My Take | Hong Kong breakdown can only mean a Beijing takeover
- Sooner or later, people in the city will have to acknowledge mainland China is the only power that can rewrite our social contract, relaunch government and restore institutions
Legitimacy, wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is the key problem of political science.
Social contract theorists such as the French philosopher try to build legitimate government from the ground up. That ground zero, they call the state of nature. Hong Kong has become an empirical experiment in degeneration into that state.
Sadly, it’s not the fabled peaceful anarchic Eden of noble savages imagined by Rousseau, but that of his far more pessimistic fellow social contract theorist, Thomas Hobbes. It’s a state of civil war, of all against all, and tribe against tribe.
Eventually, desperate for a way out, they submit to what Hobbes calls “a sovereign” to impose order and to protect them. In the case of Hong Kong, that sovereign can only be China.
Hobbes didn’t mean that people began like violent savages; rather they behave like them when society and institutions break down. That is when key institutions start losing legitimacy in the eyes of the people. How do you lose legitimacy? Quite simply, people stop trusting them – and then each other.