More than 100 countries and the European Union, accounting for more than half of the world’s population, held elections in 2024. In Europe, the elections resulted in a rightward shift away from globalism toward an emphasis on national sovereignty. And the American election has seen Donald Trump secure a second, non-consecutive term as President and the Republican Party regain control of Congress. Almost as if on cue, leftists and progressives, especially after the American election, began warning the world of the impending collapse of democracy and the erosion of human rights. The U.S. Supreme Court with three Trump-appointed justices has, after all, just returned the abortion debate to the states by overturning Roe v. Wade and coronated Trump in a landmark decision on presidential immunity. The vociferous opponents of these electoral and legal developments have even claimed, according to various and complex reasons, that the U.S. Supreme Court is illegitimate and the defense of national sovereignty regressive and counterproductive. 

Given this context, it seems an appropriate time to reflect on the idea of government by consent of the governed and political legitimacy when the populations of Western nations seem so bitterly divided. So, Dr. Paul DeHart’s excellent and strikingly original work, The Social Contract in the Ruins: Natural Law and Government by Consent, could not have come at a better time. 

As DeHart briefly addresses in the book, the historical origin of the precept that underlies a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” is contested. Some argue that it is present in some form in ancient Greece and the biblical nation of Israel, while others maintain that it arose in the Middle Ages or the Catholic Counter-Reformation. Without asserting that any of these claims are entirely without merit, DeHart maintains that Reformed covenantal theology is the true source of modern social contract theory’s focus on the necessity of individual consent for the legitimacy of government authority. 

This is a possibly controversial claim among intellectual historians. Certainly, DeHart cites others who have taken different positions. But laying aside that controversy, DeHart’s primary thesis is that the modern notion of social contract theory is incoherent as articulated by most twentieth century theorists. DeHart’s bold claim undermines the view that individual-rights centric theories of politics, liberalisms, can be understood apart from a specifically Reformed Protestant context, a perspective which has been more or less been uncritically accepted by most political theorists. 

DeHart traces some early Protestant articulations of what was then a radical idea. Beginning in the 16th century, new Christian churches formed based on new types of congregational governments where members had the authority to appoint and dismiss ministers as well as admit new members to their number. By the 17^th century, Puritans in North America were arguing that the choice of magistrate “by God’s allowance” belongs to the people rather than to a distant monarch or to his more proximate representative. This model for church polity quickly spilled out into the body politic and the older theories of authority became insufficient for people now liberated in the spiritual realm.

Social contract theory in any form locates government authority in the consent of the governed to assume various obligations that members of a community owe to one another and to the community as a whole. This view holds that the law and its representatives are legitimate insofar as they possess the consent of the governed. DeHart is critical of modern social contract theory insofar as it is dependent upon a nominalist metaphysic and voluntarist ontology of obligation, where individuals are understood primarily in solipsistic terms instead of being thought of as beings with obligations to God and the community.

These fundamental assumptions of the theory are unsurprisingly rooted in modernism given their origin and it is these assumptions, argues DeHart, that renders the modern articulation incoherent. On this reasoning, social contract theory is built on a theory of obligation entirely dependent upon human will. He demonstrates quite convincingly that these theories are self-defeating.

He does not, however, argue that establishing a theory of government by consent is a fool’s errand. He argues that political and social conventions established by acts merely informed by the will require some sort of moral grounding for stability and, contrary to the prevailing wisdom of the twentieth century, he argues that classical natural law supplies that necessary grounding. It is natural law that provides a moral framework for legal and political obligations. This moral foundation is rooted in a metaphysically real, objective good that transcends the will, something often influenced by transient factors like social convention. Legal and moral obligation as merely the outworking of the preferences or peculiarities of a people is not durable, but metaphysically grounded conceptions of the moral good are, in fact, “the permanent things” upon which civilization is built.

DeHart’s book is admittedly technical and requires careful reading, but it is not inaccessible, particularly given the author’s clear writing style. But one of the most unique things about this work is not just that it engages an important issue a critical time, but that it helpfully integrates disparate sources into a coherent narrative. DeHart harmonizes secular, Catholic and Protestant sources. He does not, as some authors do, pit factions against one another. This innovative work is worth serious consideration by thinkers from many disciplines, and I look forward to the conversations related to both the theoretical questions of political theory as well as the practical questions of political legitimacy that it sparks.