Overview

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.

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9781538120125

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Reviews

A timely analysis of the contemporary political scene combined with a prescription for revitalizing the social compact that underlies it. This is political philosophy at its best! -- James P. Sterba, professor, University of Notre Dame What happens when government breaks the social contract? In this insightful and compelling book, Zack answers that residents must step up to fill the void with an inclusive social compact to buffer the disasters of a corrupt and morally bankrupt government. She powerfully demonstrates that current conceptions of race, class, and gender do not adequately represent the reality on the ground. Deftly moving between philosophical discourse and current events, Zack's analysis pushes up against the limits of identity politics, and conceptions of the good citizen, to illuminate the way forward. -- Kelly Oliver, author of Carceral Humanitarianism: Logics of Refugee Detention and Hunting Girls: Sexual Violence from The Hunger Games to Campus Rape. Zack's book addresses a critical moral issue in modern American society: how social contracts and social compacts function in the presence of the changing dynamics of political systems and political parties, in terms of its impact on the issues of race, class, disasters, terrorism and immigration. Where social contracts become outdated or fail, then the more informal social compacts in society become critical to the continued and effective functioning of a liberal democratic society. This is an important book with a message that needs to be heard and understood by those with both formal and informal voices, who care about living in a moral society. -- David Etkin, York University, author of Disaster Theory: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Concepts and Causes Supercharged politics prevents government from meeting its obligations to the people according to the social contract and endangers our democracy. Naomi Zack's brilliant book argues that we can save it if we reclaim the almost forgotten idea that it depends on a social compact among the people that is prior to government and requires that they work independently of government to create a culture of inclusion. -- Bernard Boxill, professor emeritus, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Author Information

Naomi Zack is professor of philosophy at the University of Oregon and is author of Applicative Justice: A Pragmatic Empirical Approach to Racial Injustice, White Privilege and Black Rights: The Injustice of U.S. Police Racial Profiling and Homicide, The Ethics and Mores of Race: Equality after the History of Philosophy, and Ethics for Disaster.

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