Social Contract Theory

Social Contract Theory

Introduction

Social contract theory is an approach to questions of political legitimacy and obligation that seeks to ground claims to sovereignty on an agreement among people to form a political community. Social contract theory was the dominant approach to such questions in early modern Europe, and numbered among its proponents many of the major political theorists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, Samuel von Pufendorf, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant. As it is a theory of popular sovereignty, social contract theory was originally in opposition to theories such as that of the divine right of kings that grounded political authority on a putative mandate from God.

Although John Locke (1632-1704) is now most famous for his revision of Hobbes's theory of the social contract, it is important to remember that he saw himself responding at least as much to Sir Robert Filmer as to Hobbes, and devoted the first of his Two Treatises of Government to a critique of Filmer's account of the origins of political sovereignty as being in divine mandate. Locke followed Hobbes and Pufendorf in insisting that sovereignty could only originate in an agreement made by the people to whom it was to apply. However, he sided with Pufendorf and against Hobbes on the question of the nature of that contract, and his disagreement with Hobbes stemmed in large part from a different conception of the state of nature (Rousseau, 2007).

According to Locke, the state of nature need by no means be warlike. In many ways, the picture of primitive communism that Locke draws seems idyllic. In his view, the state of nature is one of liberty to do as one pleases, but is not one of license. Rather, the state of nature is governed by a law of nature that can be applied by anyone in cases of breaches of it. Anyone who breaches the law of nature places him or herself into a state of war with the victims of their transgression and may rightly be punished. The upshot is that, for all its promise, the state of nature depicted by Locke is ultimately unstable in much the same way as is that of Pufendorf. One of the reasons that Locke provides for inhabitants of a state of nature to sign a social contract taking them out of that state is to avoid the danger of slipping into a state of war (Pufendorf, 2004).

Discussion

The social contract theory provided relief from social and religious injustice by proposing that all human beings are individuals who possess an independent identity that predated society. Second, human kind is composed of people who are all relatively equal and entitled to happiness in their own right; three, individuals, rather than being society's creatures, create society; and society is to be maintained as a congregation of free and equal individuals who relate to each other by virtue of mutual interest and on the basis of what they have acquired through the exercise of humanity ...