What if the social contract is broken?

Answer 1

The basic foundations of civil government, in colonial America, came with certain monarchical, constitutional, and other principles of political economy and finance. These principles continued to greatly shape and influence Americans through the inception of the Republican government.

In the 1790s, most Americans hoped to realize a republic divorced from antiquated ailments that so often characterized ancient republics: monarchy (tyranny), aristocracy (political, social and economic injustice), and democracy (mob-rule), and exchanging one's obedience for protection, i.e., the Social Contract.

In the last half of the eighteenth-century, the historical struggle of virtue and corruption showed itself again in the political crisis' which led to the American colonies declaring independence on July 4th, 1776. It, was not the legal authority of King and Parliament that the Colonists revolted against, it was the violation of the laws of custom.

This is what Edmund Burke a direct heir of this way of thinking was to call `prescriptive', or `presumptive reasoning'. Because a custom or particular institution had a `prescriptive claim', i.e., was already established, `there was a presumption, in its favor; we presumed that it had been found to work well.'1

The Colonists merely questioned authority, and their legal reasoning, was based in the law of custom, (common law), or the sovereign's duty, and the Social Contract or Social Compact.

"Hamilton's use of the Social Contract as the source of political obligation shows an ambiguity that he shared with many contemporaries, including Blackstone.2 It was the lack of distinction between the pactum societatis and the pactum subiecionis, that is, between the contract that welded individuals into one society and the contract that exchanged the ruler's protection for the obedience of the ruled."3

The King violated, repeatedly, that trust and faith in the common good. This is explicit in the Declaration of Independence, in that, "He [the King] has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good." The lawful custom that gave the king and Parliament its authority, was the duty of the sovereign. It was an obligation, in which the Magna Carta had been validated for more than five hundred years by earlier generations. It was a Social Contract and Compact born of barbarous times when monarchies had been built upon the ruins of the Roman Empire.

The Declaration of Independence questioned the authority of king and Parliament. Both the king and Parliament were believed to be corrupted. The colonists believed that an arbitrary government which had fallen away from its principle of duty and obligation was corrupt.

However, the answer to your question is to be found in the Declaration of Independence, vis-à-vis:

... That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security ...

1J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition,(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), , 15.

2See Magna Carta as Whig contract in Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, Ch. VII., Law and Contracts, sec. 2, The Contract of Rulers and Ruled, 268.

3Gerald Stourzh, Alexander Hamilton and the Idea of Republican Government, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1970), 25.