Blog Marcos L. Mucheroni Filosofia, Noosfera e cibercultura

All contemporary tension involves something beyond politics and economics, the tension over the conception of social contract and power.

The concept of justice is linked to modernity by Contractualism, through construction from the thought of Thomas Hobbes through John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, they take man out of his natural state and exercise him to live in society, they will differ in this way on the concept of who man is: evil by nature and must live under guardianship, he is influenced by society and develops in it, or he is a “noble savage” that society corrupts.

The set of natural rights and the theory of the state of nature is what is called jusnaturalism, whose problem is that the state of equal rights generates conflicts and the state must arbitrate, but in modern society it is together with the liberal utilitarian thought .

Thus, they are all linked to a social contract established by the state, and the first major criticism is made by Hegel, which he will understand by general will is a pure, idealistic concept, maintained in a rational instance, above any agreement or contract.

Max Weber will make a deeper reform by differentiating domination from power, since domination is the acceptance of power that can be given in three ways: legal, traditional and charismatic. However, in none of them the use of force is dispensed with and the social question is not always remembered.

John Rawls develops and re-elaborates a Theory of Justice based on classical contractualism, determining the rights and duties that must be carried out in order to carry out the so-called “cooperation of peoples” and offers contributions to the social issue that is a source of conflicts.

However, current theorists such as Emmanuel Levinas and Martha Nussbaum, question each one in their own way, if the social contract does not have a serious limitation, Nussbaum points out, for example, the problem of people with mental or physical disabilities, the problem on the issue of animals and forests.

Levinas starts from the ethical requirement that exists in Rawls’s work to elaborate the idea that we must refuse the temptation to impose our will and strive to establish peaceful compromises, and thus rejects the idea of ​​the state as having a monopoly on violence and power, in a certain way. sense, it also re-elaborates the issue of domination and power, central to Max Weber.

Lévinas, E., Humanisme de l’Autre Homme, (1973) (Montpellier : Fata Morgana, 1972).