Stephen Sawyer, Care and the Social Contract: Toward a Reconstructive Critique of the Modern (Care & Democracy Seminar Series)

Abstract

How may we make sense of the void at the center of our narratives of contract theory : from Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Kant, did social contract theory really disappear in the years following the French Revolution only to be magically resurrected in the post-war by John Rawls and those who followed? Amid contract theory's twentieth-century rediscovery, Carole Pateman exposed its structural limitations (and expanded its possibilities) by demonstrating the exclusion that had underwritten its elaboration, pushing us to profoundly revise if not entirely reject the presuppositions of contractual modernity. In so doing, Pateman’s critique also opens a perspective that unravels some basic assumptions on the narrative of contract theory’s development tout court: 1) the highly improbable notion that from the end of the eighteenth century to post-World War II, contract theory somehow evaporated; and 2) that the core of modern contract theory took shape through liberal notions of a “free civil society” contractually bound. Ultimately, the two arguments are mutually constitutive. A reconstructive critique of social contract theory may therefore begin by disentangling them. Care offers an unexpected but useful point of departure for this endeavor, which in turn requires two further displacements: 1) pushing from the centrality of sovereignty to a consideration of the varieties of modes of government necessary for society to manage its relationship to itself and between its members; and 2) pushing from liberal notions of civil society to democratized conceptions of care as a means of negotiating a contract of self-government.

Bio

Stephen W. Sawyer is the Ballantine-Leavitt Professor of History and director of the Center for Critical Democracy Studies at The American University of Paris (AUP). Sawyer came to AUP from the University of Chicago Center in Paris and the École Normale Supérieure where he was lecturer in the final years of his dissertation. After receiving fellowships from the EHESS, Fulbright, and Sciences Po, Sawyer served as part-time assistant to Pierre Rosanvallon at the Collège de France. He has served on the editorial board of the Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales and as associate editor for its English version since 2012. In 2014-15, he was named inaugural Neubauer Collegium Fellow at the University of Chicago. In 2014, he was appointed publications director of The Tocqueville Review and subsequently founded the online platform Tocqueville21 in 2017. In 2018-2019, he was named research fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. 

Care & Democracy Seminar Series

 The Care & Democracy series explores how the relational dimensions of care, traditionally centered on dependency and moral responsibility, can deepen our understanding of democratic practices. By examining care as a normative and political framework, the seminars interrogate how care ethics challenges conventional liberal-democratic ideals, reshaping conceptions of citizenship, power, and social cohesion.