What Ferguson has made clear, specifically, is that the social contract has been broken. With the expected grand jury non-indictment of Officer Darren Wilson likely to provoke renewed and righteous unrest, we are seeing nothing less than the state proving itself illegitimate.
I mean this in a very particular sense. When the decisions of a justice system are so repugnant to a significant mass of people that the state apparatus expects and must contend with popular unrest, then this political system has lost the grounds on which political legitimacy is based. When, on Monday, Missouri Governor Jay Nixon declared a state of emergency in Ferguson ahead of the grand jury decision, I like to think the ghost of Jean Jacques Rousseau looked on and whispered through the icy Missouri air, "Rise up."
Ferguson police emails reveal 'life is very rough' for officers. Read more here.
Rousseau's The Social Contract does not describe the modern democratic state. Yet the tenets of the 1762 treatise provided the framework by which we came to understand how political legitimacy resides in a democratic government. The social contract is broken, Rousseau stated, when a government does not represent the general will of the sovereign — the sovereign being the people, united — and when justice is not the expression of the general will of the people. And so, in Ferguson, where the National Guard must be called for fear that people will be moved to violence because of the decisions of our justice system, the social contract, it seems, is broken. This, for Rousseau, would be grounds enough for revolution.