DaGyum Yang

Can a social contract exist without consent? Since Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, political legitimacy has been grounded in the fiction of voluntary agreement. Yet no one consents to be born, nor to the political and institutional order into which they are delivered. Birth itself is a non-volitional event, and in contemporary societies it is further transformed into an institutional event—shaped by demographic policies, welfare regimes, and strategies of civilizational survival. If birth is institutional, then the state does not merely govern after the fact; it assumes prior and categorical duties the moment new life enters. This paper names this condition Institutional Thrownness and argues for a Non-Voluntary Social Contract: a framework in which legitimacy rests not on imagined consent but on the inevitability and normativity of birth. In this model, the state’s responsibility is not contingent upon citizens’ agreement but arises from the very fact of institutionalized birth, binding the state to guarantee dignity, provide unconditional basic income, and secure maximal freedoms—of failure, of creation, and of access to information. This reorientation challenges the very identity of social contract theory. Instead of grounding legitimacy in hypothetical procedures of consent, it derives obligation from the unchosen conditions of existence. By situating birth as the foundation of political obligation, the paper reconstructs the relationship between state and individual and opens a new philosophical horizon for social and political thought.