Columbia University president Minouche Shafik is, on paper, a very impressive person. She has been a vice president at the World Bank, a deputy managing director at the International Monetary Fund, deputy governor at the Bank of England, and director of the London School of Economics. She has served on the boards of the British Museum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and was named a Peer of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second’s United Kingdom in 2015.
In 2021 Shafik published What We Owe Each Other: A New Social Contract for a Better Society. True to its hypercredentialed author, the book was celebrated by some of the biggest names in international economics and social policy: European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde, World Trade Organization Director General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf, and the American philosopher Michael Sandel, to name five—all of whom attested in some way or another that Shafik’s little book was indispensable for building a better world.
Few early readers of What We Owe Each Other could have imagined that its author would, within a few years, propel herself to the authoritarian vanguard of U.S. politics. Fewer still would have guessed that the vector for this metamorphosis would be a major American university. But Shafik’s disastrous tenure at Columbia has exposed undemocratic currents flowing through the elite milieu that once celebrated her. Read as the memoir-manifesto of a woman who turned riot police on unarmed students, What We Owe Each Other serves as an unwitting guide to the intellectual precarity of the reigning liberal order—a document revealing what can go wrong when liberals treat democratic legitimacy and public consent as merely incidental elements of the liberal political project.
The book would be less harrowing if it were simply devoid of insight. But beneath the Obama-era bank director clichés (Automation! Nudge! Secular stagnation!), Shafik conveys a handful of solid policy proposals, emphasizing that nice-guy humanitarian impulses often turn out to be good for economic growth and productivity. She wants higher taxes on capital and better benefits for labor; longer parental leave and more state support for parents; affordable education and quality health care for all. The world would be a better place if more peers of the realm were on board with the book’s agenda.
But Shafik bills What We Owe Each Other as a new social contract, invoking the tradition of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and John Rawls. Social contract theorists are interested in much more than policy wonkery. They try to define the bounds of legitimate government by asking how individuals in an ungoverned “state of nature” would agree to be governed. For Hobbes, the state of nature was so violent and chaotic that rational individuals would readily consent to the authority of an absolute monarch to establish law and order. For Locke, the state of nature’s material bounty meant that governments were required to respect the “natural rights” of individuals, including the right to own private property. Rousseau arrived at democracy by envisioning a state of nature populated by peaceful and compassionate noble savages, while Rawls declared that social inequality could be justified only if inequality improved the living standards of the worst-off. (It might, for example, be OK to pay doctors more than migrant workers because even society’s poor residents benefit, ostensibly, from a functioning medical system.)
Although these different thinkers reach very different political conclusions, they are all—even Hobbes—operating within a fundamentally democratic paradigm: Governments are justified by some kind of appeal to the consent of the governed; the state of nature is the key philosophical tool for establishing how people reason through their rights and obligations to each other.
It is striking, then, to see that Shafik’s social contract doesn’t involve a state of nature at all and isn’t actually a deal that individuals reach with other individuals.
“When I refer to the social contract, therefore, I mean the partnership between individuals, businesses, civil society and the state to contribute to a system in which there are collective benefits,” she writes.
In one blithe sentence, Shafik assumes into legitimacy the major institutions of liberal modernity and declares them partners in a cooperative project, without inquiring into whether or how these institutions might be democratically justified. What we owe each other ends up depending a lot on where we live, what institutions we are affiliated with, and how those institutions—say, for instance, Columbia University—are governed. How these institutions resolve internal disputes is at most a sideshow; how they might fit into a narrative about free individuals choosing their future together is not even contemplated.
Shafik is, to be clear, calling for institutional reforms. She rejects the state-vs.-market dichotomy. She wants to see institutions bearing more collective risks and individuals receiving more of society’s collective output. The successful businesses of the future, she argues, will operate with an eye toward social responsibilities beyond short-term shareholder profits, and ultimately find themselves better regulated and better off.
“Enlightened companies will increasingly see environmental sustainability, paying their fair share of taxes and commitment to their employees and communities as central to their strategies,” Shafik writes. “Investors, meanwhile, will increasingly factor such commitments into their valuations of firms’ share prices, and financial markets will reward firms that manage these risks intelligently.”
All of this sounds very nice and would no doubt be an improvement from the privateering corporate status quo. But which of these various public duties will the successful business prioritize? What should investors do if, say, labor and environmental interests conflict? How might other institutions—Columbia University, perhaps—sort out competing claims? What can different members of the university community reasonably expect from their school’s investment management? What rights do individuals outside the formal management hierarchy have when they want to change the way an institution operates? Where does change come from, and when is it legitimate?
These are not easy questions to answer, and Shafik doesn’t do so. Instead, she pivots from talking about “the social contract” to discussing “social contracts” of varying “generosity” that whole countries, rather than individuals, can “choose” from, depending on the balance of power between people and institutions that happens to prevail. It’s an extraordinary philosophical bait and switch in which Shafik substitutes a variant of neoliberal economics for the democratic considerations of social contract theory. Shafik clearly feels real sympathy for the downtrodden, but her narrative is not about self-government, consent, or consensus. What We Owe Each Other is essentially a lengthy meditation on the observation that greater economic productivity will enable “more generous social contracts.”
I like improved productivity as much as the next Excel dweeb, but this results in some really weird musings on politics. “In most countries today the evolution of social contracts depends on the structure of the political system,” Shafik writes. Democracies “tend to be better at delivering longer lives for their citizens and better economic outcomes,” but “selectorate” countries—Shafik cites China as an example—“can also deliver effective outcomes for their citizens.” After some hemming and hawing, she concludes, “Achieving a better social contract is ultimately about increasing the accountability of our political systems. How this happens will vary between countries.” OK!
Shafik mentions “free media” once, in her final chapter, as part of a description of real-world democracies, and includes the phrase “safeguards of freedoms of association and collective action” in a graphic on Page 178. Otherwise, there are no discussions of free speech or free press in the book. The word dissent does not appear.
One particularly striking aspect of the state-enforced repression sweeping America’s universities is that so much of it is being ordered by people who are supposed to be the good guys in standard liberal accounts of today’s political quagmire. University of Virginia President Jim Ryan was the author of a good book on segregation and education before he tear-gassed his students. Joe Biden has made some genuinely moving speeches on the highest ideals of the American political tradition, and he really has overseen the best U.S. economic performance in at least a generation. But when police started arresting pro-Palestinian students at dozens of campuses nationwide, Biden smeared the protesters and defended the crackdown by declaring that “dissent must never lead to disorder”—an axiom worthy of King George III. Liberal leaders seem to know what to do when democracy is threatened from without—nothing focuses the mind like a glowering autocrat. But throughout the campus crisis over Gaza, liberal leaders in the United States and Europe have repeatedly failed to maintain liberal values when they are challenged from within.
Over the course of the school year, Shafik steadily escalated student protests over Israel into an intractable institutional conflict. Today Columbia’s donors and its administration are essentially at war with the school’s faculty and student body. Students want Columbia and its endowment to divest from Israel, and they keep appealing to democratic processes and procedures to illustrate the legitimacy of their demand. In addition to establishing encampments, they’ve submitted a referendum on divestment to the Columbia College student body—the university’s undergraduate liberal arts school—and received a vote overwhelmingly in support. Shafik, meanwhile, has invoked her institutional authority to deny that demand, and called on the state to enforce her authority. To “win” her most recent battles, Shafik has basically had to shut down the school: This year’s graduation ceremony is canceled, and it’s hard to imagine Shafik enduring any event where students and faculty would congregate.
Columbia, it seems, could benefit from an updated social contract.
