When the social contract was new

One perhaps obvious point about the United States' formative period is brought home vividly in Pauline Maier's Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788.  It's this: the framers, and many of those debating ratification, were quite consciously trying form a new social contract -- that is, implement some version of the social contract theory developed over the prior century-and-a-half. In fact, worries about the chaos that might ensue if the inert federal government was not replaced with a functioning one made some fear the return of a state of nature, which must have added to the sense of being in at the birth.  The sense of consciously forming something new, yet doing it deliberately and in accordance with the norms of representative government already developed, is really quite astonishing. It was an almost scientific experiment and a lived creation myth rolled into one.  Here is James Wilson making the opening bid for ratification in the Pennsylvania ratification convention (as paraphrase/quoted by Maier):

"Government...taken as a science may yet be considered in its infancy," Wilson said, and it had in the past been the product of "force, fraud, or accident." America, he said, offered the first instance "since the Creation of the world...of a people assembled to weigh deliberately and calmly, and to decide leisurely and peaceably, upon the form of government by which they will bind themselves and their posterity."

That's true, isn't it? Remarkable...

Chronicle of an early social contract

In his new book The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution, Francis Fukuyama considers the origins of the social contract that formed the state, and speculates whether it could ever have been the product of a conscious decision on the part of a tribal society. He does not take this discussion where I thought he would:

     Thomas Hobbes lays out the basic "deal" underlying the state: in return for giving up the right to do whatever one pleases, the state (or Leviathan) through its monopoly of forced guarantees each citizen basic security. The state can provide other kinds of public goods as well, like property rights, roads, currency, uniform weights and measures, and external defense, which citizens cannot obtain on their own. In return, citizens give the state the right to tax, conscript, and otherwise demand things of them. Tribal societies can provide some degree of security, but can provide only limited public goods because of their lack of centralized authority. So if the state arose by social contract, we would have to posit that at some point in history, a tribal group decided voluntarily to delegate dictatorial powers to one individual to rule over them. The delegation would  not be temporary, as in the election of a tribal chief, but permanent, to the king and all his descendants. And it would have to be on the basis of consensus on the party of all the tribal segments, each of which had the option of simply wandering off it didn't like the deal.