Social Contract, Free Ride - (Collected Papers of Anthony de Jasay) by Anthony De Jasay (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Social Contract, Free Ride is a cogent argument that strikes at the very foundations of traditional economic apologies for coercive action by the state to fulfill necessary public utility.

Anthony de Jasay is an independent theorist living in France.

Review Quotes

First published in 1989, this book by Hungarian-born libertarian philosopher and economist de Jasay aims to refute the existence of the classic public goods problem, which holds that contributions to shared benefits is collectively rational but individually irrational and that therefore a social contract must be fashioned with the power to coerce individual contributions to public goods. To the contrary, he argues, with simple contractual obligations there would be a self-selective set of people who would provide public goods as part of prudential calculation of the alternatives and there would be others taking the risk of the free ride in the acceptance that the prior group would be big enough. All the social contract does, then, is to transform these self-selecting groups into analogous, but coerced, groups of taxpayers and tax-beneficiaries.

Reference & Research Book News
August 2008


Does society truly need the government acting as a parental figure? The Collected Papers of Anthony de Jasay: Social Contract, Free Ride, A Study of the Public-Goods Problem presents several radical ideas for the reader to ponder. Arguing that through the social contract and morality inherent in Americans, voluntary contributions of the people would solve many of society's problems--because under the social system, everyone would feel urged to contribute if they had the ability to do so. The possibility that many would prefer to take the free ride is not discounted, however. Thoughtful and thought provoking throughout, The Collected Papers of Anthony de Jasay: Social Contract, Free Ride, A Study of the Public-Goods Problem is highly recommended for community library political collections.

The Midwest Book Review
July 2008

The publisher Liberty Fund has republished Anthony de Jasay's book Social Contract, Free Ride: A Study of the Public-Goods Problem. In this book, de Jasay, one of the most original and sharpest political philosophers of our age, offers a critical review of the public goods argument for the state. He argues that a) economists and political philosophers too easily dismiss the possibility of voluntary production of public goods, and b) that the social contract solution to establish a state to remedy market failure and free-riding will create an environment that will bring back free-riding with a vengeance.

Although de Jasay prefers to make his case by staying within the orthodox rational choice framework, he admits the logical problems implicit in the social contract argument:

"The high road to coercion is the contractarian pretension that acceptance by a person of a share in a benefit he did not solicit is tantamount to his tacit acceptance of an obligation to provide a share of the corresponding contribution in the same way as those who did solicit the benefit."

The desire for fairness in contributing to public goods tends to generate political arrangements that will undermine both justice and fairness:

"...while the intent of the social contract is to suppress free riding, its actual effect is to open up an altogether new ground on which it thrives with impunity. For the deterrent to state-of-nature free riding is the falling probability of successful public provision of a good as abuse of it by free-riding increases. When the necessary contributions for successful public provision are assured by coercion, no such check operates and free riding is never too risky. Risk, in fact, enters people's calculations with the opposite sign: from a check upon free riding it turns it into a spur."

Liberty Funds edition of the book is presented as The Collected Papers of Anthony de Jasay.Hopefully this indicates the start of an ongoing series of de Jasay's (unpublished) writings.

Aschwin de Wolf
September 18, 2008