3. The Enlightenment and its Impact on social ontology
Enlightenment social contract theorists presupposed the sovereignty and independence of the individual as being in their natural state free from all social and political structures, but who, in order to make human society at all possible, unconsciously enter into a what they called the social contract by which, as Locke describes it:
men, when they enter into society, give up the equality, liberty and executive power they had in the state of nature, into the hands of the society, to be far disposed of by the Legislative as the good of the Society shall require; yet it being only with an intention in everyone the better to preserve himself, his Liberty and Property (Locke, 1690:93).
Rousseau himself argued that the state of nature, the only state in which
humans are truly free, uncorrupted and sovereign, is the very foundation for the “equality of rights and the idea of justice which such equality creates [and which] originate in the preference each man gives to himself, and accordingly in the very nature of man” (Rousseau, 1762:69).3 To him individual liberty and sovereignty, therefore, entailed egocentric self-servitude free from all external constraints.
The ontological implications of the social contract theory are profound: society is accordingly viewed as fundamentally made up of naturally sovereign individuals. Each individual as a basic constitutive unit of human society share a natural equality with all others, with civil society or the state then being the result of an implicit contract signed by free and equal individuals who sacrifice some of that natural autonomy for the sake of establishing a functional human society (Spahn, 2018:2). This individualist ontological framework has remained the prevailing philosophical foundation underlying the notion of universal human rights throughout the post-World War II world as it is understood and promoted by the United Nations today (Spahn, 2018:2-3).
In Western Christendom prior to the Age of Enlightenment, family and
lineage were understood to have played a central role in shaping society as
well as in determining the individual’s place within and relationship to society. The influential thirteenth-century philosopher-theologian, Thomas Aquinas (2006:4), for example, wrote that
God holds the first place, for He is supremely excellent, and is for us the first principle of being and government. In the second place, the principles of our being and government are our parents and our country, that have given us birth and nourishment. Consequently, man is debtor chiefly to his parents and his country, after God. Wherefore just as it belongs to religion to give worship to God, so does it belong to piety, in the second place, to give worship to one’s parents and one’s people. The worship due to our parents includes the worship given to all our kindred since our kinfolk are those who descend from the same parents.4
Even right up until the dawn of the Enlightenment, this medieval family and kinship-centered notion of society remained prevalent, as evidenced in
the work of one of the most prominent political philosophers of the early
seventeenth century, Johannes Althusius (1610:715), who, in his magnum
opus, Politica Methodice Digesta, Atque Exemplis Sacris et Profanis Illustrata, emphasized the decisive role of the family—both nuclear and extended—as the constitutive unit of human society:
It cannot be denied that provinces are constituted from villages and cities, and commonwealths and realms from provinces. Therefore, just as the cause by its nature precedes the effect and is more perceptible, and just as the simple or primary precedes in order what has been composed or derived from it, so also villages, cities and provinces precede realms and are prior to them. For this is the order and progression of nature, that the conjugal relationship, or the domestic association of man and wife, is called the beginning and foundation of human society. From it are then produced the associations of various blood relations and in-laws. From them, in turn, come the sodalities and assemblies, out of the union of which arises the composite body that we call a village, town or city … It is necessary, therefore, that the doctrine of the symbiotic life of families, kinship associations, assemblies, cities, and provinces precede the doctrine of the realm or universal symbiotic association that arises from the former associations and is composed of them.5
This understanding of social ontology fundamentally relates the individual to the family and to broader blood or ancestral relationships in which he finds his social place and identity. This, of course, stands in stark contrast to the atomizing tendencies of the social ontology that would later characterize the thought of Enlightenment social contract theorists. The influential eighteenth-century French Philosophe, Jacques-Pierre Brissot (1783:157-158), for example, advocated embracing the ideal of cosmopolitan multiculturalism as an alternative to what he considered the prejudice based on familial relations, nationhood, religion and race that had characterized European society until that time.
When the Counter-Enlightenment, a movement that sought to establish
a viable antithesis then emerged as conservative reaction to the Enlightenment’s revolutionary notions of the nature of society based in the
social contract (McMahon 2001:8-9), it proceeded to counter what it regarded to be as an inversion of true social ontology with a more traditionalist social ontology.
3 “Ce qui prouve que l’egalite de droit et la notion de justice qu’elle produit derive de la preferance que chacin se donne et par consequent de la nature de l’homme.”
4 “Deus summum obtinet locum, qui et excellentissimus est, et est nobis essendi et gubernationis primum principium. Secundario vero nostri esse et gubernationis principium sunt parentes et patria, a quibus et in qua et nati et nutriti sumus. Et ideo post Deum, maxime est homo debitor parentibus et patriae. Unde sicut ad religionem pertinet cultum Deo exhibere, ita secundo gradu ad pietatem pertinet exhibere cultum parentibus et patriae. In cultu autem parentum includitur cultus omnium consanguineorum, quia etiam
consanguinei ex hoc dicuntur quod ex eisdem parentibus processerunt”.
5 “Nam negari non petest ex pagis et urbibus, provincias, ex bisce vicro Respublicae et rega constituta. Sicut igitur cansa sua natura praecedit effectum, eoque, notior est et simplex, seu primum id quod compositum seu ortum a primo est, antecedit ordinare, ita quoque, pagi, civitates et provincia, regna antecedunt et prius quam ea suerunt. Hic enim naturae
ordo et processus, ut conjungium, seu consocatio domestica viriet uxoris fundamentum et principium humane societatis dicatur, et ex hac Porro producantur consociationes consanguineorum et adsinium diversorum, ex bis vero sodalitates, collegia, ex quorum conjunctiove corpus compositum, quod pagum, oppidum, vel civitatem dicimus … Necessario igitur doctrina de vita symbiotica coniugum prpinquorum, collegiorum, ci vit atum et provincae antecedit eam, qua est de regno, vel universali consociatone symboitica priore orta est et exea composita.
