Oleksiy Panych, Doctor of Philosophy, Senior Research Fellow at the Dukh i Litera Research and Publishing Association
Ten or twenty years ago, Ukrainian intellectuals were actively – though entirely unsuccessfully – preoccupied with the search for a “national idea.” More recently, however, this theme has largely been displaced by discussions of the “social contract.” The Aspen Institute Kyiv has even organized an entire series of seminars on this subject and published a corresponding collection of essays, while additional contributions have appeared in the pages of Ukrainska Pravda.
Yet the overwhelming majority of these publications, with only a few exceptions, share one striking characteristic. Their authors usually describe their own wish list – or, to put it more diplomatically, their own vision of a well-ordered future Ukraine – and present that vision as the “new social contract” that Ukrainians are supposedly meant to conclude.
But how exactly is this contract to be concluded? Who is expected to negotiate with whom, and by what process will such an agreement be reached? These questions rarely arise. Instead, it is simply taken for granted that, somehow, “everyone” will conclude a “new social contract” with “everyone else.” One is tempted to add: “…and then we shall all live happily ever after.”
Needless to say, this is not how things work. But before explaining how they do work, it is first necessary to identify the root of this common intellectual mistake – or, more precisely, this persistent yet erroneous pattern of thinking about the social contract.
As a historian of philosophy, it is quite obvious to me that this pattern stems from an uncritical application of the classical theories of the social contract inherited from modern European philosophy. Thomas Hobbes and his Leviathan provide a particularly vivid example. (Incidentally, Leviathan is the title that will appear in my Ukrainian translation of the work, scheduled for publication next year.)
The essence of Hobbes’s understanding of the social contract can be summarized quite simply. Exhausted by the chaotic state of nature – a “war of everyone against everyone” – people gather together and agree voluntarily to surrender their individual right of self-defence by delegating it to their common representative. That representative is the Leviathan – their collective legal person. Consequently, the principal, indeed the only fundamental, duty of the Leviathan is to provide collective security. Only if the Leviathan proves incapable of protecting society do its subjects become free from the obligations of the social contract once concluded by their ancestors.
It is precisely this model that various Ukrainian authors attempt to apply, with different modifications, to contemporary Ukrainian society. Yet all such attempts are doomed to failure because even this concise account of Hobbes’s argument contains two fundamental flaws.
The first concerns the very procedure of concluding a social contract.
In reality, a social contract is never concluded by “everyone with everyone.” It is always concluded by social elites, with some degree of participation by—and subsequent ratification, or at least tacit and reluctant acceptance from – the rest of society.
In this sense, the first genuine social contract in England was not Hobbes’s hypothetical agreement at all but the Magna Carta. The subject of that agreement was not collective security – as Hobbes, writing during the bloody English Civil War and the Scottish intervention, desperately hoped – but rather the distribution of power between the king and the barons. The rest of the population was simply presented with the outcome.
Is the Ukrainian Constitution adopted through a substantially different procedure?
Even when fundamental questions of public life are submitted to a plebiscite – whether a referendum or presidential and parliamentary elections – the principle remains the same. The elites define the contours of the proposed contract, while the broader population merely expresses approval (“yes”), willingness to tolerate it (“did not vote”), or rejection (“no”).
This means that any discussion of Ukraine’s future social contract should begin from this reality. The task is to develop an agreement among the elites that will be sufficiently acceptable to the broader population – one that guarantees paternalistically minded citizens the minimum social support they expect while providing socially active citizens with adequate space for self-realization and personal development.
Yet Hobbes’s second flaw is even more fundamental. It renders his theory not only inapplicable to Ukraine but also reveals a profound weakness in the broader Western conception of the individual and society that he represents.
For Hobbes, collective security constitutes the ultimate foundation of the social contract. This assumption also corresponds to the conceptual structure of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, in which the need for security immediately follows physiological needs.
Yet this European fixation on security – understandable though it may be in historical context – contains a dangerous trap. It produces precisely those “last men” whom Nietzsche described with horror and disgust in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Francis Fukuyama later articulated this danger more systematically in The End of History and the Last Man – a book that has been widely criticized but, unfortunately, rarely read carefully.
Fukuyama asks why citizens of a liberal state, particularly one based on Hobbesian principles, should serve in the armed forces and risk their lives for their country. If the individual’s fundamental natural right is self-preservation, on what rational basis should that individual choose to die for the country rather than flee with their money and their family? (The End of History and the Last Man, 1992, p. 160.)
This criticism seems more relevant than ever when read in today’s Ukraine at war, while considering both Western liberal societies and our own draft evaders.
As is well known, Fukuyama attempts to overcome liberalism’s fixation on security—which ultimately weakens the capacity for collective resistance – by arguing that human beings possess another equally fundamental need alongside security. Following Plato, he calls it thymos: the need for recognition.
According to Fukuyama, this need exists in two equally important forms: the desire to be recognized by others as an equal (isothymia) and the desire to be recognized as superior (megalothymia).
Translated into the Ukrainian context, this is essentially a question of dignity.
Yet Ukraine’s experience allows me to draw even more radical conclusions than Fukuyama himself.
The foundation of our resilience – which remains so difficult for many Western analysts to understand – is precisely that the hierarchy of values for a critical mass of Ukrainians differs fundamentally from that described by Hobbes, Maslow, and other classical thinkers of Western liberalism.
For Ukrainians, dignity is a more fundamental value than security. That is precisely why we are capable, collectively – by the hundreds of thousands and even millions – of risking our security in order to defend our dignity.
Europeans and Americans find this extraordinarily difficult to comprehend because, unlike us, they have experienced almost no wars of identity over the past three centuries, with only a few exceptions, most notably in the Balkans.
For this reason, they struggle to understand that Russia’s occupation of Mariupol is incomparably more devastating – in both its methods and its consequences – than the occupation of Paris or Warsaw by the Third Reich.
It is one thing to have a foreign government imposed upon you by force. It is something entirely different when, together with foreign rule, you are compelled – under threat of destruction – to accept a foreign identity as your own.
This is why attempts to apply Hobbes’s model of the social contract to Ukraine are fundamentally misguided.
It is also why dignity must stand at the very centre of attention when Ukrainian elites seek to define the contours of post-war agreements, both formal and informal, that they will eventually present to society as a renewed social contract.
If they fail to do so, the outcome is entirely predictable: Ukrainians will stage another Revolution of Dignity.
And this will continue until our elites finally learn that our dignity cannot be ignored.
The institutional norms and constitutional arrangements through which this fundamental concern for dignity should ultimately be expressed, however, belong to a different – and much more extensive – conversation.
