SOCIAL CONTRACT THEORY

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. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, social contract theory came under sustained attack from Edmund Burke, David Hume, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham and James Mill. As a result of these attacks, it fell out of favor in both the Anglophone and the continental European traditions of political theory until, in 1971, John Rawls sought to revive it. Since then, important contemporary variants on social contract theory have been developed by Rawls and by such figures as Robert Nozick, T. M. Scanlon, Charles Beitz, and Ronald Dworkin. This entry focuses on the social contract theory of early modern Europe. Its contemporary revival is discussed in the entry on Contractualism and other related entries in this encyclopedia.

Although all social contract theorists share an appeal to an original covenant that is the foundation of political society, and hence all ground sovereign authority on popular agreement, each major figure in the tradition developed a distinctive variant of the social contract. For example, Hobbes's social contract ushers in an absolute sovereign that, in its powers, is more similar to the figure envisaged by divine right theorists such as Robert Filmer than to the limited government of Locke's theory. This entry thus begins with an overview of the versions of the social contract offered by the figures previously listed, before turning to an account of the major themes that unite social contract theorists—such as their individualistic premises, the positing of a state of nature, and the appeal to natural law—and of the criticisms that beset contract theory after the Enlightenment. It concludes with a comparison with contemporary contractualism.

Discussion and Analysis

For all their differences, there are certain unifying features in the thought of the major contract theorists previously reviewed. First, each of them posits the notion of a state of nature. In some cases, the state of nature is supposed to be purely conjectural: this is so, certainly, for the early stages in Rousseau's account in the Discourse on Inequality. In others, it is part conjecture and part history, as when Hobbes and Locke refer to American Indians as living in something akin to a state of nature (Morris, 1999). At any event, the state of nature is a heuristic device that demonstrates the purpose that the social contract is ...