Conclusion: From the Social Contract to the Natural Contract

Abstract

Between 1972 and 2017, a number of scientific manifestos ceaselessly warned about a sobering future for mankind: “human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. (…) A great change in our stewardship of the Earth and the life on it is required, if vast human misery is to be avoided” (1992). Since 2018, the idea of a threatening future suddenly has become anachronistic. In 2018, 700 French scientists asserted: “We have already fully entered the ‘climate future,’” and in 2019, William Ripple and colleagues wrote: “The climate crisis has arrived and is accelerating faster than most scientists expected. It is more severe than anticipated, threatening natural ecosystems and the fate of humanity.” In short, we are now witnessing the first phases of an environmental collapse of unfathomable proportions. The effort to “educate” capitalism for sustainability was doomed to fail because unsustainability is constitutive of capitalism. There remains the urgent collective task of overcoming it. We do not yet know what form a postcapitalist society will take on. Discussing and defining its possibilities remain the greatest challenge of contemporary philosophical and political thought and practice. This conclusion discusses a possible transition toward a new natural contract, which implies overcoming (1) the paradigm of Homo oeconomicus and (2) classical democracy itself (based on an anthropocentric matrix) for the benefit of a biocracy, which is nothing but a more comprehensive understanding of democracy.