Social Contract
The doctrine that legitimate political authority is grounded in an agreement among the governed — actual, hypothetical, or rational.
Social-contract theory holds that the legitimacy of political authority derives from an agreement among the governed rather than from divine appointment, tradition, or natural hierarchy. The classical early-modern theorists — Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau — each derived very different conclusions from the same contractarian framework.
Hobbes's Leviathan (1651) grounds the contract in the rational fear of a war of all against all in the state of nature: rational agents surrender nearly all rights to an absolute sovereign in exchange for security. Locke's Second Treatise (1689) derives a more limited government from a more peaceful state of nature, with the contract authorizing government only for the protection of pre-political natural rights. Rousseau's Social Contract (1762) replaces the alienation of rights with the general will of the citizen body acting on its own behalf. Twentieth-century contractarianism, especially Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971), revives the framework as a hypothetical agreement under conditions of fairness.