By Hugo Roger Paz
Squazzoni (2025) renews a familiar and appealing idiom: peer review as a ‘social contract of academic citizenship,’ sustained by reciprocity and voluntary service. Galimberti’s (2025) short comment on that editorial rightly stresses that reciprocity is real and worth defending. Neither point is in dispute here. What is in dispute is whether ‘contract’ is doing any analytical work, or whether it is being used as a moral shorthand that happens to borrow the vocabulary of political philosophy without accepting its obligations.
A norm is not a contract
Classical contract theory never used ‘contract’ as a decorative synonym for cooperation. Hobbes (1651/1996) begins from mutual authorisation: parties transfer specific powers to a common authority in exchange for order none could secure alone. Locke (1689/1988) adds fiduciary limits on that authority and a standing right to judge whether it remains within its purpose. Rousseau (1762/1997) sets a still higher bar: legitimate rules are those citizens can regard as jointly authored, not externally administered. These traditions disagree on almost everything else, but they agree that ‘contract’ names a claim about the origin, scope, and legitimacy of authority — not an exhortation to be helpful.
Peer review does not fit that structure. Authors and reviewers do not jointly authorise editors or platforms to allocate scarce evaluative attention. They do not collectively determine the criteria by which a submission is judged out of scope, low priority, or too costly to send for external assessment. Consenting to a journal’s submission terms is not the same as co-authoring the rule system itself, and the mere possibility of submitting elsewhere does not manufacture voice, bounded discretion, or reciprocal accountability within the venue that actually holds the manuscript.
Two contracts, conflated
There is a further slippage worth naming. In science-policy scholarship, the ‘social contract for science’ (Guston & Keniston, 1994) describes the relationship among science, the state, and the public — autonomy and funding exchanged for social value. That is a different object from the internal workflow of journal peer review. Borrowing the phrase to moralise unpaid editorial labour compresses two distinct relationships into one, and the compression is not innocent: it relocates a question about institutional design onto the conduct of individual scholars.
Where the citizenship idiom actually moves the weight
The citizenship framing is not neutral in the direction it points. It asks authors to submit more carefully, and reviewers to give more of their time, in the name of a shared obligation. Both are reasonable requests. But the same idiom rarely asks the symmetrical question: what do journals and publishers owe in return — in disclosed capacity, in accounting for reviewer supply, in distinguishing a scientific judgement from an operational shortage before it is communicated as one? A contract, in any sense inherited from the theory it borrows its name from, binds every party it names. An appeal to citizenship that specifies the duties of authors and reviewers while leaving the duties of editorial and publishing institutions unstated is not incomplete by accident. It is a way of describing a capacity problem that belongs to the system as though it were a virtue problem that belongs to scholars. The elegance of the idiom is exactly what should make it suspect: it costs the institution nothing to invoke, and it is scholars, not journals, who are asked to change their behaviour in response.
Modern contractualism raises, not lowers, the bar
Rawls’s (1999) original-position test asks whether institutional rules would be accepted by parties ignorant of their future position within the system. Applied here: would scholars accept opaque rules for allocating external review without knowing whether their own work would sit close to or far from a journal’s established evaluative apparatus? Scanlon’s (1998) contractualism supplies a related test — a principle is defensible only if it cannot reasonably be rejected by those subject to it. A journal may reasonably ration scarce reviewer attention; a principle that lets a capacity limitation be represented as a purely manuscript-centred judgement is harder to defend, because it changes what the author can learn from the decision. Habermas (1996) adds the requirement of public reason: norms binding on affected parties must be justifiable through intelligible reasons, not insulated discretion. None of these standards asks peer review to become a direct democracy. All of them ask for a visible relation between decision category, institutional constraint, and the reason given to the author.
Critical contract theory sharpens the point further. Pateman (1988) and Mills (1997) showed, in very different domains, that agreement-language can conceal unequal background conditions and unequal control over the terms of association. The narrower methodological lesson travels well beyond their substantive cases: one must always ask who sets the rules, who supplies the labour, who bears the uncertainty, and who can contest the terms. Naming a relationship a contract does not make it reciprocal.
What follows
None of this denies that reciprocity matters, or that Squazzoni (2025) is right to worry about a system under strain. The claim is narrower and, I think, more useful: reciprocity is a norm of contribution, not a theory of legitimate governance. It explains why scholars might review at all; it does not specify who has authority to ration review, how that authority is bounded, or what is owed to an author when a decision is capacity-based rather than manuscript-based. Those are the questions a genuine social contract would have to answer, and they are precisely the questions the metaphor currently lets us avoid.
A more exact description is available: peer review is a capacity-constrained evaluative infrastructure, sustained by partial reciprocity but governed through editorial discretion, platforms, and classification systems whose rules are set elsewhere. Under that description, the appropriate response to scarcity is not a stronger appeal to citizenship. It is a decision taxonomy that distinguishes scope from capacity from scientific insufficiency; visible reporting of the capacity constraints that actually drive closure; and a bounded channel through which authors can ask how one decision relates to another. Reciprocity remains necessary. It is not, and has never been, a sufficient account of governance.
References
Galimberti, P. (2025). Short comment on ‘Editorial Note: We need to recognise that peer review is central to the ‘social contract’ of academic citizenship’ (JASSS, 2025, 28, 1, 6). Review of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 3 Feb 2025. https://rofasss.org/2025/02/03/jassseditorial/
Guston, D. H., & Keniston, K. (1994). Introduction: The social contract for science. In D. H. Guston & K. Keniston (Eds.), The Fragile Contract. MIT Press.
Habermas, J. (1996). Between Facts and Norms (W. Rehg, Trans.). MIT Press.
Hobbes, T. (1996). Leviathan (R. Tuck, Ed.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1651)
Locke, J. (1988). Two Treatises of Government (P. Laslett, Ed.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1689)
Mills, C. W. (1997). The Racial Contract. Cornell University Press.
Pateman, C. (1988). The Sexual Contract. Stanford University Press.
Rawls, J. (1999). A Theory of Justice (Rev. ed.). Harvard University Press.
Rousseau, J.-J. (1997). The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings (V. Gourevitch, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1762)
Scanlon, T. M. (1998). What We Owe to Each Other. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Squazzoni, F. (2025) Editorial Note: We need to recognise that peer review is central to the ‘social contract’ of academic citizenship. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 28(1), 6. https://www.jasss.org/28/1/6.html
Paz, H.R. (2026) Reciprocity Is Not Governance: a short comment on the social-contract metaphor in peer review. Review of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 7th Jul 2026. https://rofasss.org/2026/07/07/reciprocity-is-not-governance
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