Social contract

In moral and political philosophy, the social contract is a theory or model that originated
during the Age of Enlightenment and usually concerns the legitimacy of the authority of the
state over the individual.

Social contract arguments typically are that individuals have consented, either explicitly or
tacitly, to surrender some of their freedoms and submit to the authority (of the ruler, or to
the decision of a majority) in exchange for protection of their remaining rights or
maintenance of the social order. The relation between natural and legal rights is often a
topic of social contract theory. The term takes its name from The Social Contract (French:
Du contrat social ou Principes du droit politique), a 1762 book by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
that discussed this concept. Although the antecedents of social contract theory are found
in antiquity, in Greek and Stoic philosophy and Roman and Canon Law, the heyday of the
social contract was the mid-17th to early 19th centuries, when it emerged as the leading
doctrine of political legitimacy.

The starting point for most social contract theories is an examination of the human
condition absent of any political order (termed the "state of nature" by Thomas Hobbes). In
this condition, individuals' actions are bound only by their personal power and conscience.
From this shared starting point, social contract theorists seek to demonstrate why rational
individuals would voluntarily consent to give up their natural freedom to obtain the benefits
of political order.

Prominent 17th- and 18th-century theorists of the social contract and natural rights
included Hugo de Groot (1625), Thomas Hobbes (1651), Samuel von Pufendorf (1673), John
Locke (1689), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762) and Immanuel Kant (1797), each approaching
the concept of political authority differently. Grotius posited that individual humans had
natural rights. Thomas Hobbes famously said that in a "state of nature", human life would
be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short". In the absence of political order and law,
everyone would have unlimited natural freedoms, including the "right to all things" and
thus the freedom to plunder, rape and murder; there would be an endless "war of all
against all" (bellum omnium contra omnes). To avoid this, free men contract with each
other to establish political community (civil society) through a social contract in which they
all gain security in return for subjecting themselves to an absolute sovereign, one man or
an assembly of men. Though the sovereign's edicts may well be arbitrary and tyrannical,
Hobbes saw absolute government as the only alternative to the terrifying anarchy of a state
of nature. Hobbes asserted that humans consent to abdicate their rights in favor of the
absolute authority of government (whether monarchical or parliamentary).
Alternatively, Locke and Rousseau argued that we gain civil rights in return for accepting
the obligation to respect and defend the rights of others, giving up some freedoms to do
so.

The central assertion that social contract theory approaches is that law and political order
are not natural, but human creations. The social contract and the political order it creates
are simply the means towards an end—the benefit of the individuals involved—and
legitimate only to the extent that they fulfill their part of the agreement. Hobbes argued
that government is not a party to the original contract and citizens are not obligated to
submit to the government when it is too weak to act effectively to suppress factionalism
and civil unrest.

According to other social contract theorists, when the government fails to secure their
natural rights (Locke) or satisfy the best interests of society (called the "general will" by
Rousseau), citizens can withdraw their obligation to obey or change the leadership through
elections or other means including, when necessary, violence. Locke believed that natural
rights were inalienable, and therefore the rule of God superseded government authority,
while Rousseau believed that democracy (majority-rule) was the best way to ensure
welfare while maintaining individual freedom under the rule of law. The Lockean concept
of the social contract was invoked in the United States Declaration of Independence.

Social contract theories were eclipsed in the 19th century in favor of utilitarianism,
Hegelianism and Marxism; they were revived in the 20th century, notably in the form of a
thought experiment by John Rawls.

Philosophers

Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan (1651)

The first modern philosopher to articulate a detailed contract theory was Thomas Hobbes
(1588–1679). According to Hobbes, the lives of individuals in the state of nature were
"solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short", a state in which self-interest and the absence of
rights and contracts prevented the "social", or society. Life was "anarchic" (without
leadership or the concept of sovereignty). Individuals in the state of nature were apolitical
and asocial. This state of nature is followed by the social contract.
The social contract was seen as an "occurrence" during which individuals came together
and ceded some of their individual rights so that others would cede theirs. This resulted in
the establishment of the state, a sovereign entity like the individuals now under its rule
used to be, which would create laws to regulate social interactions. Human life was thus
no longer "a war of all against all".

The state system, which grew out of the social contract, was, however, also anarchic
(without leadership). Just as the individuals in the state of nature had been sovereigns and
thus guided by self-interest and the absence of rights, so states now acted in their self-
interest in competition with each other. Just like the state of nature, states were thus bound
to be in conflict because there was no sovereign over and above the state (more powerful)
capable of imposing some system such as social-contract laws on everyone by force.
Indeed, Hobbes' work helped to serve as a basis for the realism theories of international
relations, advanced by E. H. Carr and Hans Morgenthau. Hobbes wrote in Leviathan that
humans ("we") need the "terrour of some Power" otherwise humans will not heed the law
of reciprocity, "(in summe) doing to others, as wee would be done to".

John Locke's Second Treatise of Government (1689)

John Locke's conception of the social contract differed from Hobbes' in several
fundamental ways, retaining only the central notion that persons in a state of nature would
willingly come together to form a state. Locke believed that individuals in a state of nature
would be bound morally, by the Law of Nature, in which man has the "power... to preserve
his property; that is, his life, liberty and estate against the injuries and attempts of other
men". Without government to defend them against those seeking to injure or enslave them,
Locke further believed people would have no security in their rights and would live in fear.
Individuals, to Locke, would only agree to form a state that would provide, in part, a "neutral
judge", acting to protect the lives, liberty, and property of those who lived within it.

While Hobbes argued for near-absolute authority, Locke argued for inviolate freedom
under law in his Second Treatise of Government. Locke argued that a government's
legitimacy comes from the citizens' delegation to the government of their absolute right of
violence (reserving the inalienable right of self-defense or "self-preservation"), along with
elements of other rights (e.g. property will be liable to taxation) as necessary to achieve
the goal of security through granting the state a monopoly of violence, whereby the
government, as an impartial judge, may use the collective force of the populace to
administer and enforce the law, rather than each man acting as his own judge, jury, and
executioner—the condition in the state of nature.[citation needed]

Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Du Contrat social (1762)

Rousseau's political theory differs in important ways from that of Locke and Hobbes.
Rousseau's collectivist conception is most evident in his development of the "luminous
conception" (which he credited to Denis Diderot) of the ‘general will’. Summarised, the
‘general will’ is the power of all the citizens' collective interest - not to be confused with
their individual interests.

Although Rousseau wrote that the British were perhaps at the time the freest people on
earth, he did not approve of their representative government, nor any form of
representative government. Rousseau believed that society was only legitimate when the
sovereign (i.e. the ‘general will’) were the sole legislators. He also stated that the individual
must accept “the total alienation to the whole community of each associate with all his
rights”. In short, Rousseau meant that in order for the social contract to work, individuals
must forfeit their rights to the whole so that such conditions were “equal for all".

[The social contract] can be reduced to the following terms: Each of us puts his person and
all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will; and in a body, we
receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole.

Rousseau's striking phrase that man must "be forced to be free "should be understood
[according to whom?] this way: since the indivisible and inalienable popular sovereignty
decides what is good for the whole, if an individual rejects this "civil liberty" in place of
"natural liberty" and self-interest, disobeying the law, he will be forced to listen to what
was decided when the people acted as a collective (as citizens). Thus the law, inasmuch as
it is created by the people acting as a body, is not a limitation of individual freedom, but
rather its expression. The individual, as a citizen, explicitly agreed to be constrained if, as
a private individual, he did not respect his own will as formulated in the general will.

Because laws represent the restraint of "natural liberty”, they represent the leap made
from humans in the state of nature into civil society. In this sense, the law is a civilizing
force. Therefore, Rousseau believed that the laws that govern a people help to mould their
character.

Rousseau also analyses the social contract in terms of risk management, thus suggesting
the origins of the state as a form of mutual insurance.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's individualist social contract (1851)

While Rousseau's social contract is based on popular sovereignty and not on individual
sovereignty, there are other theories espoused by individualists, libertarians, and
anarchists that do not involve agreeing to anything more than negative rights and creates
only a limited state, if any.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865) advocated a conception of social contract that did not
involve an individual surrendering sovereignty to others. According to him, the social
contract was not between individuals and the state, but rather among individuals who
refrain from coercing or governing each other, each one maintaining complete sovereignty
upon him- or herself:

What really is the Social Contract? An agreement of the citizen with the government? No,
that would mean but the continuation of [Rousseau's] idea. The social contract is an
agreement of man with man; an agreement from which must result what we call society.
In this, the notion of commutative justice, first brought forward by the primitive fact of
exchange, ... is substituted for that of distributive justice ... Translating these words,
contract, commutative justice, which are the language of the law, into the language of
business, and you have commerce, that is to say, in its highest significance, the act by which
man and man declare themselves essentially producers, and abdicate all pretension to
govern each other.

John Rawls' Theory of Justice (1971)

Building on the work of Immanuel Kant with its presumption of limits on the state, John
Rawls (1921–2002), in A Theory of Justice (1971), proposed a contractarian approach
whereby rational people in a hypothetical "original position" would set aside their individual
preferences and capacities under a "veil of ignorance" and agree to certain general
principles of justice and legal organization. This idea is also used as a game-theoretical
formalization of the notion of fairness.

David Gauthier's Morals By Agreement (1986)

David Gauthier "neo-Hobbesian" theory argues that cooperation between two independent
and self-interested parties is indeed possible, especially when it comes to understanding
morality and politics. Gauthier notably points out the advantages of cooperation between
two parties when it comes to the challenge of the prisoner's dilemma. He proposes that, if
two parties were to stick to the original agreed-upon arrangement and morals outlined by
the contract, they would both experience an optimal result. In his model for the social
contract, factors including trust, rationality, and self-interest keep each party honest and
dissuade them from breaking the rules.
Philip Pettit's Republicanism (1997)

Philip Pettit (b. 1945) has argued, in Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government
(1997), that the theory of social contract, classically based on the consent of the governed,
should be modified. Instead of arguing for explicit consent, which can always be
manufactured, Pettit argues that the absence of an effective rebellion against it is a
contract's only legitimacy.