excuse me, just organizing my thoughts

reading an essay by david graeber. what i think he is saying is:
when we make a social contract, we need to base it (or its enforcement) on something outside of the contract itself (ie the formation of a constitution cannot be done by constitutional means).
the more alien to us the mechanism we choose in order to do this, the more alien the social contract (alien? outside? different? abstract?). or vice versa - the more abstract the social construct, the more abstract its mechanism of enforcement.