The Social Contract refers to the hypothetical agreement struck between members of a society as to how they should be organized and governed. It seeks to explain how a ruler derives power from the ruled, an area most famously explored in the 17th century by, once more, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke in Britain and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in France. Their ideas have continued to inform our understanding of statehood – and the rights and responsibilities of the governing and the governed – ever since.
Plato was among the first to give consideration to the concept of a social contract, explaining that citizens give their implicit approval to be governed by remaining within a society. Hobbes began the wave of Enlightenment writings on the subject with Leviathan – his response to the bloodshed and discord caused by the English Civil War of the previous decade. He contended that government is necessary to elevate Man above his dismal ‘state of nature’ which he described thus:
In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Locke, in his Two Treatises of Government (1689), took a different line describing the ‘state of nature’ in these terms:
It is evident that all human beings – as creatures belonging to the same species and rank and born indiscriminately with all the same natural advantages and faculties – are equal amongst themselves. They have no relationship of subordination or subjection unless God (the lord and master of them all) had clearly set one person above another and conferred on him an undoubted right to dominion and sovereignty.
The people and power
Nonetheless, in common with Hobbes, Locke regarded the state of nature as unstable and perilous, claiming that people agree to come together in a society ‘for the mutual preservation of their lives, liberties and estates, which I call by the general name, property.’ Rather than the absolutist ruler of Locke’s vision, Hobbes instead opted for government ‘by the consent of the majority, giving it either by themselves, or their representatives chosen by them.’ Crucially, he argued that should a government overstep its remit, the citizenry have the right to overthrow it – key liberal ideals that were evident in both the French Revolution and the American colonies’ demands for independence.
Rousseau’s great contribution to the subject was 1762’s Of the Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right. He had a much more optimistic view of ‘Man in his primitive state’ as a morally uncorrupted figure ‘at an equal distance from the stupidity of brutes and the fatal enlightenment of civil man.’ Civil society, by contrast, he regarded as deleterious, enslaving Man though he is born free. Rousseau thus suggested a society in which the entire citizenry participates to create laws in accordance with the common will. So radical were his ideas that Rousseau was compelled to spend several years in effective voluntary exile away from France.
In the 19th century, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon argued for a utopian form of anarchism in which there is a social contract directly between citizens, whereby all agree to refrain from attempts at governing anyone but themselves. More recently, John Rawls in A Theory of Justice (1971) speculates as to what form of social organization would be favoured by subjects hypothetically rendered unaware of their own personal circumstances (e.g. gender, age, race and wealth). He suggested most would agree on two fundamental principles of governance: (a) the right to political liberty, and (b) that social and economic inequalities should be such that they are to the greatest benefit of the least well-off and should also guarantee equality of opportunity.