Kevin Knight ed, The Summa Theologiæ of St. Thomas Aquinas (NewAdvent, 2007) Prima Secundæ Partis

incompatibility between the individual and the community. Rights are justified, enumerated and secured—whether individual or collective rights against tyrannical governments—by an appeal to the principle: If something is good/bad for the society, then it is also good/bad for the individual and vice versa. 15

II. The Defects of Liberalism

The historical scholarship of Leo Strauss makes plain how liberalism rejects the classical notion that individuals reach their perfection in and through society, that society is prior to the individual. All the rights of the state as a whole are derivative from rights which belong properly to the individual. Liberalism insists that the primary moral fact is rights not duty. 16

These notions are directly connected to the idea that there is a “state of nature” which precedes civil society. Social contract theories couple the idea of a primitive state with that of consent. The essence of the arguments below are intended to be general enough to address most social contract theorists.

(1) The theory is abstract and deformative. There never is a historical era in which we fail to see men living in society. There is no way to think psychologically of human beings as essentially independent. It seems rather that intersubjectivity is essential to subjectivity. This mythology skews the historical record and misrepresents human existence; as such it is a harmful ideology that fetishizes individuality. 17

(2) Living in society is not based on consensus. The most obvious fact of human existence is that we do not choose the powerfully formative world into which we are born. In positing an “original state, ” social contract theorists ignore the intractable fact that our world is a given, thinking of individuals as creators rather than as receivers. Proponents of social contract theories often insist that a person is free to stay or leave whatever society one finds oneself in and that to remain is a tacit consent. 18 Such a tacit consent, however, hardly rises to the explicit level of what we typically mean by consent, nor do we have a meaningful consent if we do not have a realistic alternative. 19

(3) The universal claims of social contract theory are historically locatable. The liberal individual is believed to be the representation of “an abstract, generalized model of humanity writ large. ”20 However, the “original individual” bears a striking resemblance to an individual that belongs to a particular time and place. 21 The individual reflected in the original state is nothing more than the modern European bourgeois who emerged from a decaying feudalism. The problem here is that social contract theorists unwittingly base their supposed universal political philosophy on concept of “man” which is a historically sexist, racist, and exploitative. 22

15 Ibid. Page 4. 16 Leo Strauss,

“Natural Right and History. ” (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1950). Page 180-184. 17 Christopher W. Morris ed, The Social Contract Theorists: Critical Essays on Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau (Cambridge: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1998). 18 Christopher W. Morris ed, The Social Contract Theorists: Critical Essays on Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. 19 Ronald Dworkin, Law ’ s Empire (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1986). The difficulties of immigration for so many exclude de facto an alternative to their country of origin. Furthermore, as Dworkin notes, a person can leave one sovereign to join another, but no one has the choice to be free from sovereigns altogether. 20 Celeste Friend, “Social Contract Theory, ” The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://iep.utm.edu/soc-cont/#H2 21 Virginia Held, “Rationality and Reasonable Cooperation, ” Social Research, 1977. Page 708-44. 22Virginia Held, Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture, Society, and Politics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993). Liberalism is, once again, patently false and gives an ideological justification for oppression.