by Jeffrey Tucker, Daily Reckoning:

This is not about whether there is such a thing as a literal social contract. The phrase has always been a metaphor, and an imprecise one since it was first invoked by Enlightenment-era thinkers trying to sort through a rationale for collective practice of some sort.

It’s easy enough to regard the social contact not as explicit but implied, evolved and organic to the public mind. At the most intuitive level, we can think of it as a widely shared understanding of mutual obligation, a tie that binds, and also the exchange relationship between society and state.