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The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica Last Updated: Jul 29, 2024 • Article History Table of Contents
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social contract, in political philosophy, an actual or hypothetical compact, or agreement, between the ruled or between the ruled and their rulers, defining the rights and duties of each. In primeval times, according to the theory, individuals were born into an anarchic state of nature, which was happy or unhappy according to the particular version of the theory. They then, by exercising natural reason, formed a society (and a government) by means of a social contract.
Although similar ideas can be traced to the Greek Sophists, social-contract theories had their greatest currency in the 17th and 18th centuries and are associated with the English philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke and the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. What distinguished these theories of political obligation from other doctrines of the period was their attempt to justify and delimit political authority on the grounds of individual self-interest and rational consent. By comparing the advantages of organized government with the disadvantages of the state of nature, they showed why and under what conditions government is useful and ought therefore to be accepted by all reasonable people as a voluntary obligation. These conclusions were then reduced to the form of a social contract, from which it was supposed that all the essential rights and duties of citizens could be logically deduced.
Theories of the social contract differed according to their purpose: some were designed to justify the power of the sovereign, while others were intended to safeguard the individual from oppression by a sovereign who was all too powerful.
According to Hobbes ( Leviathan, 1651), the state of nature was one in which there were no enforceable criteria of right and wrong. People took for themselves all that they could, and human life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” The state of nature was therefore a state of war, which could be ended only if individuals agreed (in a social contract) to give their liberty into the hands of a sovereign, on the sole condition that their lives were safeguarded by sovereign power.
For Hobbes the authority of the sovereign is absolute, in the sense that no authority is above the sovereign, whose will is law. That, however, does not mean that the power of the sovereign is all-encompassing: subjects remain free to act as they please in cases in which the sovereign is silent (in other words, when the law does not address the action concerned). The social contract allows individuals to leave the state of nature and enter civil society, but the former remains a threat and returns as soon as governmental power collapses. Because the power of Leviathan (the political state) is uncontested, however, its collapse is very unlikely and occurs only when it is no longer able to protect its subjects.
Locke (in the second of the Two Treatises of Government, 1690) differed from Hobbes insofar as he conceived of the state of nature not as a condition of complete license but rather as a state in which humans, though free, equal, and independent, are obliged under the law of nature to respect each other’s rights to life, liberty, and property. Individuals nevertheless agree to form a commonwealth (and thereby to leave the state of nature) in order to institute an impartial power capable of arbitrating disputes and redressing injuries. Accordingly, Locke held that the obligation to obey civil government under the social contract was conditional upon the protection of the natural rights of each person, including the right to private property. Sovereigns who violated these terms could be justifiably overthrown.
Locke thus stated one of the fundamental principles of political liberalism: that there can be no subjection to power without consent—though once political society has been founded, citizens are obligated to accept the decisions of a majority of their number. Such decisions are made on behalf of the majority by the legislature, though the ultimate power of choosing the legislature rests with the people; and even the powers of the legislature are not absolute, because the law of nature remains as a permanent standard and as a principle of protection against arbitrary authority.
