Social Contract

Social Contract

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.

Discussion

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Writing in the century after the previous theorists, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) insisted in his Discourse on Inequality that no previous writer had drawn an accurate picture of the state of nature, because they had imputed to natural human beings character traits that were in reality the product of society. As a result, their “natural man” was in fact not natural, and their states of nature represented what would happen if modern Europeans were taken out of civil society rather than what human beings would have been like before the creation of political commonwealths. Drawing on the arguments of, inter alia, the baron de Montesquieu, Rousseau developed a conception of the state of nature in which human beings originally had little contact with each other, then lived in harmonious “primitive” villages, and only later became enmeshed in a state of war after the development of agriculture and metallurgy led to inequalities that were hitherto impossible. Rousseau concludes that contemporary civil society is not in accord with the laws of nature because it is characterized by a degree of inequality vastly at odds with that which human nature would ...