What Is Original About Kant’s Original Contract?
Larry Krasnoff
College of Charleston
Northeastern Political Science Association, November 2003
What is the point of appealing to the notion of an original or social contract? Here is the
standard and not very instructive answer: one’s being a party to the contract is supposed to
provide a reason to obey the law, and especially to obey it when it seems coercive. If we have
agreed to the law, or agreed to be coerced by it, then we cannot complain of coercion at all.
That standard answer is, I think, the right answer. But making sense of it turns out to be
much harder than it seems, because there is a great temptation to clarify the idea of the social
contract with an appeal something that goes beyond the notion of the contract itself. On this kind
of reading, the original contract turns out not to be original at all. In what follows, I want to
show that avoiding this temptation is what distinguishes Kant’s treatment of the social contract
from that of others in modern political philosophy, and what accounts for the seeming thinness of
that treatment. Compared to Hobbes or Rawls, for example, Kant does much less with the idea
of the social contract. But if I am right that these other accounts are appealing to something more
than the original contract, then what seems like a weakness in Kant’s account may turn out to be
a strength.
To understand the temptation to appeal to more than the original contract, it helps to start
with the obvious fact that there is no actual contract to which citizens are parties. So then we
have to ask: why should we see coercive state authority as if it really were founded on a kind of
contract? The flat Kantian answer to this is: because this is our moral duty. But that answer
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