Airstrip One

Foreign Travel & the Social Contract 28th October, 2002.

I don't suppose Hobbes, Locke, or Rousseau ever expected to see that as a title.

Messrs Carr & Goldstein have been arguing over how much protection Britannia should accord her subjects overseas. Mr Carr says, "A lot," Comrade Goldstein, as you would expect, "Sweet F.A." (or thereabouts). In the course of the argument, Mr Carr has invoked the social contract between the state & the subject, declaring that the state is breaking its terms if it fails to do everything reasonable to protect its subjects abroad. He has also implied that the social contract is a Tory idea, & this Cde Goldstein has pooh-poohed.

On this last point, Cde Goldstein is certainly right. Burke spoke of a "partnership between the dead, the living, & those yet to be born" (I misquote from memory), but that is not the same as a contract, & Hume was famously contemptuous of the theory. If any single idea encapsulates better the difference between liberalism & conservatism, I should be pleased to hear about it. We all know that the social contract is not to be taken literally, that it is an implied contract, but not even an implied contract makes sense unless there are parties to that contract who could in principle have opted not to agree to it - & that is precisely what a conservative will not allow, on the grounds that individuals are inconceivable in any sense prior to the society in which they exist. For a liberal, society is composed of individuals & exists to serve their ends, rather as a business exists to serve shareholders; for a Tory, society is an end in itself, in which, as Aristotle said, man becomes what he is meant to be - it is less like a company, & more like a family, where, leaving aside the rather inconvenient detail of the marriage contract, contracts have no place.

If a nation is like a family, then its members are no less its members for being abroad & beyond the full power of its protection. On the real point at issue, I am more in agreement with Mr Carr. The "interest" of a family is not furthered when it callously disregards the welfare of its members away from home, to the extent that people feel discouraged from leaving. At the same time, of course, individuals are responsible for their actions: the younger son who insists on frequenting the crack dens of Harlesden against parental advice cannot expect his father to interpose when his dealer turns nasty; & similarly, Britons who travel to countries in the midst of civil war have to be aware that they are taking their lives in their hands. We ought to take all reasonable steps to look after our fellow-subjects abroad, but there are obviously limits, & those limits are overreached at the cost of our fellow-subjects at home. Warnings about bombs in Bali, however, come nowhere close to those limits.