The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (59 page)

 
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An agreement made between two or more persons to secure a result which each intends should benefit him or her. Although every participant anticipates a gain, it does not follow that each will benefit to an equal amount; indeed, one or more may lose in the event. Legal systems and their students are concerned with questions like: Which contracts should be legally enforceable? Should contracts be enforced by requiring that they be carried out, or by assessing compensation due to the aggrieved party if they are not? What is the proper way to analyse a contract—as a pair of promises, as an offer coupled with an acceptance, as a promise given for a reasonable consideration? Contracts are also of importance in exemplifying the relation between rights and duties, which seems particularly symmetrical in the case of consensual contract. Each party acquires duties and rights as a result of the contract, and one person's right has a clear relation with other persons' duties. An important political application has been the
social contract
, under which the state, the political community, or legitimate authority is seen as the consequence of a contract drawn up to secure that result. The idea of a social contract has been criticized for historical inadequacy, and for misconceiving the relation between individuals and society or the state. Nevertheless, the contractarian tradition still flourishes in political theory. For example, John Rawls (
A Theory of Justice
, 1971) has asked what individuals in specified conditions would hypothetically agree to, what sort of contract they would accept, if they were trying to agree on critical standards of justice—although whether this approach is illuminating is disputed.
AR 

 
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Term adapted from its ordinary meaning by
Hegel
and
Marx
to refer to dialectical conflicts in history and society. According to Marxist theory, contradiction is a tenet of dialectical reasoning rather than a logical error. Contradiction is held to be present in all phenomena and to be the principal reason for their motion and development. In
Dialectics of Nature
,
Engels
presents examples from both natural science and mathematics intended to defend this proposition. However, the doctrine of contradiction as the main source of development is most easily understood with respect to society. Marx and Engels argued in the
Manifesto of the Communist Party
that, ‘the history of society is the history of class struggle’. Social classes, particularly bourgeois and proletarians under capitalism, found themselves with contradictory interests, and their interaction produced not only historical but social transformation. Marx and Engels predicted the victory of proletarians and the eventual abolition of class relations. Given the ubiquity of contradictions. Soviet ideologists were faced with initial difficulty in characterizing social relations under socialism. They resolved the problem by developing the notion of antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradictions; thus, unlike bourgeois and proletarians under capitalism, workers and peasants in the Soviet Union did not have antagonistically contradictory interests, merely non-antagonistically contradictory ones.
SWh 

 
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(1) A meeting of persons with a common concern or purpose, for example the intention to create a constitution. ( See also
party convention
.)
(2) A shared practice, or a practice widely followed, usually in the absence of any written prescription and sometimes without the backing of (formal) sanctions. Conventions governing property and government were especially important in the writings of
Hume
, for whom they provided an alternative explanation of political institutions to the (for him) discredited theory of a
social contract
. Conventions have also been important to
anarchist
writers as examples of social co-operation in the absence of centralized coercion. The unwritten ‘constitution’ of the United Kingdom is often described as conventional, meaning that it is thought appropriate to do what has been done before. Here it is not so much that a practice is widely followed (as there may be few examples of a particular situation having arisen) as that there is a general inclination to follow alleged precedents. Because of the possibilities of uncoerced social co-operation apparently offered by conventions, the dynamics of their emergence have attracted sociological and philosophical attention. See also
nature
.

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The idea of replacing economic competition by the mutual co-operation of producers and/or consumers was central to the nineteenth-century socialist tradition, particularly Robert
Owen
and his followers. In principle all economic activities related to the processes of production, distribution, and exchange might be included in a scheme for a ‘Co-operative Commonwealth’, implying the total abolition of capitalist industrial ownership and management, and the establishment of a network of voluntary associations owned and run by groups of workers or (in the case of consumer co-operatives) by consumers. It is one of the key principles of economic co-operation that net earnings are redistributed directly (usually on an annual basis) to the ‘members’ of the association or undertaking, and do not serve as profit for a separate group of owners or investors. In practice co-operatives of many kinds have emerged and flourished across the world: in farming, industry, and the service sector, and in the form of consumer societies and housing associations. Co-operatives have been more common and in many respects more successful in capitalist societies (including the United States) than under systems of socialist economic planning. Yet for many democratic socialists and anarchists the co-operative principle, linked to the ideal of
workers' control
, remains an important starting-point for building a vision of an alternative society to both capitalism and state socialism.
KT