SINCE 1828
social contract
nounDefinition of social contract
: an actual or hypothetical agreement among the members of an organized society or between a community and its ruler that defines and limits the rights and duties of each
Examples of social contract in a Sentence
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The title calls out to theorist, artist, and rapper Rammellzee’s position that the alphabet is a bet — a social contract that can be rewritten. — BostonGlobe.com, "“A book is a sequence of spaces.," 12 Sep. 2019 Its Instagram and WhatsApp subsidiaries are healthy and growing, but legacy Facebook is showing signs of strain under both its heavy ad load and its implicit social contract to ensure fair and equitable discourse. — Adam Seessel, Fortune, "Valuation: Could WeChat Sink Tencent’s Stock?," 25 July 2019 Congress was considering major upgrades to the New Deal social contract that brought a fair amount of prosperity to the working class in exchange for longstanding labor peace. — Sarah Jaffe, The New Republic, "The Road Not Taken," 24 June 2019 Fresh thinking within the Democratic Party should and will include an overdue debate about the balance of obligations in the social contract. — Mark Schmitt, Vox, "Why did Bernie Sanders’s Stop BEZOS legislation draw so much resistance?," 18 Sep. 2018 And how would a democracy ask its members to commit to a social contract for citizenship without making a military career one option of public service? — Jeff Rice, Twin Cities, "Jeff Rice: I damaged the ROTC offices at Northwestern University. Here’s how — and why — I atone," 24 June 2019 The crypto world and the Afrikaner right share the rhetoric that the end is nigh: The financial system is fallible, the social contract unstable. — Gregory Barber, WIRED, "Inside an All-White Town’s Divisive Experiment With Cryptocurrency," 6 June 2019 All of this has led to a huge shift in the US social contract, from one in which supports are based on poverty — often limited to deep poverty — to one in which programs are based on need and children. — Mark Schmitt, Vox, "Why did Bernie Sanders’s Stop BEZOS legislation draw so much resistance?," 18 Sep. 2018 The brilliance of the performance is to render Inga’s actions horrifyingly logical for someone unconstrained by the social contract. — Jeannette Catsoulis, New York Times, "Review: An Icelandic Suburb Hides Deep Dysfunction ‘Under the Tree’," 5 July 2018These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'social contract.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.
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