What is the social contract, and how does it apply to the international? We very briefly identify Thomas Hobbes and Woodrow Wilson, respectively, to define each. In the comparative and international contexts, early 20th century ethnographer Ruth Benedict offers important insights into the salience of cultural difference; those insights are amplified by French philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas in his emphasis on absolute alterity. Benedict adopts and problematizes a schema to explain archetype-level (and macro-level) cultural differences between modern and traditional societies, including some traditional societies still existing in the West. In so doing, she draws upon Oswald Spengler and Friedrich Nietzsche. The result is that difference can be enormous and may be of profound importance. How should we reconcile that observation with coexistence in the international arena? We suggest that Wilson has offered us an international version of the social contract with some limits, highlighting a respect of difference and sovereignty at the domestic level as practiced within existing legal norms and responsibilities to the international sphere. That is, respecting the right of traditional peoples to their (lawful) traditional practices should be—and in some ways is—part of current conceptualizations of sovereignty at the domestic level. We imply a further emphasis on cultural sovereignty—a right to these (lawful) differences. It is suggested that greater attention is needed to coexistence with traditional and/or traditionalist peoples, cultures, economies, and social forces from the most remote contexts down to the metropole and within and across East, West, North, and South.

The International Social Contract

Thomas Hobbes outlines the basic need for order, and for what we now call social contract, sufficient to allow localized security so that individuals—children, elders, women, and men—can predictably go from home to work or school and back every day, even if work is in a nearby agricultural field. Indeed, Hobbes calls it the responsibility of the individual, by “general rule of reason,” to seek peace unless the other is refusing it (Hobbes 1997 [1651]: 103-4). McLean (1981) identifies social contract with Hobbes and highlights its component of ceding individual liberty to a sovereign, warning of the need to consider, in some cases, self-defense against the sovereign. For Hobbes, what we now call the social contract—by which societies may guarantee, for example, safe agricultural fields, which produce food for a family, village or region, and overall personal security—is a necessity for human sustained existence as against perilous nature and criminal or similar forces (Hobbes 1997 [1651]: 103, 129, 136-7, and 479 not adopting his valuation of cultures; see also 72, 82). The notion of an international social contract is related to philosophers of classical antiquity and the modern period from Protagoras and Cicero to Hobbes, Rousseau, and Kant by Thomas Weatherall. He, likewise, links the idea of an international social contract to notions of (agreed upon) peremptory laws and norms, international morality, moral reason, and human dignity, some of which have been incorporated into the Basic Laws of national states (Weatherall 2015: 67-8, 95-101).

Internationalist and progressivist Woodrow Wilson (Cude 2024: 26-7, 30, 55; a range of views, 123-4; against Lenin’s progressivism, 139-141) was not a strong advocate of the social contract, domestically speaking (Steigerwald 1994: 21-22). Nonetheless, his idea of internationalism and “cooperative politics” (Steigerwald 1994: 39) expanded a sort of notion of social contract applicable to the international arena, focusing on its core tenets to the relationships between states. Internationalism varied, some associating it with progress; others as a reaction against progressivism and fascism; some as an expression of national interest; others as a subordination of national interests (Steigerwald 1994: 42, 58, 135). The Wilsonian internationalism promoted a liberal political world, and, in philosophical terms, a form of idealism (Steigerwald 1994: 8, 135). Some scholars have suggested that, for Wilson, the concern with international cooperation and self-determination-under-most-circumstances were part of Wilson’s own conception of U.S. interests, that is, not a subordination of domestic interests; indeed, it was part of Wilson’s understanding of national security as rooted in a society not forced to become (internally, socially, and culturally) militarized due to international insecurity (Kennedy 2001: 10, 14, 21, 25).

At the height of World War I, the question emerged for he and many others (Trask 1983: 59, 61, 63, 67): why have world wars? What was the overall cause of them? By emphasizing the sovereignty of willing nation-states, he and others suggested that international organizations could ensure a common basis for the sovereignty (e.g., self-determination, initially to a limited list of participants defined by development status, Cude 2016: 157; regarding sovereignty, see Trask 1983: 62) and collective security of nations with the goal to “guarantee liberty and justice for frustrated or downtrodden peoples everywhere” (Trask 1983: 63). The League of Nations (to be replaced by the United Nations in 1945) was then established to provide a forum for international discourse on the issues of the day to promote peaceful coexistence and cooperation across nation-states and related authority systems.

Ruth Benedict: Coexistence, Conflict and Difference in Traditional and Modernist Archetypes

Ruth Benedict (2005 [1934]), on the other hand, tells us that Western modernism, by contrast to traditionalism (as found in the West and elsewhere), is characterized by at least three major philosophical, or even psycho-social-cultural, paradigmatic approaches. She draws these paradigms or archetypes from Oswald Spengler’s effort to identify or classify civilizational patters in The Decline of the West (2006 [English 1926, German 1918], as cited in Benedict 2005 [1934]: 53), as well as from Friedrich Nietzsche’s typologies in The Birth of Tragedy (1910 [German 1872], as cited in Benedict 2005 [1934]: 78). She impresses upon the reader that Western civilization cannot really be broken down into the civilizational patterns proposed by Nietzsche and Spengler, as there are more types today and additional manners in which one might interpret them (Benedict 2005 [1934]: 54-5, 79, 85-8). Nonetheless, she draws upon them in her analysis of the Pueblo peoples. Moreover, her explanation in drawing together Spengler’s and........

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