Reviving the Social Compact

Naomi Zack’s Reviving the Social Compact: Inclusive Citizenship in an Age of Extreme Politics addresses current political and social upheaval and distress with new concepts for the relationship between citizens and government. Politics has become turbo-charged as a form of agonistic contest where candidates and the public become more focused on winning than on governing or holding the government accountable for the benefit of the people. This failure of the government to fulfill its part of the social contract calls for a new social compact wherein citizens as a collective whole make long-term resolutions outside of government institutions. Analyzing present and evolving events, Zack reveals how race has exceeded intersection after formal rights have failed to correct ongoing discrimination; how class is no longer based on real life interests and has been manufactured and manipulated for political contest; how women have made spectacular progress but how the fame of elite women has left out poor, non-white women, transgender people, and sex workers; how natural disasters have not been (and perhaps cannot be) adequately prepared for or responded to by government; how environmental preservation becomes politicized; how homelessness could be fixed through capitalism; and how immigration reform has pivoted from inclusion to expulsion and why hospitality is an important civic virtue. Reviving the Social Compact is a call for good citizenship. Voting is the first step—because in a divided two-party system, a change from one party to the other is tantamount to revolution—and a new understanding of the social compact can lead to the stable civic life we need at this time.