Social contract theory asks you to imagine decision made under veil pf ignorance (Rawls) or a state of nature (Hobbes) to determine principles of justice from an objective perspective. Albert Weale, takes a different route. In his 2013 book Democratic Justice and the Social Contract he argues that we don't need a hypothetical bargaining scenario at all we can find working examples of fair social contracts already operating in the real world, and build a theory of justice out of them.
Weale's starting claim is simple to state: justice emerges from collective agreement among political associates who enjoy approximate equality of power. Where people bargain as genuine equals, if nobody can coerce or dominate others, the agreements they reach will tend to be just. This is because no one has the leverage to rights the game. (Obviously this is far from our current reality - see.the recod breaking £72 million loaded on Reform UK this month)
Rather than relying purely on abstract reasoning, Weale points to real, historically documented cases of common-pool resource regimes, I.e. communities that have governed shared resources like fisheries, grazing land, or irrigation systems through negotiated, self-enforcing rules (the kind of arrangements associated with Elinor Ostrom's work). These aren't thought experiments; they're empirical cases of people striking durable, mutually acceptable bargains. Weale treats them as a working model for what a democratic social contract looks like in miniature, and then scales the logic up to the level of the modern state.
Weale argues a workable account of the social contract needs three ingredients:
An account of the rationality of agents i.e. what it means for people to reason and bargain sensibly
The form of equality they enjoy i.e. roughly equal bargaining power, not equality of outcome
-The common interests around which agreement converges i.e. shared stakes that make cooperation worthwhile
Yhe agents in Weale's model aren't the thin, purely self-interested calculators of classical rational choice theory. He imagines people capable of reflective distance (considering the public good), deliberative competence, the ability to see how actions serve a goal, and a degree of normative self-determination which refers to the capacity to set and revise one's own ends. This rationality is a working assumption about how people generally reason, not an idealized, unfalsifiable axiom.
