that would be great. It just sucks watching it drop as though it doesn't exist.

As government is not an entity of it's own.

What has distorted things so much imo, is that we have let our creations take forms that appear to exist and act outside of the individuals who created it. The machine then takes over and no longer serves the creators.

Edit- this does not hold true if you are an occupied nation.

over our collective selves. Those in government are the agents, accountable to us as the principle. We give them leeway to work on our behalf, but when they cross the line and go too far we as principle have a right/duty to reign our government agents back in. The authority for the state to exercise coercion over us is granted from us by us for our government to act on our collective behalf to maintain order. When the state oversteps the bounds and employs unreasonable use of government coercion, we need to reign them in lest we break the social contract.

Kind of makes my head spin a bit. Thanks for sharing your idea. It forced me to look at social contract in a way that I was failing to see it before.

It's an injection of 18th century bourgeois mercantile relations into human group relationships.

One of its main flaws is that a contract implies an equal relationship between the parties. That ha never been the case economically or politically. We are feeling the effects of this false theory acutely at the moment.

A society should be based on attending to the needs of its weakest members.

That said, you've described the concept accurately. It is in theory the tradeoff of autonomy for security and comfort. More to the point, it is a rationale for the legitimacy of the ruling classes. "We can do this because you've agreed to it. See Clause 87."

You might find this interesting:

http://polisciprof.blogspot.com/2007/02/comparing-marx-and-rousseau.html

I guess the framework of my paper will be that the US was founded on the principles of liberalism enforced by the government that sprang up from the theory of the social contract. My thought was that the state has no implicit right to run roughshod over individual liberties. I was to argue that doing so constitutes a break in the social contract. So I take your point, but I'm set for purposes of this project on the social contract.

"Illiberalism in a Liberal Society: Holding Unelected Agents of the State Accountable to the Social Contract" is my working title.

This national was formed with the idea of a social contract (or construct )

I hope you can share more as your writing progresses. This isn't scholarly, but an opinion piece from a pretty reputable man:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/19/our-broken-social-contract/?_r=0

On some topic. Can be formal like a constitution or laws, or informal like shared meaning for the word tree - these informal ones generally arrived at and enforced through usage and peer feedback

in order to raise life above the competition/exploitations and predations of humans a brutes of nature. This requires a potential loss of liberty which is itself defined by the will of the people.

The people's expressed will was expected to be accommodated by a body of governors which might include various agents, bureaucracies, and as you suggest such things as police.

The need for a governing body wasn't because the people were incapable of erecting values that would guide society, but because dealing with the details was impossible for the population as a whole to live their daily lives and also tend to specific actions required to address the particular situations that arose from governing according to the people's will. Which I suppose could include policing, but also the actions of courts to settle disputes and address criminal acts, and today would possibly include publically owned utilities.

So I think you are right. The police as agents of the governing body are supposed to be acting within the limits of the will of the people. It's pretty clear that people wouldn't want to be brutalized as rising above the brutality of human nature was the basis for coming together into community.

is just. Very appreciated.

some social contract theories look at this from a point of view of a society and how that society derives rights from what members want. That would be closer to both the views of John Locke and even some of the French revolutionaries.

Thomas Hobbes was more of the state of nature and how we chose to live in society to avoid it. It was a more authoritarian way of seeing life.

In modern terms, the social contract has evolved. And I prefer John Rawls ideas that all derives from a sense of justice and a search for justice. Of course in the Rawlian way of looking at things, police and police powers figure highly, since they come out of a collective need, and the society has a right to control police. Police derives from us, as a society and should be controlled by us. Johan Rawls is just fascinating and highly recommended.

And if you want to go to the edge of this, explore critical race theory, and how race actually influences a lot of our lives, even in a "post racial era." It also explores some of what i like to call on the edge of things, and how minority - majority interactions happen.

The Internet Encyclopedia of philosophy is a good intro, but you will not find critical race in there, I think partly because it originally started in law.

Though they do go into feminist theory, which is a while different kettle of fish.

Of course Critical Race Theory is essential these days in my mind.

position" and "veil of ignorance" and think it would be very useful if I brush up on him a bit. Thank you for contributing to my thought process. Much appreciated.

somebody mentioned him in a GA and I went... who is that? Been reading his stuff on and off ever since.