Preface to the Original Edition
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2014
Summary
THE best-known tradition approaches the social contract in terms of rational decision. It asks what sort of contract rational decision makers would agree to in a preexisting “state of nature.” This is the tradition of Thomas Hobbes and – in our own time – of John Harsanyi and John Rawls. There is another tradition – exemplified by David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau – which asks different questions. How can the existing implicit social contract have evolved? How may it continue to evolve? This book is intended as a contribution to the second tradition.
Hegel and Marx are, in a way, on the periphery of the second tradition. Lacking any real evolutionary dynamics, they resorted to the fantasy of the dialectical logic of history. It was Darwin who recognized that the natural dynamics of evolution is based on differential reproduction. Something like differential reproduction operates on the level of cultural as well as biological evolution. Successful strategies are communicated and imitated more often than unsuccessful ones. In the apt language of Richard Dawkins, we may say that both cultural and biological evolution are processes driven by differential replication. There is a simple dynamical model of differential replication now commonly called the replicator dynamics. Although this dynamics is surely oversimplified from both biological and cultural perspectives, it provides a tractable model that captures the main qualitative features of differential replication. The model can be generalized to take account of mutation and recombination. These biological concepts also have qualitative analogues in the realm of cultural evolution. Mutation corresponds to spontaneous trial of new behaviors. Recombination of complex thoughts and strategies is a source of novelty in culture. Using these tools of evolutionary dynamics, we can now study aspects of the social contract from a fresh perspective.
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- Evolution of the Social Contract , pp. xiii - xvPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014