Social Contract Research Network
29 episodes listed below
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Featuring seminars and interviews about the contemporary social contract: what it is, how and why it breaks down, and how it can be strengthened. Some episodes discuss academic and philosophical approaches to social contract theory; others discuss practical, social and political issues related to the social contract. This podcast is made possible by funding from the Australian Resesarch Council Future Fellowship project "Rewriting the Social Contract: Technology, Ecology, Extremism". Project webpage: bit.ly/MonSCRN YouTube: bit.ly/YouTubeSCRN
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Formal seminars connect political philosophy's arguments about sovereignty and consent to colonialism, capitalism, speech, land, and climate politics.
The Social Contract Research Podcast turns political theory into formal seminar arguments about how authority is claimed, maintained, and resisted. Hobbes and Spinoza recur as speakers test ideas of consent, sovereign power, freedom of speech, and the practical limits of rule.
A sovereign cannot make a table eat grass; you get political theory with unusually sharp practical limits.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A sharp Schmitt seminar that treats sovereignty as a live problem, not a slogan.
Timothy Howells closes the last Social Contracts Research Network seminar of the semester with a hard-edged Schmittian claim: sovereignty is not just force, but a power that can look at concrete human life and make a decision that keeps political space alive and representative.
A careful talk about power, speech, and the limits of contract.
Sandra Leone-Field treats Spinoza's social contract as a hard question about sovereign power rather than a neat bargain: what can rulers actually force, and what follows when they push too far?
A clear talk on how slavery sits inside, not outside, the social contract.
The seminar frames slavery and the social contract as bound together by exclusion, and it is strongest when it traces the plantation system from planters and home government through marronage, tribute, and raid.
A careful Hobbes lecture that keeps authorization and obedience in sharp view.
This seminar uses Hobbes to ask how political authority gets imagined, justified, and made to seem necessary. Ioannis Efigenis moves from early modern theology and science to the logic of authorization, and the result is a clear case for why Hobbes still matters to sovereignty,…
Pettit's Hobbes seminar asks whether a sovereign can be bound by the limits it is meant to enforce.
This Social Contracts Research Network seminar starts with Philip Pettit on Hobbes and quickly settles into the old problem of the social contract and the state of nature.
A careful argument about how land is turned into property through naming and enclosure.
Barbara Arneil's seminar keeps its focus on a hard political question: when land is called empty, and when it is called waste, who gets to make that naming stick?
A grounded reading of capitalism that puts colonial power, sovereignty, and unfree labour at the center.
John Holmwood argues that capitalism cannot be separated from colonial power, sovereignty, and unfree labour. He traces the story through mercantile, liberal competitive, state-managed or social democratic, and finally financialized capitalism.
Ryan Holiday pairs daily Stoic lessons with long-form guest conversations at his Texas bookstore.
Philosopher Barry Lam turns reported stories — gig algorithms, AI music, vampires — into philosophical inquiry.
Economist Glenn Loury interviews one guest at a time on race, religion, and geopolitics.
Peter Boghossian applies street epistemology to guests debating free speech, immigration, and belief.
Vox's narrative reporting on factory farming, pandemic risk, and its Good Robot AI safety series.
Professor Ioannis Efigenis explores Hobbes' state of nature, arguing it functions as a rhetorical tool rooted in political psychology rather than pure science.
Barbara Arneil presents research connecting John Locke's 17th-century colonial theories with Jeremy Bentham's 18th-century enclosure policies.
John Holmwood revisits McPherson’s account of possessive individualism by putting colonialism at the center of modern capitalism.
Sandra Leone-Field gives a Monash seminar on Spinoza and the social contract.
Timothy Howells closes the semester's Social Contracts Research Network seminar with a talk on Carl Schmitt.
Professor John Pratevi turns the seminar toward slavery as a problem inside social contract theory.
Philip Pettit explores Thomas Hobbes's distinctive view of the social contract, arguing that Hobbes saw language as key to human conflict and proposed an absolute sovereign as the only escape from a 'nasty, brutish, and short' state of nature.
The Social Contract Research Podcast features Christopher Kelly of Boston College explaining why Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality contains several distinct states of nature rather than one simple original condition.