There is No Social Contract!
Editorial
Holley R. Cantine, Jr.

Retort, A quarterly journal of Anarchism, art and reviews

Winter, 1947

reprinted in Retort Special Anthology Issue, 1942-1951. Retort was originally published by the 
Retort Press, Bearsville, New York; Holley R. Cantine, Jr., Editor.


There still appear to be liberals, who while they may be skeptical of the justice, power, or potential 
achievements of the U.N., fail to see the injustice, arbitrariness, and invariable failure of the single 
'nation' or state.

Few are so naive as to suppose that the present peace show is anything more than a vehicle of 
power politics, which--if it has even that function--allocates the division, repression and rule over 
smaller 'nations'.

Yet when the power of any particular state, more particularly their own or some power they 
conceive to be representative of them--is called into question, they immediately hurl about 
'lawfully delegated federation', 'just and equitable commonwealth'. They conceive of the 'state' as 
possessing powers that will prevent their house from being broken into and robbed.

Such liberals resent the charge that they consider man to be fundamentally evil. When one 
points out that even in terms derived from their own beliefs, the state could then be nothing more 
than a coercive instrument for protecting the majority of good men from the small number that is 
evil, they are not content.

The more sophisticated liberals, particularly those with academic philosophical training, pretend 
to believe that the powers of the state are delegated through a social contract by men that are 
neither good nor evil, but capable of both. It is, then, against the evil in all men, rather than evil 
men, that the state devolves its powers. But consider the blatant idiocy of the claim that the state 
is an agency for the prevention of the evil in man's nature from rising to ascendancy, (cf. 
Calvinism) when we can see that the organized evil of the state, perhaps more in contemporary 
times than ever before, has no match for setting loose the satanic furies that are supposed to lurk 
in men--that very state designed to protect the good in men.

The question we must ask these men, who in years of such transparent cynicism and 
despondency have 'evolved' in their thinking from Rousseau to Hobbes, is: if man is neither good 
nor evil, why is evil so much more powerful than good, that an ORGANIZATION of good--the 
state--is required to keep the evil in check? Furthermore, how do they reconcile their definition of 
the state as an organization of the good in man with its being a 'NECESSARY evil'. Liberals will 
time and again give this schizoid definition of 'the state'.

In this connection they use society and the state interchangeably, arguing that if there were no 
state there would be no organized society; progressives continuing in this vein, feel that the 
increasing complexity and corruption are inherent and inevitable. The idea or possibility of 
establishing a society of simplicity and statelessness is consequently incomprehensible to them.

We must omit 'necessary' from the definition and substitute 'unmitigated'. The state is an 
unmitigated evil. Aside from the usual discernible reasons, there is a further one that must be 
recognized by radicals: that is, the irresponsibility--which if man may be said to have any inherent 
qualities--seems to be inherent in man. Man invariably and willingly relinquishes his individual 
duties to a group. It is not merely gullibility, which many of us have hitherto believed to be a 
dominant cause for the failure of revolutions such as the Russian; it is the unwillingness of 
individual men to assume responsibility for their own well being.

It does not appear likely that any satisfactory social change will occur until man has developed an 
ingrained mistrust of all forms of institutions and organizations, except perhaps small groups 
within which he functions with full responsibility and an equal share of control. We may no longer 
think in terms of social contract--power delegated by us to some mythical organization of the 
popular will. For while there is an organization of a small minority of people with power over us all, 
its power is not delegated; it is usurped. THERE IS NO SOCIAL CONTRACT!