“The new social contract in Ukraine cannot be an “agreement of all with all”.”, — write: www.pravda.com.ua
However, the vast majority of these publications, with only a few exceptions, have a common and, in my opinion, striking feature. Their authors usually describe their own “wishes”, or – to put it more succinctly – their own vision of a future well-organized Ukraine, and present this own vision as the “new social contract” that Ukrainians should conclude.
How exactly to arrange? Who will negotiate with whom and who will conclude this contract exactly how? – they don’t even have such questions. It is simply taken for granted that the “new social contract” must somehow be concluded by “everyone with everyone” (I would like to add: “…and finally heal”).
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Of course, “that’s not how it works.” But to explain how it works, one must first identify the roots of this standard mental error – or, more precisely, this persistent, and at that, erroneous, pattern of reasoning about the social contract.
It is quite obvious to me, as a historian of philosophy, that these roots are the uncritical perception and application to the Ukrainian situation of classical models of thinking about the social contract, which European modern philosophical thought left us as a legacy. A vivid example can be Thomas Hobbes with his “Leviathan” (that’s how this work will be called in my translation, which will be published next year).
The essence of Hobbes’s understanding of the social contract can be stated quite simply. Exhausted by the chaotic state of nature “war of everyone against everyone”, people gather together and agree that they all voluntarily renounce their own right to self-defense, delegating this right to their common representative. This representative is Leviathan – their joint legal entity. Accordingly, the main and only fundamental duty of this Leviathan is to take care of collective security. Only if Leviathan proves to be incompetent to secure their society, its subjects can consider themselves free from this (once concluded by their ancestors) social contract.
It is this model that various Ukrainian authors are trying to apply, with one or another addition, to modern Ukrainian society. However, all these aspirations are doomed to failure, because even in such a succinct reasoning Hobbes actually has two fundamental flaws.
The first of them concerns the procedure for concluding a social contract. In fact, this contract is never concluded “all with all”. This contract is always concluded by social elites, with certain participation and with subsequent ratification (or at least tacit/reluctant approval) of this contract by the rest of the population. In this sense, the first real social contract on English soil was actually the Magna Carta (aka “Great Charter of Liberties”). And the subject of this treaty was not “collective security” (as dreamed by Hobbes, who conceived and wrote his “Leviathan” during the bloody civil war in England, to which the intervention of the Scottish army was added), but the distribution of power between the king and the barons. The rest of the population was simply confronted by the participants of the agreement.
Is very different from this according to the approval procedure Ukrainian Constitution?
Even when some fundamental issues of social life are submitted to a plebiscite (referendum, presidential or legislative elections, etc.), the principle remains the same: the outline of the proposed treaty is determined by the elites, and the rest of the population only expresses their approval (“for”), their willingness to tolerate it (“did not vote”), or their disapproval (“against”).
This means that the ideas regarding the future contours of the social contract in Ukraine should actually be defined in this paradigm: it is about such a contract of elites, which will be acceptable enough for the rest of the population and will provide – speaking specifically about Ukrainians – the necessary minimum of social support for paternalists, and for socially active citizens sufficient space for self-realization and self-development.
However, the second flaw in Hobbes’ reasoning is actually even more serious, and in this regard, his theory, firstly, is not applicable to Ukraine at all, and secondly, it also reveals the fundamental weakness of the version of the Western vision of man and society presented by him.
It is about the fact that the basis of the foundations of the social contract for Hobbes is collective security. After all, this also coincides with the conceptual foundations of Maslow’s pyramid, where the level of physiological needs immediately follows the level of safety. However, it is in this preoccupation with security, although suffered by Europeans, that there is actually a great insidiousness. After all, it is she who gives birth to those “last people”, about whom Nietzsche wrote with horror and disgust in “Zarathustra”. And in a more rational language, this insidiousness was well explained by Francis Fukuyama in his book “The End of History and the Last Man”, which by now was not only criticized by the lazy, but, unfortunately, very few people read carefully.
It is not clear, says Fukuyama, “why a citizen of a liberal state, too in its Hobbesian version, should serve in the army and risk his life in a war for his country. After all, if the fundamental natural right was the self-preservation of the individual, on what basis would it be rational for that individual to die for his country, and not try to escape with his money and his family?” (The end of History…, 1992, p. 160).
This criticism of Fukuyama seems more fair and relevant than ever, if you reread it in today’s warring Ukraine, having in mind both Western liberal societies and our local “evaders”.
Fukuyama himself, as you know, tries to help this liberal fixation on security, which in fact paralyzes the will to collective resistance, by proposing to recognize in man, along with the need for security, another equally basic need, which he calls, following Plato’s example, “thymos”. It the need for recognitionwhich, according to Fukuyama, exists in two equally important forms: the need to be recognized by others as equal (isothymia) and the need to be recognized by others as superior (megalothymia).
Translating this reasoning into Ukrainian, it is actually about dignity.
However, the experience of Ukraine allows me to draw more radical conclusions than those made by Fukuyama in his time.
The basis of our resistance, which is incomprehensible to Western analysts, is precisely the fact that for a critical mass of Ukrainians, the pyramid of values looks different than it is depicted by Hobbes, Maslow and other classics of Western liberalism. For Ukrainians, dignity is a more fundamental value than security – and that is why we are able collectively, hundreds of thousands and even millions, to risk our own safety, defending our own dignity.
It is incredibly difficult for Europeans and Americans to understand, because in the last 300 years they, unlike us, hardly knew identity wars (with only a few exceptions, in particular in the Balkans). Therefore, they do not understand that the occupation of Mariupol by Russia is an order of magnitude more terrible – both in terms of procedure and in terms of consequences – than the occupation of Paris or Warsaw by the Third Reich. Because it’s one thing when someone else’s power is imposed on you by force, and it’s quite another thing when, together with someone else’s power, you are also forced, under the threat of destruction, to recognize your identity as someone else’s.
That is why attempts to apply the Hobbes model of “social contract” to Ukraine are futile.
And for the same reason, it is dignity that should be the focus of attention of Ukrainian elites, when they will look for contours of post-war agreements (formal and informal) in their own circle, in order to offer them to society on the basis of a renewed social contract.
If this does not happen, the result is known in advance: Ukrainians will organize another “revolution of dignity”. And so it will be until we teach our elites that our dignity cannot be ignored.
And in what institutional norms and forms should be reflected this fundamental concern for dignity is already the subject of another and much more detailed conversation.
Oleksiy Panych
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