Contractarian/Contractualist Theories from Giles of Rome to John Locke (c. 1280 - 1690)

• Applicant: Privatdozent Dr. Christian Rode
• Subject Area: History of Philosophy ; Practical Philosophy
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 524037622

What is the reason for our commitment to our community, to our state? How are our state and its government legitimized? The project attempts to show that there have been genuinely contractualist/contractarian philosophical answers to these questions throughout the whole period from about 1280 to 1690. In this context, "contractualist" or “contractarian” refers to a theory that assumes a deficient initial state, a consensus to leave it, and a sufficient final state. The form of this contractualist/contractarian argument is varied over the period covered, but remains relatively constant. The first working hypothesis is that it is the embedding in social, anthropological, and normative contexts that gives the mere consensus of the argument the necessary deontic force. These diverse functional embeddings will be investigated in the project. A further working hypothesis is that in Hobbes and Locke, then, these very embeddings, stemming from their empiricism, give contractarianism/contractualism greater force: through an individualization and de-substantialization of the good, through an open-endedness of the conception of happiness, and through a pleonectic theory of the acquisition of money, the entering into a social contract becomes more urgent than in theories that view man in principle as an animal civile/sociale. But these changes in the embeddedness of contractualism/contractarianism are also grounded in the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries, e.g., in Thomas Aquinas's Aristotelian proto-empiricism, in Ockham's particular political appreciation of the new and innovative, in Olivi's de-substantialization of the normative and its relational social ontology, and in Olivi's appreciation of the accumulation of capital. The proposed project will serve to trace the discontinuities and continuities in contractualist/contractarian theorizing, and thus to show how systematically viable late medieval and early modern contract-theoretical models are, including whether earlier forms of contractualism/contractarianism (such as Ockham’s or Marsilius’s) are in some respects superior to those of the seventeenth century. Moreover, the work should help to understand which of the changes and innovations of the development between ca. 1280 to 1690 still shape our present time. It would be desirable that especially the examination of earlier theories, e.g. of Suárez or Marsilius, which are less individualistic or atomistic in nature and do not commit themselves to unlimited growth and a pleonectic conception of happiness, helps to overcome today's one-sidedness - especially in view of the current multiple social crises, which have their origin, among other things, in the course set by the 17th century.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants