This chapter contains answers to the Questionnaire on Constitutional Democracy for Chinese Liberal Intellectuals, which covers the basic concepts and institutional designs of constitutional democracy. China’s most pressing task is not making a new and better constitution, but rather formulating social contract through implementing the existing constitution, which does pay lip service to many political natural law precepts. Unlike many admirers of the American presidential system, I advocate for a Westminster-type parliamentary system, which has largely been borrowed by the current Chinese constitution, to be embedded in a federal framework for future China.

The century-long predicament of Chinese constitutionalism lies not in its constitutions, but in the complete absence of social contracts as the legitimizing foundation of any constitution. Although the Xinhai Revolution did not shed much blood, it was carried out very much in a way opposed to the spirit of social contract. In less than two years after the establishment of the First Republic, the ill-fated political cooperation between Yuan Shikai and the Nationalist Party was fatally disrupted. The Treaty of Versailles ignited the patriotic fire overnight and set the stage for Communist ascendance. The frequency analysis of keywords from the Xinhai Revolution to the May Fourth Movement showed that anti-contractual concepts such as revolution, Leninism and socialism had been soaring, and had become a popular trend by 1919, leading to the establishment of the Communist regime in 1949.

This chapter delves into the concept of legitimacy and introduces the readers to key debates on regulatory legitimacy. The concept of legitimacy has been extensively studied by scholars from various academic disciplines, including political theory, legal theory, political science, sociology and management studies. The resulting body of scholarship has, however, tended to remain in disciplinary siloes, making the study of legitimacy difficult to navigate. Chapter 11 offers first an exploration of different legitimacy claims that justify why individuals recognize an authority and its rules as legitimate. The chapter then moves to regulatory legitimacy.

This chapter sums up the main argument of the book and offers a brief overview of the reception of the Epicurean theory of justice.

This chapter provides an account of the agreements that lead to the creation of justice on the Epicurean view. In doing so, the three sections of the chapter complete the argument of Chapter 1 by focusing on the textual evidence in Epicurus and later Epicurean authors. The first section elaborates on the claim that the Epicureans defend a middle position in the nomos-phusis debate. The second section describes in more detail the content and function of agreements in Epicureanism. And the third section deals with the topic of who can make agreements on the Epicurean view, including the question of whether there can be agreements with nonhuman animals.

This chapter discusses the nomos-phusis debate of the fifth and fourth century BCE and introduces the book’s main argument: that the Epicureans defend a sophisticated middle position (vis-à-vis Plato and Aristotle, on the one hand, and some sophists, on the other) in this debate when it comes to justice. On the Epicurean view, justice is neither fully natural nor conventional; there is a robust virtue of justice and it is always better to be just than to be unjust, but it is not always better to obey the laws.

This chapter argues that while being just is of supreme importance in Epicureanism, obeying the law in all cases is not: the Epicureans allow that laws whose adherence is not useful and whose violation does not entail negative consequences may be violated. In arguing for this claim, the chapter discusses a question that Epicurus posed himself in a work that is no longer extant, namely, whether a sage, an ideal agent, would violate a law, knowing he will escape detection. The chapter provides a detailed suggestion on how to understand Epicurus’ pronouncement, discusses alternative readings that have been advanced by other scholars, and addresses some objections that one could raise against the suggestion of the chapter.

This chapter shows that although the Epicureans claim that justice comes to be by agreements, they also argue for the existence of a robust virtue of justice. The first section of the chapter gives a general overview of the Epicurean theory of the virtues, while the second section examines in detail the passages in which Epicurean authors discuss the virtue of justice. The third and last section of the chapter turns to the precise relationship between contractual and aretaic justice on the Epicurean view. It argues that the former is a precondition for latter, as contractual justice specifies the content of aretaic justice and provides the developmental basis for aretaic justice to emerge.

This chapter relates how justice comes to be on the Epicurean view by examining in detail the Epicurean account preserved in Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things V. In doing so, the chapter shows that the Epicureans are defenders of a kind of social contract theory and so side with defenders of nomos in the nomos-phusis debate. Nevertheless, their conception of nomos is importantly constrained by phusis. Furthermore, the chapter also argues against those readers who have characterized the Epicurean account of the social contract as Hobbesian. If the Epicurean account is to be assimilated to a modern view, the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau are a much better fit.

Property has a vexed status in Rousseau’s Social Contract. On one hand, Rousseau seems committed to the conventionalist view that property is a creation of law and state. Yet Rousseau also recognizes prepolitical dimensions of property, such as a right of first occupancy and a natural entitlement to land through “labor and cultivation.” This chapter contends that Rousseau’s seemingly divergent views on property become less paradoxical once one distinguishes between the rights of others and the more self-regarding aspects of morality. Focusing on the dense section of the Social Contract titled “Of Real Property,” it argues that while Rousseau acknowledges moral obligations governing the use of things, he ultimately holds that persons only have full-fledged property rights within the state. It suggests, moreover, that Rousseau’s attention to both the political and prepolitical dimensions of property continues to resonate in contemporary debate.

Most interpreters who have taken an interest in Rousseau’s nationalism have looked beyond his Social Contract. This seems fitting, for Rousseau’s Considerations on the Government of Poland, Constitutional Project for Corsica, and Discourse on Political Economy explicitly discuss the role of nationality and the distinctiveness of national identity. By way of contrast, the Social Contract is often cited as a work of ideal theory, less concerned with the empirical, sociological contingencies of actual nations and more focused on normative questions about the best political community. This chapter suggests that this standard interpretation of the Social Contract discounts the significant role played by extant, prepolitical peoples. Rather than a purely abstract contract among previously unaffiliated individuals, as per Thomas Hobbes, a closer reading reveals the ontological and historical primacy of peoples in Rousseau’s political theory.

This chapter examines the duties of states to insiders (people living within a state’s physical territory) and outsiders (people in other states). It is argued that states have, provided the initiation of securitization is otherwise justified and that must cause is satisfied, an overriding duty to secure insiders from objective existential threat via securitization. Regarding morally mandatory other-securitization, the picture is more mixed, a range of costs to the self, including (1) the risk of death, disease, and disability; (2) the risk of instability and insecurity; and (3) financial costs can override an individual state’s obligation to secure and – where necessary – securitize outsiders from threat. This chapter goes on to examine what happens to pro tanto duties if states are liable for threat creation abroad. Moreover, it suggests a ranking of different triggers for remedial responsibility derived from common-sense morality, enabling the pinpointing of specific states as primary duty-bearers for morally mandatory other-securitization.

This chapter uses archival documents and oral history interviews to conclusively demonstrate that the Rhodesian Army was systematically racist, contradicting both Rhodesian-era and post-war neo-Rhodesian accounts. It also shows that some senior army officers and ministers blocked reforms of the army’s racist treatment of black soldiers and sought to retain systematic discrimination. reafter it argues that, despite the prevalence of racism within the army, it was not corrosive to the loyalties of black soldiers. In part, this reflected how the army’s practices of discrimination were less severe than those in other areas of Rhodesian life. It also reflected how the professional ethos of the Rhodesian Army also served to minimise the impact of racism upon black soldiers. Within the RAR, a distinctive military culture flourished that attempted to mitigate the racism of the wider army and society, founded upon adherence to a professional ethos. In this regiment, relationships between black and white came to be premised upon mutual respect and camaraderie in a way that differed from the rest of the army, and which enhanced the loyalties of black soldiers.

Various notions of the state are considered, with its origins and the limits set to its importance by globalization; among them, Webers thesis of the state as characterized by the monopoly of legitimate force, and Marxs theory of the state as an instrument of class power. Rousseaus theory of the social contract (and its implications) is contrasted to Humes notion of tacit consent. The ordoliberal idea of the necessity of a legal construction of the market is contrasted to Hayeks theory of a spontaneous order (grown order rather than made order). Issues of personal security (police) and the administration of justice are discussed, then national defence and military power. The notion (and limits) of the state as a countervailing power to economic power is then considered, with specific attention to the welfare state (and national differences in its realization) and to types of regulation (connected to the notion of different kinds of capitalism).

As scholars and activists seek to define and promote greater corporate political responsibility (CPR), they will benefit from understanding practitioner perspectives and how executives are responding to rising scrutiny of their political influences, reputational risk and pressure from employees, customers and investors to get involved in civic, political, and societal issues. This chapter draws on firsthand conversations with practitioners, including executives in government affairs; sustainability; senior leadership; and diversity, equity and inclusion, during the launch of a university-based CPR initiative. I summarize practitioner motivations, interests, barriers and challenges related to engaging in conversations about CPR, as well as committing or acting to improve CPR. Following the summary, I present implications for further research and several possible paths forward, including leveraging practitioners’ value on accountability, sustaining external calls for transparency, strengthening awareness of systems, and reframing CPR as part of a larger dialogue around society’s “social contract.”

In describing the significance of the idea of popular sovereignty, Tocqueville alluded to its theological properties, indicating that its power relies at least in part on belief. Edmund S. Morgan declared, The success of government [...] requires the acceptance of fictions, requires the willing suspension of disbelief, requires us to believe that the emperor is clothed even though we can see that he is not. I trace the long lineage of these observations, focusing mainly on three formative moments. The first is Platos Republic, in which Socrates anticipates reason of state, by allowing rulers to lie, to protect the state. The second is Hobbess appeal to consider society as though it had emerged from a social contract, which shaped modern political thought from the seventeenth century to the present. The third is Rousseaus observation that the legislators work involves an undertaking that transcends human capacities and, to execute it, an authority that is nil, a problem that he proposed to solve by means of a civil religion. The continuing relevance of these observations not only poses important challenges, but also presents opportunities, for popular sovereignty.