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According to those social theories which can be subsumed under the common title of atomism, the original human condition is solitary. It is only from such a solitary stance that individuals can enter a social contract, which most theories describe as an essentially interest-based arrangement where one trades-off one’s intrinsic, and in principle unlimited, freedom in exchange for a degree of fundamentally biological protection that is possible only in a collective of individuals. The attraction of social contract throughout the modern history of philosophy has arisen from its easy compatibility with liberal sentiments. The predominance of liberal thinking in political philosophy has ensured that the ‘generic’ explanation of society along the lines of a social contract would be broadly accepted and elaborated. Assuming that the protection of individual liberties and the curtailment of the state to the minimum necessary to benefit the most, while allowing the maximum possible liberty to each one member of a society, is the value to guide political philosophy, it has been highly convenient for philosophers to trace back the very legitimacy of society to a pre-social situation where individuals had supposedly enjoyed unlimited freedom and would have decided at one point to join society. In the described context, it is not actually important that social contract theory does not postulate a factual solitary state at any particular point in human history but simply assumes one for reasons of theory. The very assumption warrants that, if the theory is valid, such a factual situation must at least have been possible. In other words, social contract goes hand-in-hand at least with traditional liberalism. I shall try in this article to discuss the compatibility of liberalism with organic solidarity which, I shall argue, is a prerequisite for any effective form of social integration within existing democracies. Such solidarity is required, for example, for union activities and the ability of members of groups to identify with each other on a basis broader than crude and obvious interest. My point will be that organic solidarity requires a sufficiently broad range of shared values that they could constitute a particular passion of commonality. Finally, I shall argue that, without such a passion of commonality, there can be no adequate social solidarity that would be truly useful in highly complex modern democratic societies and that the liberal tradition today militates against such instrumentally necessary solidarity. I shall discuss these issues in a free form and will not adhere to technically strict standards in order to allow for a broad range of issues to be encompassed in a relatively short discussion. In addition, it is not the aim of this article to be argumentatively tight in the usual analytic way, but rather to relate issues preliminarily that may later be elaborated through a more stringent methodology.

What has happened to firstborn social theory: the social contract