F.M. Barnard goes beyond the seventeenth-century understanding of the social contract by making national self-enactment contingent on public reasons for individual liberty within civic mutuality. He examines the possibilities and limits for a self-enacting, principled politics, acknowledging reason and self-enactment as central concepts of historical and political thinking. But he qualifies each by viewing the former as practical reason that only indirectly acts as a cause and the latter as operating in relation to reciprocity with the other. Accordingly, enactment is opposed to...
F.M. Barnard goes beyond the seventeenth-century understanding of the social contract by making national self-enactment contingent on public reasons f...
