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“Some Man” and the Savage

Scholarship on social contract theory generally takes for granted that narratives about civil society emerging from the state of nature are, and are merely, hypothetical. The state of nature is simply instrumental, a fictional construct serving only to expound privileged descriptions of empirically legitimate social and political organization. And yet seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political philosophy, premised on the aspiration for correspondence between representation and “reality,” is co-emergent with another ostensibly realistic discourse, the novel. While both traditions attempt to situate human life in “realistic” contours, they both advance radically different arguments about how rational, self-governing individuals constitute, and are constituted by, legitimate social and political organization. In this paper, I take the narrative elements of social contract more seriously. Specifically, by examining the “protagonist” of social contract theory, I develop a fuller articulation of a submerged obstacle to both narrative and conceptual accounts of eighteenth-century social and political legitimacy.