Social Contract

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.

The classical contract theorists differ not only on the content of the agreement but on its modal status. Hobbes's contract is a rational reconstruction: not a historical event but the agreement rational agents would converge on given an accurate diagnosis of human nature. Locke leaves room for actual historical instances and for tacit consent expressed in ongoing cooperation. Rousseau's general will is something stranger — neither historical fact nor hypothetical agreement but the immanent rational will of the citizen body acting on its own behalf.

The twentieth-century revival of contractarianism reframed the framework as a hypothetical thought experiment. Rawls's veil of ignorance is the most influential version: the principles of justice are those rational agents would choose if they did not know who in society they would turn out to be. Critics from communitarian, feminist, and post-colonial traditions have argued that the contractarian tradition takes the situation of the propertied male European citizen as the implicit norm and obscures the relations of dependency, care, and historical injustice that any actual political society also rests on.