Death of the social contract isn’t just a top-down betrayal – it’s also bottom-up complicity
It’s one of the greatest ironies of our age: we live in the freest, most prosperous democracies history has known, yet trust in government, institutions and even democracy itself is crumbling like old stone.
It’s not hard to see why. From Donald Trump’s empty factory dreams to governments’ sleight of hand on energy transition costs and the shifting narratives we endured around Covid vaccines, we are living through a period of mass disillusionment.
Politicians make grand promises – or, worse, moral pronouncements – only to walk away from them with quiet footnotes and policy backflips. While the way we now communicate and increasing polarisation are paving the way, we are dealing with a far deeper collapse: the death of the social contract.
In the most basic sense, the social contract is the unspoken agreement between citizen and state: individuals agree to surrender certain freedoms (and pay taxes) in exchange for protection, fairness and opportunity.
It’s a philosophical foundation stone of modern democracy, most famously shaped by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Hobbes argued that, without it, life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. Locke believed the contract was about securing natural rights – life, liberty, property. Rousseau insisted it should express the “general will” – a kind of collective moral force.
In the 20th century, American philosopher John Rawls reimagined the contract through the “veil of ignorance”: if none of us knew where we’d land in society, we’d design systems that were fair and just.
Rawls believed in reciprocity – that the social contract must work for the worst-off, not just the winners. Unsurprisingly modern theorists and scholars are split on how a new social contract should work. Many say the size of the state is now an impediment to the social contract, whereas others urge ongoing adaptation to the demands of modern society.
Let’s be clear, the social contract is itself a construct and since Hobbes’s time it has experienced periods of decline and decay. But today, more than ever, it is in serious trouble. The contract exists in name only and the voters know it.
Take Donald Trump. When he told Americans he would “Make America Great Again”, they heard: We’re bringing back your jobs, your towns, your dignity. But manufacturing jobs lost to globalisation and automation are never coming back – not in Detroit, not in Ohio, and certainly not because of tariffs and tweets.
The truth is, if Trump’s economic plans don’t start to deliver soon enough, he won’t have rebuilt the social contract; he’ll have hastened its demise.
Or take climate policy. Governments across the West have committed to net-zero targets with lofty rhetoric but have obscured, and continue to obscure, the real costs to households, industries and livelihoods. They use jargon (“just transition”) to sugar-coat pain. They assume consent where none was given. Labor’s outright lies about the costs of the Coalition’s nuclear energy plans at the recent federal election is an example.
These were outrageous, known lies, yet the protagonists, rent seekers and a disinterested media now proclaim a mandate against nuclear energy has been obtained. A Labor campaign based almost entirely on lies is hailed as genius when in fact a great delinquency against our future prosperity and democracy has occurred.
And who could forget the Covid era, when vaccine policies were rolled out with ever-shifting messaging. First, no mandates. Then soft mandates. Then exclusion from public life for the unvaccinated – despite governments being in possession of uncomfortable data about vaccine side effects and efficacy. The lack of transparency didn’t just break trust in some parts of the community, it torched it.
But politicians are not acting alone. As American political commentator Andrew Breitbart famously said, “Politics is downstream from culture.” The erosion of the social contract isn’t just a top-down betrayal – it’s also bottom-up complicity.
We now have once unimaginable swathes of citizens that are largely dependent on the state – financially, emotionally or ideologically.
More than 30 years ago, Francis Fukuyama effectively warned this might happen. In The End of History and the Last Man, he argued that liberal democracy was the final ideological form of government. But he didn’t celebrate it uncritically. He feared with material needs satisfied and ideological enemies vanquished, the citizens of liberal democracies might become spiritually hollow, complacent and easily misled.
Fukuyama’s Last Man is not an oppressor or a hero. He is the voter who shrugs at lies, accepts mediocrity and stops demanding truth. He is the politician who campaigns in poetry and governs in deception. He’s the journalist who is a player rather than a truth seeker.
In such a system, there is no contract – just a series of transactional manipulations.
Left-wing populism, often dressed up as moral utopianism, plays a big part. Where the populist right wants to restore a golden past, the populist left promises a flawless future – free healthcare, free university, climate salvation, rent caps, debt forgiveness and so-called justice for every group identity under the sun. These are not policies; they are fantasies disguised as plans. They are sold with the same emotional manipulation as their right-wing counterparts – and almost always with less honesty.
If democracies are to survive in anything but name, we need to revive the idea of consent, honesty and reciprocity in public life. This doesn’t mean consensus. It doesn’t mean everyone agrees. It means citizens must be treated not as passive recipients of policy but as adult partners in a shared democratic project.
That starts with leaders who tell hard truths – about jobs, about climate, about pandemics, most importantly about the limitations of the state and what it can and cannot deliver. But it continues with citizens who demand more than slogans and subsidies.
If we want better leaders and a better society we’ll need to become better citizens, capable of handling hard truths and resisting easy lies. The social contract isn’t just written by government; it’s upheld by a culture that can handle – nay, demand – realism over rhetoric and truth over relativism.
If as a society we don’t start to get real, each one of us becomes the Last Man.
Louise Clegg is a barrister specialising in public law and employment law.
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