Towards a post-pandemic social contract

Bibliographic Data

ID4480689
AuthorsD Sik (0000-0002-0567-4587, Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume174
Issue1
Pages62-80
Publication date2023-02-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThesis Eleven (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0725-5136 • E-ISSN: 1461-7455
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/07255136221148278
OpenAlexW4323049697
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited39

Social contract theories serve a twofold purpose: by addressing acute crises, they elaborate solutions to long-standing social paradoxes. The article reinterprets the stakes of the Covid pandemic from this perspective. Firstly, the long-lasting structural paradoxes of late modernity are linked to the acute crisis of the pandemic with the help of critical theories of late modernity. It is argued that the pandemic provides opportunity for revaluating those social contracts, which are based on universalist principles of justice. Secondly, two paradigmatic historical examples (Hobbes, Rawls) are overviewed in a meta-theoretical fashion, so that the dimensions of revaluation could be highlighted. Thirdly, the foundations of a post-pandemic social contract are outlined. As the pandemic is inseparable from the structural paradoxes caused by unconstrained systems based on universal principles of justice, the post-pandemic social contract aims at preventing the system paradoxes by revaluating their universal principles in a 'trial of particularity' (Derrida, Levinas

Economic Justice · Epistemology · Law and economics · Modernity · Pandemic · Political science · Politics · Social contract · Social justice · Sociology · Law · Philosophy · Political Philosophy and Ethics · Political Theology and Sovereignty · War, Ethics, and Justification

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