Evolution of the Social Contract

Evolution of the Social Contract PDF Author: Brian Skyrms
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107434289
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 165

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Book Description
This new edition further develops the application of evolutionary game theory to an analysis of the origins of social contracts.

Evolution of the Social Contract

Evolution of the Social Contract PDF Author: Brian Skyrms
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107434289
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 165

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Book Description
This new edition further develops the application of evolutionary game theory to an analysis of the origins of social contracts.

The Social Contract from Hobbes to Rawls

The Social Contract from Hobbes to Rawls PDF Author: David Boucher
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134839685
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 532

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Book Description
First published in 2004. WHAT IS THE ROLE OF THE SOCIAL CONTRACT IN MODERN POLITICAL THOUGHT? The concept of a social contract has been central to political thought since the seventeenth century. Contract theory has been used to justify political authority, to account for the origins of the state, and to provide foundations for moral values and the creation of a just society. In The Social Contract from Hobbes to Rawls, leading scholars from Britain and America survey the history of contractarian thought and the major debates in political theory which surround the notion of the social contract. The book examines the critical reception to the ideas of thinkers including Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hegel and Marx, and includes the more contemporary ideas of John Rawls and David Gauthier. It also incorporates discussions of international relations theory and feminist responses to contractarianism. Together, the essays provide a comprehensive introduction to theories and critiques of the social contract within a broad political theoretical framework.

The Pleistocene Social Contract

The Pleistocene Social Contract PDF Author: Kim Sterelny
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197531385
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
"No human now gathers for himself or herself the essential resources for life: food, shelter, clothing, and the like. Humans are obligate co-operator, and this has been true for tens of thousands of years; probably much longer. In this regard, humans are very unusual. Cooperation outside the family is rare: though it can be very profitable, it is also very risky, as cooperation makes an agent vulnerable to incompetence and cheating. This book presents a new picture of the emergence of cooperation in our lineage, developing through four fairly distinct phases from a baseline that was probably fairly similar to living great apes, who cooperate, but in fairly minimal ways. As adults, they rarely depend on others when the outcome really matters. This book suggests that cooperation began to be more important for humans through an initial phase of cooperative foraging generating immediate returns from collective action in small mobile bands. This established in our lineage about 1.8 million years ago, perhaps earlier. Over the rest of the Pleistocene, cooperation became more extended in its social scale, with forms of cooperation between bands gradually establishing, and in spatial and temporal scale too, with various forms of reciprocation becoming important. The final phase was the emergence of cooperation in large scale, hierarchical societies in the Holocene, beginning about 12,000 years ago. This picture is nested in a reading of the archaeological and ethnographic record, and twinned to an account of the gradual elaboration of cultural learning in our lineage, making cooperation both more profitable and more stable"--

The Stag Hunt and the Evolution of Social Structure

The Stag Hunt and the Evolution of Social Structure PDF Author: Brian Skyrms
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521533928
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
Brian Skyrms, author of the successful Evolution of the Social Contract (which won the prestigious Lakatos Award) has written a sequel. The book is a study of ideas of cooperation and collective action. The point of departure is a prototypical story found in Rousseau's A Discourse on Inequality. Rousseau contrasts the pay-off of hunting hare where the risk of non-cooperation is small but the reward is equally small, against the pay-off of hunting the stag where maximum cooperation is required but where the reward is so much greater. Thus, rational agents are pulled in one direction by considerations of risk and in another by considerations of mutual benefit. Written with Skyrms's characteristic clarity and verve, this intriguing book will be eagerly sought out by students and professionals in philosophy, political science, economics, sociology and evolutionary biology.

The Social Contract

The Social Contract PDF Author: Robert Ardrey
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Animal behavior
Languages : en
Pages : 405

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Book Description


The Social Contract

The Social Contract PDF Author: Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780852291634
Category : Political right
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


Modern Social Contract Theory

Modern Social Contract Theory PDF Author: Albert Weale
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192594990
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 656

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Book Description
Modern Social Contract Theory provides an exposition and evaluation of major work in social contract theory from 1950 to the present. It locates the central themes of that theory in the intellectual legacy of utilitarianism, particularly the problems of defining principles of justice and of showing the grounds of moral obligation. It demonstrates how theorists responded in a novel way to the dilemmas articulated in utilitarianism, developing in their different approaches a constructivist method in ethics, a method that aimed to vindicate a liberal, democratic and just political order. A distinctive feature of the book is its comparative approach. By placing the works of Barry, Buchanan and Tullock, Harsanyi, Gauthier, Grice, Rawls, and Scanlon alongside one another, similarities and differences are brought out, most notably in the way in which principles are derived by each author from the contractual construction as well as the extent to which the obligation to adopt those principles can be rationally grounded. Each theory is placed in its particular intellectual context. Special attention is paid to the contrasting theories of rationality adopted by the different authors, whether that be utility theory or a deliberative conception of rationality, with the intention of assessing how far the principles advanced can be justified by reference to the hypothetical choices of rational contracting agents. The book concludes with a discussion of some principal objections to the enterprise of contract theory, and offers its own programme for the future of that theory taking the form of the empirical method.

The Social Institutions of Capitalism

The Social Institutions of Capitalism PDF Author: Pursey Heugens
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 9781781950333
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
Offering a diverse set of contributions to current social contracting research, this text illustrates how social contracts necessarily underlie and facilitate all forms of capitalist production and exchange.

Social Contract, Free Ride

Social Contract, Free Ride PDF Author: Anthony De Jasay
Publisher: Collected Papers of Anthony de
ISBN: 9780865977013
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book provides a novel account of the public goods dilemma. The author shows how the social contract, in its quest for fairness, actually helps to breed the parasitic 'free riding' it is meant to suppress. He also shows how, in the absence of taxation, many public goods would be provided by spontaneous group co-operation. This would, however, imply some degree of free riding. Unwilling to tolerate such unfairness, co-operating groups would eventually drift from voluntary to compulsory solutions, heedless of the fact that this must bring back free riding with a vengeance. The author argues that the perverse incentives created by the attempt to render public provision assured and fair are a principal cause of the poor functioning of organised society.

The Racial Contract

The Racial Contract PDF Author: Charles W. Mills
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501764306
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
The Racial Contract puts classic Western social contract theory, deadpan, to extraordinary radical use. With a sweeping look at the European expansionism and racism of the last five hundred years, Charles W. Mills demonstrates how this peculiar and unacknowledged "contract" has shaped a system of global European domination: how it brings into existence "whites" and "non-whites," full persons and sub-persons, how it influences white moral theory and moral psychology; and how this system is imposed on non-whites through ideological conditioning and violence. The Racial Contract argues that the society we live in is a continuing white supremacist state. As this 25th anniversary edition—featuring a foreword by Tommy Shelbie and a new preface by the author—makes clear, the still-urgent The Racial Contract continues to inspire, provoke, and influence thinking about the intersection of the racist underpinnings of political philosophy.