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"The notion of "contract" has a long illustrious history in political thought. When the Caesars ruled the world, peace (pax) was achieved when a pact (pactum)—a treaty or contract—was formed between warring parties. As is well known, Thomas Hobbes saw the formation of a contract between conflictive strangers as the logical basis for the modern nation-state. Two observations. First, the contact he envisioned was that between strangers who only accidentally shared something in common beyond the mutual desire for self-preservation.
Second, the "peace" achieved was privative only: peace is the absence of war. No more substantive account of the commonwealth is offered than a barely tolerable balance of power that teeters on the brink but does not plummet into war.
Two millennia prior to Pax Romana there was living in Egypt a caste of slaves made up of foreigners from Canaan. Through a series of fantastic evens in the reign of Pharaoh Rameses II, this band of Hebrews escaped Egypt and was led by their charismatic leader Moses to the hinterlands of a country that would one day be theirs. Curiously, this socially backward bunch of former slaves wandered somewhat aimlessly around the desert for an entire generation while they practiced to be a people under the terms of a covenant that they had adopted as their own. This covenant became their constitution, it defined their very form of life. It told them what to do with their pots and pans. It told them, to cancel all debts every fifty years and return any land held as collateral back to the original owner. It told them when to work and when to party, whom to have sex with and whom not to have sex with.
This covenant was highly invasive; rebellious children as well as adulterers could be stoned to death for breach of this covenant. But it had one tremendous advantage: it was an agreement formed among friends that trumped all other considerations. When the Israelites spoke "Shalom!" to each other they were not merely wishing for the absence of conflict. They were wishing upon each other a more substantive good, the good of becoming together precisely the sort of people capable of embodying the covenant. In so doing they understood themselves to be the people of God.
I suspect that one must be an insider to a covenantal form of life to fully appreciate the fact that being such a community is a good greater and more substantial than the mere absence of conflict."
[from: Kallenberg, Brad J. "Professional or Practitioner? What's Missing from the Codes?" Teaching Ethics: The Journal of the Society for Ethics across the Curriculum 3, no. 1 (2002): 49-66.]
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