The Broken Pact: How Populism Distorts the Logic of the Social Contract
Around 300 years ago, the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously stated that “man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.” His idea of submitting oneself to the authority above is still relevant nowadays: it is what we do as citizens of a political society. Yet, Rousseau argued that it is wrong to simply be a slave. Although it is true that to live in society, we are required to give up our natural freedom of doing whatever we desire, he pointed out that man can regain liberty once part of society; indeed, by contributing to the creation of laws, and therefore being governed by one’s own laws, man is free. A new kind of civil liberty is thus formed, and man is master once more. This social contract rhetoric seems innocent at first sight. Yet, today it has become what contemporary populists claim to legitimize their movements.
The political theory of the social contract aims to establish a form of political society that is granted legitimate authority by the citizens’ consent. This mutual agreement of giving up one’s freedom is essential for the protection of citizens’ rights and the maintenance of order in society, as competition produced by the establishment of private property threatens to turn people against each other. A social contract claims to prevent the latter from happening.
Populist rhetoric aligns with social contract theories in that both seek to make the will of the people play a constructive role in the nation’s functioning. Rousseau advocated for popular sovereignty: the idea that the general will of the people should be the source of all political power. He, like other political theorists, agreed that the laws of the polis should benefit the majority and should not be affected by private interests. This is also why Locke developed a theory of limited government. He believed that law should always protect man’s life, property and liberty, and if it fails to do so, then one has the right to revolt against the government. Populism can therefore seemingly be justified by the idea of the people defending their collective interest when their representatives betray their trust. To continue with Rousseau’s chain metaphor, populists illustrate themselves as taking the chains off the people and restoring their freedom. This might be true for systems controlled and constrained by a corrupt elite. Yet, contemporary populism reveals the contrast between what populists claim to be and what they actually are.
Populism is originally rooted in the supposed unity of the nation’s “pure people”. However, a tension arises when such a dialogue is compared to social contract theories. Populists often blame a self-serving government for betraying the nation and its people. They accuse them of ruling by their own laws, thereby reducing the citizens’ power to govern them. Yet the same approach could be addressed to the populists themselves. It is important to remember that populists do not constitute the whole nation; instead, they are only a part of it. Thus, by addressing their concern about regaining their so-called natural freedom, they are also separating themselves from the nation by expressing dissatisfaction with the social contract. In doing so, they are breaching the pact that they agreed to, and calling themselves foreign to the nation and its rules. They betray the social contract while criticizing the rulers for doing the same.
This friction between populist ideals and their practice culminates in a breach of trust: a moment when the populists’ claim to represent the people collapses under the weight of their own contradictions. While populist movements frame themselves as restoring the broken bond between rulers and citizens, they often reconstruct that bond selectively, privileging only those who conform to their image of the “true people.”
Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement fully embodies this strategy. It is presented as a restoration project aiming to return power to “forgotten men and women of America” (Trump, 2016), which indeed echoes Rousseau’s fight to reunite the rulers and the ruled under a common general will. Yet in MAGA’s case, this rhetoric was never inclusive. “The people” came to signify only those who fit a particular image of the nation: patriotic, white, Christian, and loyal to him personally. While framing himself as the saviour of the working class through the One Big Beautiful Bill and protectionist tariffs, Trump’s governance favours plutocratic interests, with tax cuts overwhelmingly benefiting the wealthy and deregulation serving corporations. This example thus showcases how contemporary populism often defends only a part of the nation’s interests, and most importantly, portrays itself as something that it is not.
Moreover, contemporary populism can often betray the logic behind the social contract by exaggerating the extent to which the government has violated the population’s trust. Argentina’s Javier Milei’s “la casta” rhetoric, referring to the entire political class supposedly being disloyal to the people, as well as his hyperbolic recounting of institutional misconduct, fuels the people’s temptation to rebel. Yet such discontent is built on distortion rather than deliberation. His discourse transforms legitimate critique into emotional outrage, undermining the possibility for democratic reform. He frames himself as the mediator, all the while diminishing the very institutions that allow citizens to collectively exercise their sovereignty, or what Rousseau would call civil freedom: the concept of acquiring freedom and independence through self-governance and active participation. Instead of reconstructing the social contract and strengthening it, Milei’s populism risks dissolving it completely. What started as a call for accountability risks dismantling the rules and checks that sustain the democratic system.
A similar pattern can be found in Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro’s strategy of theoretically invoking the logic of the social contract, yet only to weaponize it against itself. His rise to power was grounded in the claim that Brazil’s political establishment had violated the foundational agreement between rulers and citizens of striving for the common good. Bolsonaro presented himself as the renovator of the social contract, one that would reassert the people’s sovereignty. While echoing the social contract, his vision contradicted it in practice. By identifying himself as the sole representative of the people’s will, Bolsonaro redefined sovereignty as an extension of his leadership. Such demagoguery defies the very principle of the social contract, which defends legitimate authority as being the product of the collective will of all citizens being exercised through formal and shared laws.
In the end, populism thus serves to fuel polarization and conflict rather than uniting the people under a peaceful and secure social contract. Speaking for only a portion of the nation as a whole, populist leaders divide the general will into minority forces. Speaking up as an individual leader and not as a part of the sovereign contradicts the unity promoted by the social contract political theories. Populists’ misuse of such ideals is profoundly dangerous because it turns freedom into a weapon of control. What begins as a promise to give power back to the people ends as the erosion of the very democracy that makes that power possible.
Edited by Stellar Zhang
Featured Image: “Javier Milei” by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
