The First Social Contract

"States" were constructed, evolved, from social and economic relations over time, iteratively (see James C. Scott, Against the Grain). Being resisted by the populations they sought to manage, they are coerced into existence by the holders of power, and use coercion to perpetuate themselves, including coercion of the people who constitute their populations. Ironically for the coercive state, the populations they encourage possess an innate power of numbers which can impose on states limits, limits identified as "democracy", "rule of law", and "justice". The populations which have grown up in these states have come to expect services from the state, in trade for their compliance and support of the goals of the state, including freedom from danger, coercion and violence. Thus the state exercises a monopoly on the use of force, which is both a protection to the population and a threat, depending upon how it is used.

Implicitly, in the contract with the populations they have created from the original hunter-gatherer peoples from which states coersively built their populations, states are justified insofar as they allocate resources fairly, without bias for prior wealth, in that way which maximizes the freedom of its members to pursue well-being, social relations, education and personal and community development, without harming the ability of others to do the same. Since freedom is so easily used to bring harm to others, this freedom is in truth a limited freedom. And states are justified if they can persuade their populations that it is worthwhile to accept those limits.

Without the fair, equitable distribution of the resources and opportunities, without protection from harm, and without the freedom to create meaning (culture, family, community), states have no value and their members have cause to rise against them. In the absence of a clear ideology of fairness and equity, such rebellion is likely to merely destroy the society that so rebels. The only path to a future in which the state and large populations, can exist in peace, is the path on which the state endeavors to bring services of care and safety to its populations, requiring that its own purpose is to protect the ability of its members to pursue meaningful activity.