social contract
noun
: 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
Recent Examples on the Web
To shore up that social contract, Beijing wants to run a tighter surveillance ship and increase control over its mass monitoring machinery.
—
Mary Hui, Quartz, 21 Feb. 2024
The team at YouTube Music is fairly young and feeling the generational burns of navigating an especially volatile economy and a crumbling social contract between employers and employees.
—Chloe Berger, Fortune, 9 Mar. 2024
America’s social contract was that liberty and self-determination was a more powerful engine of human freedom than vassalage and the divine right of kings.
—TIME, 9 Jan. 2024
From the perspective of the motley resistance, Myanmar could be on the cusp of rewriting its social contract along federal lines.
—Avinash Paliwal, Foreign Affairs, 24 Jan. 2024
Minding one’s business is a bedrock feature of the New York social contract, one that arguably supersedes all other issues, including the collective responsibility to maintain a feces-free sidewalk.
—Mark Healy, New York Times, 27 Jan. 2024
Stepping onto a plane with a few hundred strangers is a sacred social contract: Middle seat gets the armrests.
—Todd Plummer, Condé Nast Traveler, 29 Nov. 2023
That responsibility is a social contract between citizens and the state: The state is obligated to provide security for its people, especially those who live near its borders, that makes living there safe.
—Avner Cohen, The Conversation, 14 Oct. 2023
The protests put in stark relief the fraying of that social contract, showing that the climbing economic and social costs of China’s zero-Covid policies—coupled with an increasingly authoritarian regime’s zero-tolerance for dissent—have driven many to a kind of breaking point.
—Lingling Wei, WSJ, 28 Nov. 2022
Mary Hui, Quartz, 21 Feb. 2024
The team at YouTube Music is fairly young and feeling the generational burns of navigating an especially volatile economy and a crumbling social contract between employers and employees.
—Chloe Berger, Fortune, 9 Mar. 2024
America’s social contract was that liberty and self-determination was a more powerful engine of human freedom than vassalage and the divine right of kings.
—TIME, 9 Jan. 2024
From the perspective of the motley resistance, Myanmar could be on the cusp of rewriting its social contract along federal lines.
—Avinash Paliwal, Foreign Affairs, 24 Jan. 2024
Minding one’s business is a bedrock feature of the New York social contract, one that arguably supersedes all other issues, including the collective responsibility to maintain a feces-free sidewalk.
—Mark Healy, New York Times, 27 Jan. 2024
Stepping onto a plane with a few hundred strangers is a sacred social contract: Middle seat gets the armrests.
—Todd Plummer, Condé Nast Traveler, 29 Nov. 2023
That responsibility is a social contract between citizens and the state: The state is obligated to provide security for its people, especially those who live near its borders, that makes living there safe.
—Avner Cohen, The Conversation, 14 Oct. 2023
The protests put in stark relief the fraying of that social contract, showing that the climbing economic and social costs of China’s zero-Covid policies—coupled with an increasingly authoritarian regime’s zero-tolerance for dissent—have driven many to a kind of breaking point.
—Lingling Wei, WSJ, 28 Nov. 2022
These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'social contract.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
Dictionary Entries Near social contract
Cite this Entry
“Social contract.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/social%20contract. Accessed 23 Apr. 2024.
Copy CitationLove words? Need even more definitions?
Merriam-Webster unabridged
Share