directly. The US has a representative democracy which has opened the door for lobbying. Corporations lobby the representatives for all kinds of favors, the main one being tax breaks. These favors to corporations come into play because the US does not have a direct democracy which Rousseau advocates. Rousseau also wrote his Discourse on Inequality in 1754. In it he philosophises that private property is the origin and source of inequality.
There are two types of inequality according to Rousseau: natural inequality and moral inequality. Natural inequality we can do nothing about. People are born with various talents, abilities, personalities, good looks or the lack thereof. Nature has given each individual a different hand to play as in a card game. Then it is up to that individual to make the most of that hand. Moral inequality, on the other hand, is inequality that civil society can do something about either to redress or to make worse. According to the social contract, those having a stronger hand to play or having achieved a greater degree of success in the acquisition of private property or wealth have a duty to help the weaker members of society attain at least a decent level of existence. That is the social contract in a healthy society.
However, when those who have been successful in society, either by dint of birth or even hard work, use that success only to further feather their own nests, society breaks down, the social contract has been breached, and the illness of that society splashes out in all directions. In that case society has reached the kind of society that Hobbes envisioned, a society in which life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Hobbes philosophised that it was the purpose of society to ameliorate this natural condition, but, instead, we find that many societies, including present day ones, have exacerbated this natural state of affairs.
In order for a society to maintain its health, indeed even a state of democracy, there needs to be a social contract between the better off and the worse off. This kind of social contact is absent in the US today in which the better off think that they have no responsibility for the worse off. They only have the responsibility to further their own careers by any means necessary. The meritocracy has formed an elite in which all the prerogatives and perquisites of life accrue to them in portions far exceeding what any normal person can even comprehend, consume or digest while the majority of people represent the other side of the economic divide which is opening up wider and wider.
Thus representative democracy as opposed to direct democracy has opened the door for the corporatocracy - government by corporations and the wealthy. The US is no longer governed by the people, as it says in the Constitution but by wealthy meritocrats.
