When Lavan substitutes Leah, he has not actually violated his explicit agreement – he has violated only that which is implied. Of course, adhering to implied obligations is itself a very general form of social contract. A society with only explicit agreements will quickly unravel.
When Yaacov complains, Lavan defends himself by reference to a social contract: “It is not done so in our place to give the younger one before the firstborn.” Unlike his own willful resistance to his second-born status and the arrangement of the well, Yaacov acquiesces to this social contract. He accepts, without complaint, Lavan’s position. To deny Leah would have been personally hurtful, but he could have demanded Rachel immediately. Instead, he accepts the primacy of Leah in this situation.
Yaacov suddenly seems uninterested in overturning social convention; even social conventions directly connected to his own status in life. When Leah purchases his bed, her argument for the trade is that Rachel has taken her husband. There is a social expectation, that a husband will have a connection with his wife, no matter the circumstances of the marriage. Hashem Himself weighs in on this obligation – providing Leah with children because she is not loved. In this case, Yaacov again acquiesces to a third-party contract. He seems thoroughly trained.
He is so thoroughly trained that he does not object to his working conditions even after he has earned Rachel and Leah. We know, from the end of the reading, that he considers Lavan to have been cheating him the entire time.
But he has not failed to learn. Lavan’s history of cheating is what leads Yaacov to establish the covenant of the spotted sheep. He makes a payment agreement with Lavan through which Yaacov will earn a fraction of the flock. But because he is dealing with Lavan, he does what the shepherds did with the stone: he builds in a physical method of validating the contract. The appearance of the sheep themselves will clarify ownership. It will prevent Lavan from theft, deception or muddling of terms. Yaacov has internalized not only social obligation, but the same sad state of affairs that he saw on arriving in Padan Aram.
But this time, Lavan explicitly cheats. He violates the agreement by seizing Yaacov’s payment before Yaacov can collect. In this case, Yaacov honors the explicit agreement – as Lavan had done before. But he manipulates the implicit reality to his own advantage. He pushes back against Lavan – punishing him harshly for his violation of contract. And Hashem backs his decision by providing the miracle of spotted sheep where Yaacov had only a hope.
When Yaacov flees, the Torah literally states that he ‘stole Lavan’s heart’. He was obligated to let Lavan say goodbye to his children. But Yaacov has his reasons for fleeing – namely a fear that Lavan will violate yet another implicit social obligation by preventing him from going. Lavan’s reaction to this relies on a ridiculous appeal to convention – namely that Yaacov has no property because his wives are Lavan’s daughters. But the weakness of Lavan’s argument is revealed when he states that he could take it all by force, but chooses not to. Fundamentally, he is not a man who obeys convention – he is a man who manipulates it to his exclusive advantage and relies on might to make it reality. When he manipulates implied reality, there is no higher moral objective.
This time, Yaacov’s response relies on its own appeal to convention. A shepherd is due certain implied wages and payments and does not pay for things like compensation for killed sheep, but Lavan has ignored those realities. At the end of his relationship with Lavan, Yaacov ends up using social convention in his own defense. He uses social convention to limit those who might lean on the principle of ‘might makes right.’ It is Lavan who proposes the final contract; a contract dependent on G-d himself. Perhaps he has learned from Yaacov.